Bits Blog: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Introduces 'Do Not Track' Bill

Bits Blog: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Introduces 'Do Not Track' Bill

Before his planned retirement from Congress at the end of next year, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, intends to give American consumers more meaningful control over personal data collected about them online.

To that end, Mr. Rockefeller on Thursday introduced a bill called the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013.”

The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish standardized mechanisms for people to use their Internet browsers to tell Web sites, advertising networks, data brokers and other online entities whether or not they were willing to submit to data-mining.

The bill would also require the F.T.C. to develop rules to prohibit online services from amassing personal details about users who had opted out of su ch tracking.

Mr. Rockefeller proposed the same bill two years ago. But he did not push it in the Senate at the time because industry groups had pledged to voluntarily develop systems to honor the browser-based don’t-track-me flags. Last year, however, negotiations between industry groups and consumer advocates over how to execute these mechanisms essentially broke down and have since made little progress.

The new Rockefeller bill indicates that the senator believes the industry has not acted in good faith.

“The privacy of Americans is increasingly under assault as more and more of their daily lives are conducted online,” Mr. R ockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, wrote on Thursday in an e-mail sent to a reporter. “Industry made a public pledge to develop do-not-track standards that will truly protect consumer privacy â€" and it has failed to live up to that commitment. They have dragged their feet long enough.”

Industry representatives said that legislation was unnecessary because advertising networks and data brokers several years ago voluntarily introduced their own opt-out program for consumers, called Your AdChoices. Unlike the Do Not Track signals which would allow users to make a one-time decision about all online tracking from their own browsers, the industry program requires people to go to a site and individually select the companies, among several hundred, from whom they prefer not to receive marketing offers based on data-mining.

Stuart Ingis, a lawyer for the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry consortium, said the program, which involves consumers installing individual cookies on their browsers, demonstrates that users already have choices about data collection.

“It’s a lot easier to use a system that is already built and works,” Mr. Ingis said.

Over the last few years, the number of companies that collect information about the reading habits, health concerns, financial capacity, search queries, purchasing patterns and other activities of online consumers has skyrocketed. Industry representatives argue that this benefits people because it enables companies to show them relevant ads, and that the ads themselves finance online sites and services that are free to consumers. Moreover, they say, the data collection is “anonymous” because online services typically use numerical customer codes, not real names or e-mail addresses, to track the behavior of individuals.

< p>But consumer advocates warn that such profiling systems, which can collect thousands of details on nearly every adult in the United States, can be used to segment some people for preferential offers while relegating others to inferior treatment. Despite industry claims that online tracking is anonymous, a few computer scientists have reported that sites often leak information that can identify individuals, including names, addresses and other details, to third parties.

“Nowadays, there is an incredible proliferation of tracking,” said Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco. “Data brokers, companies that you never heard of, are collecting massive dossiers about you as you browse around the Web and, right now, there are no limitations on the collection or use of those dossiers.”

To give people greater control over their own surveillance online, the Federal Trade Commission in a report on consumer privacy last March urged industry groups to adopt Do Not Track mechanisms by the end of 2012. In fact, the major browsers â€" Firefox from Mozilla, Google’s Chrome, and the more recent iterations of Internet Explorer â€" already offer the don’t-track-me buttons. When these options are turned on, they send out signals to sites, and third parties like ad networks operating on those sites, that certain users do not want to have their information collected.

But industry groups and consumer advocates have been at odds for more than a year over how “Do Not Track” mechanisms should be presented to users and how online services should respond to the signals. In the absence of legislation or industry consensus, com panies are free to ignore those user preferences.

Some browsers have responded to this standstill by taking matters into their own hands and blocking third-party tracking cookies, as my colleague Somini Sengupta reported this week.

But Mr. Rockefeller’s bill indicates that legislative action could pre-empt voluntary industry measures.

“This is a signal that Senator Rockefeller is serious about getting Do Not Track done,” said David C. Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law. Until last month, Mr. Vladeck served as director of the bureau of consumer protection at the F.T.C. “I think industry writ large â€" browser companies, advertising networks, data brokers â€" are going to understand that he is serious about getting across the finish line.”

Bits Blog: One on One: Sugata Mitra, 2013 TED Prize Winner

Bits Blog: One on One: Sugata Mitra, 2013 TED Prize Winner

Are teachers keeping students from learning in the digital age? Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, believes so. Dr. Mitra is best known for an experiment in which he carved a hole from his research center in Delhi into an adjacent slum, placing a freely accessible computer there for children to use.

The children quickly taught themselves basic computer skills. The “hole in the wall” experiment, as it is known, led Dr. Mitra to develop the idea of learning environments in which teachers would merely be supervisors as children taught themselves by working together at computer terminals. On Tuesday Dr. Mitra was given the 2013 TED Prize, which grants him $ 1 million to build a learning laboratory based on this principle.

Q.

What did you learn from the original “hole in the wall” experiment?

A.

The fir st thing to point out is that it was done 14 years ago, at a time when few children in India had access to computers. I noticed the rich parents saying that their sons and daughters must be gifted, because they were so good with computers. And since we know that gifted kids are not born only to rich parents, why would there not be similar children in the slums? I was curious to see what would happen if I gave an Internet-connected computer to the kind of kids who never had one.

We noticed that they learned how to surf within hours. It was a bit of a surprise. Long story short, they would teach themselves whatever they had to to use the computer, such was the attraction of the machine.

Q.

What does this mean for education?

A.

In those days, the main question was what does it mean for training, because back then people were trained to use computers. So I said it looks like we don’t have to do that.

But I got curious about the fac t that the children were teaching themselves a smattering of English. So I started doing a whole range of experiments, and I found that if you left them alone, working in groups, they could learn almost anything once they’ve gotten used to the fact that you can research on the Internet. This was done between 2000 and 2006.

I came to England in 2006, and the schools said, why aren’t you doing it here? So I did, and I realized that what I’ve got has nothing to do with poor children. It probably is just a new way in which children learn in this new environment. It needs two things. First, broadband. That’s fine, everybody loves that. The second thing is, it needs the teacher to stand back.

At first I thought that the children were learning in spite of the teacher not interfering. But I changed my opinion, and realized this was happening because the teacher was not interfering. At that point, I didn’t become entirely popular with teachers. But I explained to them that the job has changed. You ask the right kind of question, then you stand back and let the learning happen.

Q.

Do schools need to be radically changed to implement this, or is this a technique that fits into the current structure of schools?

A.

At the moment I pitch it as a technique that you can bring into your schools. But that’s not the real story, which is that the current schooling system is a leftover from the Victorian age of empire. In that world, there were no computers, no telegraphs and data was carried around on ships. This meant that the pillars of education were reading, writing and arithmetic. That age is gone. The system was wonderfully engineered, but we don’t need it anymore; we need something else. But you can’t just say that without saying how you do it.

What I’m doing is I’m putting my foot in the door by saying here’s a new way. Try it. If you’re happy with it, then I’ll say let’s look at the curriculum top to bottom. If we can convert the curriculum into big questions, if we can turn assessment into peer assessment, then neurophysiology tells us that learning gets enhanced. Finally, if you add admiration â€" what I call the grandmother’s method, where you stand behind and encourage them. Put all of this together and you get a new way to do schooling.

Q.

So it seems that you’re saying we don’t need teachers at all.

A.

We need teachers to do different things. The teacher has to ask the question, and tell the children what they have learned. She comes in at the two ends, a cap at the end and a starter at the beginning.

Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers. Now they have to watch as child ren learn.

Q.

Is there a problem with this in that it will serve the good students well, but leave those who need more coaching behind?

A.

Well, yes, to some extent. But there are some interesting things about children working in groups if those groups are self-made. Once you let children do that, the system has a self-correcting ability. Having said that, will there be good students and bad students? Of course.

Q.

Does this work for all levels of instruction?

A.

It doesn’t work the same way with adolescents, and definitely not with adults. With 8- to 12-year-olds, that’s the age where big questions turn them on.

Q.

What are your specific plans with the prize?

A.

In order to see if this sort of self-organized learning environment is suitable I need to have one in which I have some control over and can do measurements with. So I want to build one of these learning spaces somewhere.

It will be totally automatic, completely controlled from the cloud. There will be a supervisor, but that person is not going to be a computer expert or a teacher in anything. She â€" and it will probably be a she â€" will be there only for health and safety requirements.

The rest of the school, if we call it a school, is a facility that I can hand over to a mediator from the cloud. She logs in from her home, wherever her home is, and she’s able to control everything inside, the lights, the air-conditioning, you name it. Then there are four mediators who Skype in and use the pedagogical method. That’s going to take a lot of work.

The second bit is that schools all over the world have been using this method. We need to do a massive multiplication, and TED is going to help me do that. I am going to try to put that into homes; get your children and their friends together. Then, every time they do it, I’ll ask them to collect data and send it t o a Web site. If I succeed, in two years I’ll have massive data from all over the world. By that time I’ll be done building the facility and I’ll be ready to build a new model.

Q.

Where do you think this school will be?

A.

I’d like to do it in India, because I’d know how to get it done. There will be less of a learning curve, I know who the contractors are, and I know how not to get cheated. So I’d like to do it there, but it’s not set in stone.

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Clean Your Phone and Its Camera

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Clean Your Phone and Its Camera

Smartphones spend a lot of time in hand, where they can pick up germs and dirt. Wiping down the phone regularly with an antibacterial cloth intended for use with touch screens can help keep it clean. Many office supply stores like Staples or Office Depot carry disposable wipes for use on phone and tablet screens.

If your phone has a camera and your photos have been looking blurry, you can clean its lens with a microfiber cloth or other wipe for use with camera lenses; a cotton swab moistened with distilled water can also take off stubborn grime. Whatever you do, though, do not spray the phone with industrial cleansers or use cleaning wipes designed for household chores, because these can damage the screen and other parts of the handset.

Stargazing Apps for Amateur Astronomers

Stargazing Apps for Amateur Astronomers

One of my favorite things to do on a clear winter night is to take a trip to a beach near where I live and do some amateur stargazing, far from the glare of streetlights. After years of simply using my eyes, I recently bought a portable telescope. Now I can just about see the stripes of clouds on Jupiter, which is a truly awesome sight.

But I’m no expert, and to help me understand what I can see in the sky, both by eye and by telescope, I rely on my phone and its apps.

One of my favorite astronomy apps is Starmap, $ 5 on iOS. The main feature of this app is its virtual sky display. This is a re-creation of the sky above you, calculated from your GPS coordinates. It shows you where the stars, moon, planets and other heavenly bodies are. This display rotates and pans as you move your phone, so you can hold it up in front of you and figure out what stars or galaxies you’re looking at. You can zoom in for more detail if you find something interesting, and tap on a planet or a star to see details about it. The display can be switched to a night mode, which turns the graphics red so as not to spoil your night vision.

It’s elegantly designed, and the display is easy to read. Starmap excels in its extra features, which are useful even if you’re an astronomy novice. Clicking on the “tonight” icon, for example, brings up a list of the best things to look for in the sky that night.

This could include a suggestion to look at the moon’s craters, a note that Jupiter is bright right now or a reminder to watch a meteor shower. You can limit this list to things you can see with the naked eye, in case you don’t have a telescope. The app even tells you the weather and probable viewing conditions for the evening.

The one minor annoyance I’ve found with the app is that if you accidentally tap the screen, you disable the automatic movements of the star display.

Alternatively, you may prefer The Night Sky Lite, free on iOS and Android. This app works in much the same way as Starmap, but the way it displays stars, planets and constellation shapes is simpler. This could appeal to beginners.

The app also has a section where it reports the “latest news” about sky events, but the data is mostly text and is probably best perused at home rather than in the field.

One great feature is the “share my sky” button, which lets you share a screenshot of your display of stars by e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. The free Lite version doesn’t contain data on stars or planets and lacks a night vision mode on iOS, but these features, as well as the ability to identify passing satellites, are included in the full version, which costs $ 1.

On Android, another free option is Sky Map. This app uses Google’s free star data, and its display acts as an interactive sky guide just as the other apps featured here do. It’s simple to use and intuitive: tapping on the screen brings up a menu that lets you switch on or off features like the lines in constellations, a representation of the horizon on the screen, and planet and star names.

Sky Map also has a neat trick to help you find a particular star. A graphic ring is displayed on screen over the star field, with an arrow on its edge that points in the direction of the star you are searching for. As you follow the arrow and spin your phone to line up with the star, the ring gets brighter until you’ve found your target.

But I found the app’s sky display jittery on my Nexus 7; the stars on screen twitched a lot in response to the slightest movement of the tablet. And if you’re looking for an app that will teach you about all of the objects in the sky, Sky Map may not be for you.

Pocket Universe, a $ 2 iOS app, is packed with extras like a virtual walk on the moon and even star quizzes, and it speaks the names of stars or planets that you line up in the displayed cross hairs. I found its graphics cluttered, however, and potentially distracting.

Take care to avoid tripping, as I did the last time I used one of these apps at night (I was too busy looking up).

QUICK CALLS You can now insert yourself into that iconic James Bond “gun barrel” opening scene thanks to the free iOS app Skyfall Gun Barrel and its Android counterpart, Skyfall 007. The apps are really a promotional push for the DVD release of “Skyfall,” but they create an entertaining clip starring you as Bond. ... The Sandbox is a new game on Android that blends pixel art and creative game play, and may remind you of Minecraft. It’s free.

Gadgetwise Blog: New Partnership Brings New Design for Sol Republic

Gadgetwise Blog: New Partnership Brings New Design for Sol Republic

Sol Republic knows a good partnership when it sees it. After Michael Phelps wore a pair of Sol Republic headphones during the Summer Olympics last year, the company quickly signed an endorsement deal with the swimmer.

Its latest collaboration is with Tokidoki, the Japanese-inspired lifestyle brand created by the Italian designer Simone Legno. Sol Republic, known for making headphones with interchangeable components, released two new designs Tuesday that are infused with Tokidoki’s distinctive style.

The new designs are part of Sol Republic’s Tracks line of on-ear headphones that allow users to mix and match headbands and cables to create their own look. The line starts at $ 100 for Sol Republic’s V8 sound engines, a virtually indestructible headband and cable with an in-line microphone. The headbands come in a rainbow of colors and slide into the ear cups, which hold the sound drivers. The cable connects to the bottom of the right and left ear cups, with an in-line microphone and music controls that are set in a yoke at chest level. Each component is also sold separately at Sol Republic’s Web site.

For an extra $ 30, you can upgrade to the Tracks HD, which come with V10 sound engines. The sound of the Tracks HD headphones that I tested was clear with a deep bass, and it got even better at higher volumes, especially for electronic and rock music.

The Tokidoki headphones, which cost $ 150, have the V10 sound engines, but also come with a Tokidoki bag. Sol Republic also offers a brightly hued design from Deadmau5 and a U.S.A. theme inspired by Mr. Phelps, both for $ 150. The Tracks line also includes a pair of $ 180 headphones called Ultra that are geared toward audiophiles.

The interchangeability of the Tracks headphones is a clever idea, especially if you like to wear your headphones as a fashion statement, but it comes with a drawback: the fit. The ear cups don’t swivel, and although they were comfortable, I could not get them to sit on my ears properly. The fit wasn’t perfect, but at least they looked stylish.

Bits Blog: Gates, Zuckerberg, Other Tech Icons Promote Youth Coding in New Film

Bits Blog: Gates, Zuckerberg, Other Tech Icons Promote Youth Coding in New Film

A new nonprofit seeking to rally interest among children, parents and schools in computer programming is getting help from some big guns in the tech industry, including the founders of Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square are among the tech icons appearing in a short movie being released Tuesday by Code.org, the new nonprofit that wants to make programming classes more widely available in schools.

The organization, founded by Hadi Partovi, a tech entrepreneur and startup adviser and investor, is part of an intensifying effort among technology companies to address a serious shortfall in programming talent. Few schools offer programm ing classes. Code.org is encouraging people to sign a petition on its Web site stating that every student should have an opportunity to learn to code, and to use that response to advocate for greater availability of computer science classes in schools.

Many of the luminaries in the movie describe their first crude programming efforts and attempt to demystify the discipline by comparing it to other interests that students more commonly pursue. “It’s really not unlike playing an instrument or playing a sport,” Drew Houston, the chief executive and cofounder of Dropbox, says in the movie. “It starts out being very intimidating but you kind of get the hang of it over time.”

Mr. Partovi went outside nerd circles to add cachet to programming. The movie features the professional basketball player Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat, who took programming classes as a student, and Will.i.am, the music producer and Black Eyed Peas frontman. “Here we are, 2013, we all depend on technology to communicate, to bank, and none of us know how to read and write code,” Will.i.am says in the film. “It’s important for these kids, right now, starting at 8 years old, to read and write code.”

Code.org also secured endorsements for youth programming from a much broader group of celebrities from politics, business and education, including Bill Clinton, Eric Schmidt of Google, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

Mr. Partovi said Microsoft has provided financial support to show the film in Regal movie theaters as an advertisement for a week starting this Friday. Mr. Zuckerberg will promote it to his Facebook followers and Google will feature it on YouTube, Mr. Partovi said.

Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo‘s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

A company spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the statement, saying, “We don’t discuss internal matters.”

But based on information from several Yahoo em ployees, what that statement means is that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is in crisis mode, and she believes the policy is necessary to get Yahoo back into shape.

The employees spoke anonymously because they are not allowed to discuss internal matters.

The company also seems to be trying to distance itself from the broader national debate over workplace flexibility, and from criticism that the new policy is disruptive for employees who have family responsibilities outside work.

The work ethic at Yahoo among some workers has deteriorated over time, the Yahoo employees said, and requiring people to show up is a way to keep an eye on them and re-energize the troops. If some of the least productive workers leave as a result, the thinking goes, all the better.

Some e mployees have abused the former policy permitting work at home to the point of founding start-ups while being on salary at Yahoo, said the Yahoo employees and others have worked at the company.

Several business analysts said that if work-at-home arrangements don’t work, it is generally a management problem.

Yahoo’s culture and employee morale have dissolved as it has fallen behind hotter tech companies. And, business analysts say, those are two things that are difficult to repair without having employees present in the same place.

Still, Ms. Mayer has said many times that one of her top priorities for the company is to recruit the most talented engineers and other employees. Even if requiring people to show up is the only way to repair Yahoo’s culture, it could result in losing valuable employees.

And even if Yahoo’s broader work-at-home policy needed revision, the internal memo announcing the new policy struck some as tone-deaf by implying that employees should avoid staying at home even once in a while when there are extenuating circumstances.

“For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” it said.

Inside Asia: Smartphones Gain Ground in India

Inside Asia: Smartphones Gain Ground in India

NEW DELHI â€" As BlackBerry introduces the first smartphone from its make-or-break BB10 line in India, one of its most loyal markets, the company faces new competition from a formidable rival that has long had a minimal presence in the country.

More than four years after it started selling iPhones in India, Apple is aggressively pushing the devices with installment payment plans that make it more affordable, a new distribution model and a marketing blitz.

“Now your dream phone” at 5,056 rupees, or $ 94, read a recent full front-page ad for the iPhone 5 in the Times of India, referring to the initial payment on a phone priced at about 45,500 rupees, or almost two months’ wages for an entry-level software engineer.

The newfound interest in India suggests a subtle strategy shift for Apple, which has moved tentatively in emerging markets and has allowed rivals like BlackBerry and Samsung Electronics to dominate with more affordable smartphones. With the exception of China, all Apple stores are in advanced economies.

Apple expanded its Indian sales effort in the second half of 2012 by adding two distributors. Previously it had sold iPhones only through a few carriers and stores it calls premium resellers.

The result: Shipments of iPhones to India between October and December nearly tripled to 250,000 units, from 90,000 in the previous quarter, according to an estimate by Jessica Kwee, a Singapore-based analyst at the consulting firm Canalys.

At the MobileStore, an Indian chain owned by the Essar conglomerate, which says it sells 15 percent of the iPhones purchased in the country, iPhone sales tripled between December and January, thanks to a monthly payment program introduced last month.

“Most people in India can’t afford a dollar-priced phone when the salaries in India are rupee salaries,” said Himanshu Chakrawarti, the MobileStore’s chief executive. “But the desire is the same.”

Apple, its distributors, its retailers and banks share the advertising and interest costs of the marketing push, according to Mr. Chakrawarti. Carriers like Bharti Airtel, which also sell the iPhone 5, run separate ads.

India is the world’s second-largest cellphone market by number of users, but most Indians cannot afford fancy handsets. Smartphones account for just a tenth of total phone sales. In India, 95 percent of cellphone users have prepaid accounts without fixed contracts. Unlike those in the United States, Indian carriers do not subsidize handsets.

Within the smartphone segment, Apple’s Indian market share last quarter was just 5 percent, according to Canalys, meaning its overall penetration is tiny.

Still, the industry research company IDC expects the Indian smartphone market to grow more than five times, to 108 million units in 2016, from about 19 million last year, which presents a big opportunity.

Samsung Electronics dominates Indian smartphone sales with a 40 percent share, thanks to its wide portfolio of Android devices, priced as low as 5,900 rupees. The market has also been flooded with lower-cost Android phones from local brands like Lava and Micromax.

Most smartphones sold in India are much cheaper than the iPhone, said Anshul Gupta, a Gartner analyst: “Where the masses are â€" there, Apple still has a gap.”

Apple helped create the smartphone industry with the iPhone in 2007, but last year it lost its lead globally to Samsung, whose free Android software is especially attractive in Asia. Many in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street believe the surest way to penetrate lower-income Asian markets would be with a lower-cost iPhone, as has been widely reported but never confirmed. The risk is that a lower-cost iPhone would reduce demand for the premium version and eat into Apple’s margins.

The new monthly payment plan in India goes a long way toward expanding the potential market, Mr. Chakrawarti said.

“The Apple campaign is not meant for, really, the regular top-end customer; it is meant to upgrade the 10,000-12,000 handset guy to 45,000 rupees,” he said.

Apple’s main focus for expansion in Asia has been Greater China, including Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, where revenue grew 60 percent last quarter to $ 7.3 billion.

Asked last year why Apple had not been as successful in India, Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, said that its business in India was growing but that the company remained more focused on other markets.

“I love India, but I believe that Apple has some higher potential in the intermediate term in some other countries,” Mr. Cook said. “The multilayer distribution there really adds to the cost of getting products to market.”

Apple, which has partly addressed that situation by adding distributors, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Ingram Micro, one of its new distributors, also declined to comment. Executives at Redington, the other distributor, could not immediately be reached.

BlackBerry, which has seen its global market share shrivel to 3.4 percent from 20 percent over the past three years, is making what is seen as a last-ditch effort to save itself with the BB10 series.

The high-end BlackBerry Z10, introduced in India on Monday, is expected to be priced not far from the 45,500-rupee price tag for an iPhone 5 with 16 gigabytes of memory. The Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2, the Nokia Lumia 920 and two HTC models are the main iPhone rivals.

Until last year, BlackBerry had a market share of more than 10 percent in India, thanks to a push into the consumer segment with lower-priced phones. Last quarter, its share fell to about 5 percent, according to Canalys, just ahead of Apple.

Disruptions: Disruptions: Google Flu Trends Shows Problems of Big Data Without Context

Disruptions: Disruptions: Google Flu Trends Shows Problems of Big Data Without Context

Several years ago, Google, aware of how many of us were sneezing and coughing, created a fancy equation on its Web site to figure out just how many people had influenza. The math works like this: people’s location + flu-related search queries on Google + some really smart algorithms = the number of people with the flu in the United States.

So how did the algorithms fare this wretched winter? According to Google Flu Trends, at the flu season’s peak in mid-January, nearly 11 percent of the United States population had influenza.

Yikes! Take vitamins. Don’t leave the house. Wash your hands. Wash them again!

But wait. According to an article in the science journal Nature, Google’s disease-hunting algorithms were wrong: their results were double the actual estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put the coughing and sniffling peak at 6 percent of the population.

Kelly Mason, a public affairs spokeswoman for Google, said the company’s Flu Trends site was meant to be only one source in addition to the C.D.C. and other flu surveillance methods. “We review and potentially update our model each season,” she said.

Scientists have a theory about what went wrong, as well.

“Several researchers suggest that the problems may be due to widespread media coverage of this year’s severe U.S. flu season,” Declan Butler wrote in Nature. Then add social media, which helped news of the flu spread quicker than the virus itself.

In other words, Google’s algorithm was looking only at the numbers, not at the context of the search results.

In today’s digitally connected world, data is everywhere: in our phones, search queries, friendships, dating profiles, cars, food, reading habits. Almost everything we touch is part of a larger data set. But the people and companies that interpret the data may fail to apply background and outside conditions to the numbers they capture.

“Data inherently has all of the foibles of being human,” said Mark Hansen, director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. “Data is not a magic force in society; it’s an extension of us.”

Society has encountered similar situations for centuries. In the 1600s, Dr. Hansen said, an early census was recorded in England as the Great Plague of London killed tens of thousands of Britons. To calculate the spread of the disease, officials started recording every christening and death in the city. And although this helped quantify the mortality rate, it also created other problems. There was now an astounding collection of statistical information for scientists to review and understand, but it took time to develop systems that could accurately assess the information.

Now, as we enter a world of big data, we have to learn how to apply context to these numbers.

Dr. Hansen said the problem of data without context could be summed up in a quote from the playwright Eugène Ionesco: “Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.”

I experienced this firsthand in the spring of 2010, when I was an adjunct professor at New York University teaching graduate students in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

I created a class called “Telling Stories With Data, Sensors and Humans,” with the goal of determining whether sensors and data could become reporters and collect information. Students built little electronic contraptions with $ 30 computers called Arduinos, and attached several sensors, including ones that could detect light, noise and movement.

We wondered if we could use these sensors to determine whether students used the elevators more than the stairs, and whether that changed throughout the day. (Esoteric, sure, but a perfect example of a computer sitting there taking notes, rather than a human.)

We set up the sensors in some elevators and stairwells at N.Y.U. and waited . To our delighted surprise, the data we collected told a story, and it seemed that our experiment had worked.

As I left campus that evening, one of the N.Y.U. security guards who had seen students setting up the computers in the elevators asked how our experiment had gone. I explained that we had found that students seemed to use the elevators in the morning, perhaps because they were tired from staying up late, and switch to the stairs at night, when they became energized.

“Oh, no, they don’t,” the security guard told me, laughing as he assured me that lazy college students used the elevators whenever possible. “One of the elevators broke down a few evenings last week, so they had no choice but to use the stairs.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Recommending Web Pages With the Google +1 Button

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Recommending Web Pages With the Google +1 Button

What happens if I click that +1 button on a Web site?

The +1 button on some Web pages is Google’s version of a personal-approval stamp or recommendation, similar to Facebook’s “Like” button for publicly declaring favorite things on a social network; you probably get the most out of the feature if you are a member of the Google Plus social network. The +1 button often appears on news and entertainment sites around the Web, usually next to Facebook’s “Like” button, and buttons to click for sharing the page by Twitter or e-mail. Other Google properties, like Google Maps, also host a +1 button.

When you click the +1 button on a Web page, your recommendation is noted on your own Google profile page. Google’s guide to the +1 button says you need to have a public Google Profile set up to use the +1 button.

If you happen to use Google Plus, the +1 button is more useful. You can see a list of all the Web sites and pages you have marked. These are listed under the “+1s” tab in the Profile area of your Google Plus page â€" which is helpful for collecting or just finding those pages again for reference.

The pages you have recommended can also turn up in the sear ch results received by people who happen to be in your Google Plus “circles” of online friends and acquaintances. In those search results, your name appears next to links for pages you have favored, like those for restaurants or products, so your friends can take your opinion into account.

Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

The two big casino states, Nevada and New Jersey, are racing into online gambling as a way of protecting their turf. They will in essence become laboratories for what is and is not feasible in Internet wagering.

Nevada legislators, who previously authorized online poker, hurriedly passed a new bill this week that allows the state to enter into deals with other states to essentially pool their gambling populations. “This is the day we usher Nevada into the next frontier of gaming,” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s governor, said on Thursday as he signed the bill.

In the year since online poker became a theoretical possibility in Nevada, no company has yet offered it. One problem: It’s too small a market, especially in a state where it is not exactly hard to gamble the old- fashioned way â€" by plunking your body down in a casino or, for that matter, just about anywhere else.

“We don’t have a universe of players,” Pete Ernaut, a Nevada political consultant, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “So for us, what we get to offer to a state like California or Texas is that we have the most mature regulatory infrastructure. We have the most mature financial, auditing and collection capabilities, much greater than some of those states, and they have the players.”

Meanwhile, New Jersey is also barreling ahead. Chris Christie, the governor, is likely to sign a revised bill permitting a variety of online gambling as soon as next week. All online ventures will be under the tight control of the Atlantic City casinos. Delaware, the smallest of the three states that are moving ahead with online gambling, also has ambiti ous plans.

In a harbinger of the new age, gamblers at the Borgata casino in Atlantic City will, as USA Today put it, “be able to lose their shirts without wearing one.” Gamblers staying in one of the casino’s 2,000 rooms can now place their bets right there without venturing onto the casino floor. From there it is only a small step to just staying home and gambling from the hammock.

Internet companies that make online games are watching all this with considerable interest. “Is 2013 going to be a game-changer?” asked Paul Thelen of Big Fish Studios, which began offering a gambling app in Britain last fall. “No. But in 2014, it starts getting interesting.”

Mobile Revolution Buffets Taiwan PC Rivals

Mobile Revolution Buffets Taiwan PC Rivals

TAIPEI â€" Two computer-making neighbors in the technologically inclined economy of Taiwan seem headed in opposite directions.

Personal computer sales have slumped worldwide as smartphones and tablets have proliferated and gained in popularity. One Taiwan heavyweight, Acer, has shared in the suffering: It is expected to report a second straight annual loss in 2012 after losing 6.6 billion Taiwan dollars, or $ 223 million at the current exchange rate, in 2011.

But another Taiwan-based PC company, Asustek, which sells computers under the Asus name, grew 43 percent in the quarter that ended in September, to 6.7 billion dollars in net income. The company’s PC sales rose 6.4 percent even as industrywide PC shipments declined 4.9 percent in the last three months of 2012, according to the research firm Gartner.

The companies’ divergent fortunes expose both the mistakes and the opportunities for PC makers in an epic shift in the way consumers use technology.

For more than a decade, with no serious alternatives for consumers, Acer, Dell and Hewlett-Packard treated the PC as a commodity: All of their machines used the same Intel chips and Microsoft software and even looked similar, analysts said. In that environment, PC makers made money by focusing on marketing and by cutting costs.

For Acer, much of that strategy was driven by the former chief executive, Gianfranco Lanci, who led the company from 2004 to 2011. During his tenure, the company focused only on marketing and distribution, while gutting research and development and outsourcing design and production, analysts said.

The spread of smartphones and tablets has challenged that business model. Consumers have more choices and increasingly focus on how their devices look and feel, how mobile they are and what content they can provide access to.

“At the moment, the PC market is saturated,” said Tracy Tsai, an analyst at Gartner. “When most users have a PC already, they are not looking for just a cheaper notebook. They want something better.”

That has meant meager profits or none for global PC brands. H.P. reported a $ 12.7 billion loss in the business year that ended in September 2012, while Dell’s poor performance has resulted in an effort to take the company private.

It is a problem that has manifested itself on the street as well. Stam Chuang, a manager at a retail shop in the Guanghua Digital Plaza in Taipei, said notebook sales at his store had dropped 10 percent during the past year.

“There’s only a set amount of demand for computing out there,” Mr. Chuang said. “So if consumers decide they want a tablet or smartphone, that share will get taken out of PCs.”

Because of its research and development cuts, Acer has struggled to produce smartphones and tablets that can compete with the sleek products from mobile powerhouses like Amazon.com, Apple and Samsung, analysts said.

Asustek, however, followed a strategy that emphasized design and innovation. Its personal computer growth in 2012 was driven by the Zenbook, an ultrathin laptop with a metallic finish, stereo speakers and backlit keys.

Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek, said he had foreseen the mobile revolution and wanted his company to differentiate itself from the competition.

“Even 10 years ago, I knew I had to be prepared,” Mr. Shih said.

He added that with computer architecture and chips shrinking, he had recognized that “the ‘phone computer’ was going to happen.”

Mr. Shih has become a cheerleader for what he calls “design thinking,” pushing his employees to be creative about building products that enrich the experience for consumers. Asustek incorporated a design and artistry category into its employee evaluation system.

The two companies’ revenue numbers are similar: In the third quarter of 2012, Acer brought in 87.4 billion dollars in revenue, compared with 96 billion dollars for Asustek, according to Bloomberg data.

Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States

Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.

With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.

While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.

“Without the assistance of the banks in processing and sending electronic funds, these lenders simply couldn’t operate,” said Josh Zinner, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York.

The banking industry says it is simply serving customers who have authorized the lenders to withdraw money from their accounts. “The industry is not in a position to monitor customer accounts to see where their payments are going,” said Virginia O’Neill, senior counsel with the American Bankers Association.

But state and federal officials are taking aim at the banks’ role at a time when authorities are increasing their efforts to clamp down on payday lending and its practice of providing quick money to borrowers who need cash.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are examining banks’ roles in the online loans, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Benjamin M. Lawsky, who heads New York State’s Department of Financial Services, is investigating how banks enable the online lenders to skirt New York law and make loans to residents of the state, where interest rates are capped at 25 percent.

For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts. Roughly 27 percent of payday loan borrowers say that the loans caused them to overdraw their accounts, according to a report released this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That fee income is coveted, given that financial regulations limiting fees on debit and credit cards have cost banks billions of dollars.

Some state and federal authorities say the banks’ role in enabling the lenders has frustrated government efforts to shield people from predatory loans â€" an issue that gained urgency after reckless mortgage lending helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.

Lawmakers, led by Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, introduced a bill in July aimed at reining in the lenders, in part, by forcing them to abide by the laws of the state where the borrower lives, rather than where the lender is. The legislation, pending in Congress, would also allow borrowers to cancel automatic withdrawals more easily. “Technology has taken a lot of these scams online, and it’s time to crack down,” Mr. Merkley said in a statement when the bill was introduced.

While the loans are simple to obtain â€" some online lenders promise approval in minutes with no credit check â€" they are tough to get rid of. Customers who want to repay their loan in full typically must contact the online lender at least three days before the next withdrawal. Otherwise, the lender automatically renews the loans at least monthly and withdraws only the interest owed. Under federal law, customers are allowed to stop authorized withdrawals from their account. Still, some borrowers say their banks do not heed requests to stop the loans.

Ivy Brodsky, 37, thought she had figured out a way to stop six payday lenders from taking money from her account when she visited her Chase branch in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in March to close it. But Chase kept the account open and between April and May, the six Internet lenders tried to withdraw money from Ms. Brodsky’s account 55 times, according to bank records reviewed by The New York Times. Chase charged her $ 1,523 in fees â€" a combination of 44 insufficient fund fees, extended overdraft fees and service fees.

For Subrina Baptiste, 33, an educational assistant in Brooklyn, the overdraft fees levied by Chase cannibalized her child support income. She said she applied for a $ 400 loan from Loanshoponline.com and a $ 700 loan from Advancemetoday.com in 2011. The loans, with annual interest rates of 730 percent and 584 percent respectively, skirt New York law.

Ms. Baptiste said she asked Chase to revoke the automatic withdrawals in October 2011, but was told that she had to ask the lenders instead. In one month, her bank records show, the lenders tried to take money from her account at least six times. Chase charged her $ 812 in fees and deducted over $ 600 from her child-support payments to cover them.

“I don’t understand why my own bank just wouldn’t listen to me,” Ms. Baptiste said, adding that Chase ultimately closed her account last January, three months after she asked.

A spokeswoman for Bank of America said the bank always honored requests to stop automatic withdrawals. Wells Fargo declined to comment. Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for Chase, said: “We are working with the customers to resolve these cases.” Online lenders say they work to abide by state laws.

DealBook: Judge Sides With Einhorn and Halts an Apple Shareholder Vote

DealBook: Judge Sides With Einhorn and Halts an Apple Shareholder Vote

9:26 p.m. | Updated

A federal judge on Friday ordered Apple to halt collecting shareholder votes on a contentious proposal to change some of its corporate charter, handing a victory to the hedge fund manager David Einhorn.

The ruling issued Friday touches on a fairly narrow legal point. But it signals a clear victory for Mr. Einhorn, who has taken up a fight with Apple over using some of the $ 137 billion in its corporate treasury to make additional payouts to shareholders.

Mr. Einhorn’s hedge fund firm, Greenlight Capital, has sued Apple in Federal District Court in Manhattan, arguing that the company improperly tied together several shareholder issues to be put for a vote into one proposal. Such bundling violated rules set by the Securities and Exchange Commission, lawyers for the hedge fund argued.

At the heart of the hedge fund’s complaint was that Apple combined a plan to eliminate its ability to issue preferred stock without shareholder approval with two other initiatives that Greenlight favored. By allowing the vote to proceed, lawyers for the firm argued, Greenlight was being forced to vote against its own interests.

The judge overseeing the case, Richard Sullivan, firmly agreed with that interpretation.

“Given the language and purpose of the rules, it is plain to the court that Proposal No. 2 impermissibly bundles ‘separate matters’ for shareholder consideration,” Judge Sullivan wrote in his order. The judge said at a hearing on Tuesday that he was leaning toward Mr. Einhorn’s point of view on the ma tter.

His ruling comes just days before the company’s shareholder meeting next Wednesday. It will also prevent Apple from accepting shareholder votes on Proposal No. 2, which had included Apple’s plans to eliminate its preferred shares. Some shareholder rights advocates have contended that preferred shares have been used as an anti-takeover tactic by boards and have pushed for their elimination.

Mr. Einhorn’s bigger goal has been to persuade Apple to return some of its billions sitting in cash to shareholders as a way to unlock the company’s value. Greenlight Capital has contended that the company has far more cash than it will ever need, and that preferred shares could provide additional payouts worth about $ 61 a share, while still leaving the company with an enormous war chest.

“We know they embrace innovation and can recognize it when they see it, even if it isn’t the kind of innovation people usually think of when they think of Apple,” M r. Einhorn said in a conference call with analysts on Thursday.

Mr. Einhorn said that Apple should issue preferred shares, that would augment a stock dividend and buyback program that the company already has in place.

Although Apple was once the stock market darling for its meteoric rise, in recent months, share prices have sagged.

In a statement on Friday, Greenlight praised the judge’s ruling. “This is a significant win for all Apple shareholders and for good corporate governance,” the firm said. “We are pleased the court has recognized that Apple’s proxy is not compliant with the S.E.C.’s rules.”

Apple will now most likely have to break Proposal No. 2 into its separate elements and resubmit them to a vote.

“We are disappointed with the court’s ruling,” said Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple. “Proposal No. 2 is part of our efforts to further enhance corporate governance and serve our shareholders’ best interests. Unf ortunately, due to today’s decision, shareholders will not be able to vote on Proposal No. 2 at our annual meeting next week.”

Apple had argued that the plan in its entirety was actually shareholder-friendly, and enjoyed the backing of prominent investors like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Anne Simpson, the Calpers director of global governance, said in a statement: “We continue to support Apple in their efforts, and believe that the implementation of majority voting and shareholder approval for the issuance of new stock â€" preferred or otherwise â€" is worth waiting for.”

Ruling for Greenlight Capital in Battle With Apple

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/23/2013, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: U.S. Judge Halts an Apple Shareholder Vote.

The Boss: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor is an Average Traveler

The Boss: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor is an Average Traveler

I WAS born in Hollywood, Calif. â€" truly a shocking notion if you know how unstruck I am by stars.

My father was a trial lawyer. He taught me the power of articulate persuasion. We’d sit at the dining room table and take sides of a debate. He would argue me into a corner, then at some point say, “Switch,” and I’d have to defend the opposite position. He would then deftly argue himself out of the corner he had just painted me into.

My mother had multiple sclerosis. By the time I was 13 she was in a wheelchair, and she was bedridden when I went to college. She passed away in 1986. A huge responsibility fell to me at an early age as the oldest of three kids. I balanced the household checkbook at 13. I had a special driver’s license at the age of 15 to take my siblings around.

I picked up fencing in high school partly because it attracted the craziest bunch of people. I helped start my high school team, recruiting students with the pitch, “Wouldn’t it be fun if you learned how to stab your friends?” I went to the Junior Olympics when I was 16 or so and lost every one of my bouts. But I got better. When I went to Harvard I made the varsity team, was later elected captain, and in 1983 won a slot on the collegiate All-American team. In fencing, you have to think three moves ahead. It turned out to be good training for corporate life.

I went to Harvard thinking I would major in physics. I liked the pulleys-and-levers part but not the extensive math. Computer science was a bit of a backwater of academia then, but I liked the game of solving programming problems. I’d be pumped at 3 in the morning when I found bugs in programs.

In 1985, after I had graduated from college, I was co-founder of a company called CenterLine Software, which made programming and testing tools that we sold to software developers. In 1998 the other owners and I sold half the assets, and the other half became CenterLine Development Systems, which was headed by my wife, Caroline.

That same year, Caroline and I were planning a vacation in Mexico, and I started looking online for unbiased opinions about a particular hotel. What I got was a thousand sites showcasing exactly the same gorgeous picture and the very same descriptive paragraphs.

It took a lot of time, and some advanced Boolean logic in my search queries, but eventually I found a write-up from a couple who’d stayed at the hotel I had in mind, with pictures that showed rusted chairs and a beach not up to our expectations. I had dodged a bullet.

Later Caroline suggested I build a Web site to help other travelers in similar situations. “Just keep it easy to use and honest,” she said. TripAdvisor and its other Web sites now attract more than 75 million monthly visitors.

Unfortunately, Caroline did not live to see how large we would grow. She passed away from pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer in 2005 at the age of 42. I was left to raise our four children â€" ages 5, 7, 12 and 13 at the time. It was difficult, to say the least, but today we are a happy and healthy family. In 2012, I married a wonderful friend and an amazing mom with four kids of her own. With eight kids, a dog and a turtle, we take “full house” literally. Through the Stephen and Caroline Kaufer Fund for Neuroendocrine Research, we’ve supported medical research at several leading scientific institutions, as well as through our efforts with a great cancer charity called the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation.

Most people assume I am an avid traveler who would like nothing more than to roam the world for three months. Not true. The company was born of an average traveler’s desire to plan a great trip for a precious week or two of vacation time.

As told to Perry Garfinkel.

Alcatel-Lucent Names Chief to Lead a Major Downsizing

Alcatel-Lucent Names Chief to Lead a Major Downsizing

BERLIN â€" Alcatel-Lucent, the struggling French telecommunications equipment maker, on Friday hired a former Vodafone and France Télécom executive, Michel Combes, to lead the company through what might be a major downsizing.

Mr. Combes, 51, will take over for Ben Verwaayen, who had failed in four years to bring the equipment maker, created by the 2006 merger of Alcatel of France and Lucent Technologies of New Jersey, to sustained profit.

Mr. Combes left Vodafone last summer after agreeing to take over as chief executive of SFR, a French mobile operator owned by Vivendi. But he withdrew from the job after the sudden departure of Jean-Bernard Lévy as Vivendi’s chief executive.

In brief remarks to senior executives this morning in Paris, Mr. Combes said he planned to conduct a “listening tour” of employees, shareholders and other stakeholders before formulating a strategy for Alcatel-Lucent, which lost 1.4 billion euros ($ 1.9 billion) in 2012.

The company is in the midst of cutting 7 percent of its global work force, 5,500 of 76,000 jobs, by the end of this year.

In a statement, Mr. Combes said he would work to return Alcatel-Lucent to lasting profitability, something that has eluded it since the trans-Atlantic merger.

“This is a company I know well,” he said in a statement, “and I look forward to succeeding Ben, working with the key international customers and driving the business into sustained profitability for its customers, employees and shareholders.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s shares fell 1.8 percent, to 1.12 euros, in Paris trading after the announcement. Alexander Peterc, an analyst at Exane BNP Paribas in London, said investors had hoped for an executive with more of a track record as a cost-cutter. He said that Mr. Combes should quickly identify which businesses were for sale.

The company has indicated that its optical submarine cable business and its enterprise business of selling equipment to large companies and organizations are on the block, Mr. Peterc said.

“Alcatel-Lucent is in a crisis situation, and even just identifying which businesses it intends to sell would be a step forward that could save thousands of jobs,” Mr. Peterc said. “They have tried for six years since the merger and have spent 4 billion euros on restructuring to turn this company around, and it hasn’t worked yet.”

Mr. Verwaayen, the former chief of the British telecom operator BT, integrated the Alcatel and Lucent product lines and organizations under a unified brand. When he announced on Feb. 7 that he would step down, he said in a call with analysts that the company was reviewing its entire business portfolio with an eye to possible asset sales.

In December, the company secured 1.62 billion euros in emergency financing from Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs to buy more time. As a condition of the loans, the company pledged a percentage of revenue derived from future asset sales.

Martin Nilsson, an analyst at Handelsbanken in Stockholm, said Mr. Combes would most likely be forced to take major steps to expedite the resizing of Alcatel-Lucent, including selling some businesses. Only 12 percent of the company’s work force, roughly 9,000 people, is in France. The rest are spread around the world, mostly in the United States, China, India, the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea.

“I think irrespective of the C.E.O. they had chosen, this is the main challenge for Alcatel-Lucent at this time,” Mr. Nilsson said. “It has been seemingly very difficult for this company to reach sustained profitability.”

In another potential signal that Alcatel-Lucent may be entering a phase of greater reorganization, the company announced that it had appointed Jean C. Monty, the former president and chief executive of Nortel Networks and Bell Canada, vice chairman of the board, a new position.

Philippe Camus, the Alcatel-Lucent chairman, said in a statement that Mr. Monty would be working closely with Mr. Combes to sort out the company’s future.

“We are fortunate to have such an experienced colleague to support Michel Combes in his new role,” Mr. Camus said. “I’m looking forward to working more closely with Jean, and I’m convinced Alcatel-Lucent will benefit from his incredible knowledge of our business.”

Mr. Nilsson said that Alcatel-Lucent’s turnaround would not be easy. Selling money-losing businesses and cutting research and development spending to increase profit will decrease Alcatel-Lucent’s base of sales and could limit its future growth potential by slowing the development of new products.

“It is very easy for tech companies to get into a downward spiral,” Mr. Nilsson said.

Alcatel-Lucent has declined to say which businesses it might sell. In 2012, sales fell more than 20 percent in its optical networking business and 17 percent in wireless networking. It blamed the lower sales on the rapid transition by United States operators to faster network gear based on Long Term Evolution technology, which reduced demand for Alcatel-Lucent’s second- and third-generation products.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled, in one reference, the last name of the departing Alcatel-Lucent chief executive. He is Ben Verwaayen, not Verwaaven. It also misspelled the given name of an Exane BNP Paribas analyst. He is Alexander Peterc, not Aleksander. Additionally, an earlier summary for the article misstated the size of Alcatel-Lucent’s loss in 2012. It was 1.4 billion euros, not 1.4 euros.

Einhorn Scores Legal Victory Versus Apple in Cash Scuffle

Einhorn Scores Legal Victory Versus Apple in Cash Scuffle

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge handed outspoken hedge fund manager David Einhorn a victory in his battle with Apple Inc on Friday, blocking the iPhone maker from moving forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal to limit the company's ability to issue preferred stock.

U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan granted a motion by Einhorn's Greenlight Capital for a preliminary injunction stopping a vote on that proposal, scheduled for the company's February 27 stockholders' meeting.

The decision could hand Einhorn more leverage as he pursues his pitch for Apple to issue what he has called the "iPref": preferred stock with a perpetual dividend that he contends would reward investors and help boost the company's share price.

Greenlight sued Apple on February 7 as part of a broader pitch to unlock more of its $ 137 billion in cash. The hedge fund manager has lobbied Apple to issue preferred stock with a perpetual 4 percent dividend, and on Thursday made a direct appeal to shareholders on a teleconference.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook last week dismissed the lawsuit as a "silly sideshow."

The lawsuit itself challenged a measure called Proposal No. 2 that Apple put forward, which would eliminate its power to issue preferred shares without a shareholder vote.

At issue is Apple's "bundling" of that measure with two other unrelated matters into a single proxy proposal.

Greenlight said it supported two of the proposed amendments, but not the one on preferred shares.

In his ruling, Sullivan said Greenlight and another investor who also sued Apple "are likely to succeed on the merits and face irreparable harm if the vote on Proposal No. 2 is permitted to proceed."

"We are disappointed with the court's ruling. Proposal No. 2 is part of our efforts to further enhance corporate governance and serve our shareholders' best interests," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. "Unfortunately, due to today's decision, shareholders will not be able to vote on Proposal No. 2 at our annual meeting next week."

A spokesman for Greenlight called the ruling a "significant win for all Apple shareholders and for good corporate governance."

But not all shareholders were happy. California pension fund Calpers, a major Apple investor and public supporter of Apple's proposal, said implementation of "majority voting and shareholder approval for the issuance of new stock - preferred or otherwise - is worth waiting for."

"We encourage Apple to reintroduce these measures as soon as is practical so that all investors can be heard," Anne Simpson, Calpers' director of global governance, said in a statement.

BUNDLES

The ruling could be a warning for other companies when issuing proxy proposals, said James Cox, a professor at Duke University School of Law.

"It's going to make managers reluctant to bundle things together, because you're never going to know when you send them out if there's an Einhorn out there," he said.

The lawsuit was centered on a narrow issue of whether Apple violated U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules by "bundling" the preferred shares item with two other unrelated matters into one proxy proposal.

Greenlight's lawyers contended the SEC rules were intended to protect shareholders from being forced to vote for a proxy proposal involving materially different issues that the investors might not entirely support.

Apple had argued Proposal No. 2, which only dealt with amendments to its charter, constitute a single matter and wasn't bundled. Sullivan called the company's arguments "unavailing."

"Given the language and purpose of the rules, it is plain to the Court that Proposal No. 2 impermissibly bundles 'separate matters' for shareholder consideration," Sullivan wrote.

Judge Sullivan also found that Greenlight would be irreparably harmed without the injunction, since it would be forced to vote against its own interests. Denying Greenlight's motion would prevent it and other investors from exercising their rights to a fair vote, Sullivan said.

Sullivan separately declined to block a vote from going forward on a separate proxy proposal, Proposal No. 4, which sought an advisory "say on pay" vote on Apple executives' compensation.

The proposal had been challenged by investor Brian Gralnick of Pennsylvania, who contends Apple did not disclose enough details about how it made its compensation decisions.

Sullivan rejected that argument, saying Apple's disclosures were "plainly sufficient under SEC rules."

Arnold Gershon, a lawyer for Gralnick at Barrack, Rodos & Bacine, said he was "very pleased" with Sullivan's decision to the extent it enjoined the Proposal No. 2 vote, though said he would have to decide what to do next with regard to the say-on-pay proposal.

Sullivan directed the parties to submit a joint letter by March 1 outlining the next contemplated steps in this case.

Apple shares closed up 1.1 percent at $ 450.81 on Friday.

The case is Greenlight Capital LP, et al., v. Apple Inc., U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, 13-900.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; Editing by Martha Graybow, Gary Hill, Leslie Adler, Carol Bishopric and Lisa Shumaker)

In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

HONG KONG â€" North Korea will finally allow Internet searches on mobile devices. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck â€" only foreigners will get this privilege.

Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by next Friday, according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in the North.

The North Korean police state is famously cloistered, a means for the government to keep news of the world from its impoverished people. Only the most elite North Koreans have been allowed access to the Internet, and even they are watched. And although many North Koreans are allowed to have cellphones, sanctioned phones cannot call outside the country.

Foreigners were only recently allowed to use cellphones in the country. Previously, most had to surrender their phones with customs agents.

But it is unlikely that the small opening will compromise the North’s tight control of its people; the relatively few foreigners who travel to North Korea â€" a group that includes tourists and occasional journalists â€" are assigned government minders.

The decision, announced Friday, to allow foreigners Internet access comes a month after Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang, the North’s capital. While there he prodded officials on allowing Internet access, noting how easy it would be to set up through the expanding 3G network of Koryolink, a joint venture of North Korean and Egyptian telecommunications corporations. Presumably, Mr. Schmidt’s appeal was directed at giving North Koreans such capability.

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters following his visit. “We made that alternative very, very clear.”

North Koreans will get some benefit from the 3G service, as they will be allowed to text and make video calls, The Associated Press said. They can also view newspaper reports â€" but the news service mentioned only one source: Rodong Sinmun, the North’s main Communist Party newspaper.

HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

WASHINGTON â€" More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest sellers of smartphones in the United States, had security flaws that could allow location tracking of users against their will and the theft of personal information stored on their phones, federal officials said Friday.

The Federal Trade Commission charged HTC with customizing the software on its Android- and Windows-based phones in ways that let third-party applications install software that could steal personal information, surreptitiously send text messages or enable the device’s microphone to record the user’s phone calls.

The action is the first attempt by the commission to police a manufacturer of mobile devices. As smartphones and tablets become a common way for consumers to shop, bank and chat online, personal information and privacy will need to be guarded.

HTC America, based in Bellevue, Wash., agreed to settle the civil suit with the commission by issuing software patches that close the security holes, and by creating a security program that will be monitored by an independent party for the next 20 years. The F.T.C. does not have the authority to assess fines in consumer protection cases.

“The company didn’t design its products with security in mind,” Lesley Fair, a senior lawyer in the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote in a blog post. “HTC didn’t test the software on its mobile devices for potential security vulnerabilities, didn’t follow commonly accepted secure coding practices and didn’t even respond when warned about the flaws in its devices.”

An HTC official said Friday that the company had already started to update its software and distribute it to users of some, but not all, of the affected phones.

“Working with our carrier partners, we have addressed the identified security vulnerabilities on the majority of devices in the U.S. released after December 2010,” Sally Julien, an HTC spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We’re working to roll out the remaining software updates now and recommend customers download them once available.”

“Privacy and security are important,” the statement added, “and we are committed to improving practices that help safeguard our customers’ devices and data.”

The trade commission charged that the security flaws resulted from HTC’s modifying the operating system software used on most of the affected phones. In the case of Android, created by Google, the system is designed to protect sensitive information and phone functions through what is known as a permission-based security model.

That requires a user, when installing an application that is not a standard part of the operating system, to be notified and to agree that the application could gain access to certain information or functions.

HTC, however, preinstalled certain apps on its phones in a way that, in addition to preventing consumers from removing them, disabled the permission-based model and allowed newly installed apps to have immediate access to personal data.

“The analogy isn’t exact,” wrote Ms. Fair of the F.T.C., “but it’s like giving a friend the combination to a safe only to find out he’s handing it over to anyone who asks.”

That security hole could, for example, let the rogue software secretly record users’ phone conversations or track their location.

Flaws in the security system could also give third-party apps access to phone numbers, contents of text messages, browsing history and information like credit card numbers and banking transactions. Those flaws also affected HTC phones that used Windows-based operating systems.

While HTC’s actions introduced numerous security vulnerabilities to its phones, a commission official said it was not clear how many users experienced illegal incursions into their phones and personal information.

The flaw in the company’s phones has been known since at least 2011. HTC acknowledged the problems at that time and developed software patches for at least some of the deficiencies that year.

But the problems were far from minor. The F.T.C. said that text-message toll fraud, in which a hacker causes a phone to send text messages to a number that charges the user for delivery of the message, “is one of the most common types of Android malware,” or malicious software.

HTC’s user manuals either said or implied that a user was protected against malware because of the permission-based security, the commission said.

The commission will collect public comments on the proposed remedies for 30 days, after which it will decide whether to formally carry out the order. If HTC subsequently violates the order’s restrictions and requirements, it faces civil penalties of up to $ 16,000 a violation.

Alan F. Westin, Scholar Who Defined Right to Privacy, Dies at 83

Alan F. Westin, Scholar Who Defined Right to Privacy, Dies at 83

Alan F. Westin, a legal scholar who nearly half a century ago defined the modern right to privacy in the incipient computer age â€" a definition that anticipated the reach of Big Brother and helped circumscribe its limits â€" died on Monday in Saddle River, N.J. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, his family said.

A lawyer and political scientist, Mr. Westin was at his death emeritus professor of public law at Columbia, where he had taught for nearly 40 years.

Through his work â€" notably his book “Privacy and Freedom,” published in 1967 and still a canonical text â€" Mr. Westin was considered to have created, almost single-handedly, the modern field of privacy law. He testified frequently on the subject before Congress, spoke about it on television and radio and wrote about it for newspapers and magazines.

“He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis,” Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “He transformed the privacy debate by defining privacy as the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others.”

Since the first hominid grunted gossip about the hominid next door, every new communications medium has entailed new impingements on privacy. In a seminal 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice, and his law partner, Samuel D. Warren, were the first to articulate privacy as a legal right, defining it, famously, as “the right to be let alone.”

Brandeis and Warren were concerned primarily with covert photography; later scholarship, including work by Mr. Westin in the 1950s, centered on things like illegal wiretapping.

But by the 1960s and ’70s, as the widespread computerization of legal, financial, medical and other personal records loomed, technology had outrun the law.

Reproductive rights cases of the period â€" including the landmark Supreme Court cases Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 â€" held that the Constitution protected an individual’s right to privacy in matters of the human body, including contraceptive use and abortion rights. But the law was largely silent on the question of how personal data might be used by government or the private sector.

During these years, long before the personal computer and longer still before the Internet, Mr. Westin set out to codify just this kind of privacy for the modern age.

“He knew social history, and he could appreciate the directions that the technology was pushing the social contract,” Lance J. Hoffman, the director of George Washington’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, said in an interview.

Individuals, Mr. Westin argued in “Privacy and Freedom,” have the right to determine how much of their personal information is disclosed and to whom, how it should be maintained and how disseminated.

“This concept became the cornerstone of our modern right to privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “Part of ‘Privacy and Freedom’ is the argument that privacy enables freedom.”

“Privacy and Freedom” received two prestigious journalism prizes, the George Polk Award and the Hillman Prize.

The book, along with other work by Mr. Westin, is widely considered the foundation of a spate of modern privacy laws, among them the Privacy Act of 1974, the first law to delimit the gathering and use of personal information by the federal government.

Mr. Westin was no absolutist. In his early work on wiretapping, for instance, he condoned its use in certain instances, including cases where national security was at stake.

His argument prefigured the current national debate about privacy engendered by post-9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act, which Mr. Westin, in a 2003 interview, called “a justified piece of legislation.”

“He insisted on a balance between the competing demands of privacy, disclosure and surveillance,” Mr. Rosen said. “Much of his work in the 1960s and ’70s appears so prescient after 9/11 and in the age of Internet.”

When it came to the use of consumers’ personal data by corporations, Mr. Westin also steered a middle course. Consumers were entitled to withhold such data, he argued, but were equally entitled, if they wished, to have it used to alert them to products and services targeted to their interests. (This stance caused Mr. Westin to be accused by some critics of allying himself too closely with business interests.)

Mr. Westin, who in the 1970s was editor in chief of The Civil Liberties Review, a publication of the American Civil Liberties Foundation, published and edited the newsletter Privacy & American Business from 1993 to 2006. He was a consultant on privacy issues to major corporations, including Equifax, the consumer credit reporting giant; GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical concern; and Verizon Communications.

Mr. Westin’s wife died before him, as did a son, David. His survivors include a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Debra Westin; and three grandchildren.

A posthumous book by Mr. Westin, about privacy as a historically and philosophically Jewish construct, is being completed by Mr. Rosen.

In recent years, Mr. Westin turned his attention to the Niagara of personal data loosed by Google, Facebook and their ilk.To stem this tide was a hopeless task, and he knew it.

“He recognized that the problems of protecting privacy are now so daunting that they can’t be dealt with by law alone, but require a mix of legal, social and technological solutions,” Mr. Rosen said.

The son of Irving Westin and the former Etta Furman, Alan Furman Westin was born in Manhattan on Oct. 11, 1929; received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Florida in 1948, followed by a law degree from Harvard in 1951; was admitted to the bar in 1952; married Bea Shapoff, a teacher, in 1954 in a ceremony in which the bride wore a waltz-length white gown; joined the Columbia faculty in 1959; earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1965 (his dissertation topic was “Privacy in Western Political History”); lived for many years in Teaneck, N.J.; edited a string of books, including “Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America” (1964), “Information Technology in a Democracy” (1971) and “Getting Angry Six Times a Week: A Portfolio of Political Cartoons” (1979); once made a sound recording titled “I Wonder Who’s Bugging You Now”; was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Congress; had a Social Security number obtained in Massachusetts; and was a registered Democrat who last voted in 2011 â€" all public information, obtainable online at the touch of a button or two.