May 2011

There were high-fives on Fox News; the New York Times printed an extra 165,000 copies; and the headline on New York’s Daily News read “Rot in hell”. For one night and one morning, America’s usually divided media could agree: Osama bin Laden’s death was a cause for celebration, and a significant achievement for president Barack Obama.

News anchors jumped into suits and printing presses were held after the 9.30pm eastern time alert that the president was about to address the nation. Traffic to social media sites soared, and at 10.25pm Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld told Twitter: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.” Even before it emerged that a Pakistani IT consultant had unknowingly tweeted the strike on bin Laden’s compound, Business Insider, Henry Blodget’s website, declared it “Twitter’s CNN moment”, although many said the same of last year’s demonstrations in Iran, the uprising in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and other recent news events. “Twitter is our Times Square on this victory day,” said Jeff Jarvis, the journalism professor and blogger. On Monday morning, Mr Urbahn played down the idea that his tweet was evidence of the triumph of social media, saying that his source had been “a connected TV news producer”. For an awkward 20 minutes after his message, though, broadcasters and cable news networks were unable to confirm the news to their satisfaction. After they switched to rolling coverage of the announcement and scrambled to set up calls and video links with their own journalists and outside analysts on a Sunday evening, they were at first able only to hint at the magnitude of the announcement to come.

Over the last year, as newspapers continue to grapple with how to protect their online content, Righthaven has filed more than 200 federal lawsuits in Colorado and Nevada over material posted without permission from The Denver Post or The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The company has business relationships with both newspapers. Like much of the industry, the papers see the appropriation of their work without permission as akin to theft and harmful to their business, and are frustrated by unsuccessful efforts to stem the common practice, whether it’s by a one-man operation, or an established one. Some critics contend that Righthaven’s tactics are draconian, and that the company hopes to extract swift settlements before it is clear that there is a violation of federal copyright law. Typically, the suits have been filed without warning. Righthaven rarely sends out notices telling Web sites to take down material that does not belong to them before seeking damages and demanding forfeiture of the Web domain name.

[Commentary] How secure is the Internet? It is perhaps less so than many trusting consumers seem to believe. Two recent privacy infractions involving companies with a global brand name should make users sit up and think. They are a reminder that the voracious appetite of Internet firms for data is not always matched by their ability to keep that information secure.

Apple’s decision to embed location-tracking software in its iPhone without flagging this to customers is a good example. While the resulting data helped the company target advertisements through the handsets, it involved both a careless invasion of privacy and lax data protection. Apple did not offer users an explicit opt-out to its obtaining and logging of the information. Having obtained the data it did not store this securely. Worrying in a different way was the hack-in at Sony’s Playstation network, which may have compromised the personal data of 77m gamers. The lure of such a huge stash of information invites attacks even on big companies. Inevitably some may succeed. The cases highlight a larger security problem.

Consumers have few qualms about giving up a great deal of personal information – as they do, wittingly or unwittingly, on mobile devices and social networking sites such as Facebook. Yet while they store ever more information about themselves online, the effort they make to protect this trove of data has not risen commensurately. People often use the same password for many personal accounts, so it is comparatively easy to piece together a lot of information once one has been breached. These traits make consumers vulnerable if the information they supply goes astray. Consumers rely on companies to protect them. But it is not clear that companies, especially social networks, take these vulnerabilities seriously enough.

Personalized radio service Pandora has reached a major milestone: last week it recorded its 10 billionth thumb (and it was a thumbs up).

Avid fans of the popular service already know what that means — for the rest of you, Pandora lets users mark the song that’s currently playing with a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. The effect is pretty straightforward: hit a thumbs up and Pandora will try to play more music that sounds like the song you’re listening to, thumbs down and Pandora will immediately jump to the next song and send a minor electric shock to CTO Tom Conrad. In other words, these thumbs are explicit signals that users are sending to Pandora to help fine-tune their radio stations, and it shows that plenty of people actually try to take advantage of the personalization features as opposed to just letting the radio play in the background all day.