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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings hammered home Monday that the company believes it is squarely in the TV business, saying that increased competition for exclusive content is “a natural outcome of us becoming a network like other cable networks."
He also used the term “Internet television” to describe the company, which finished the January-March quarter with 23.4 million streaming subscribers in the U.S., following 1.7 net additions in the quarter. The company predicts it will end the year at close to 29 million streaming customers in the U.S., which would be equal to about 30% of homes that pay for TV service. Netflix is moving to acquire exclusive rights to TV shows that have run elsewhere -- such as AMC’s “Breaking Bad” -- while launching content it produces itself, such as “Lilyhammer,” which came online in the first quarter.
Subscribers Jump At 'TV Network' Netflix
As the House considers as many as four cybersecurity bills later this week, the House Homeland Security Committee will be playing only a supporting role in what could be considered one of its signature issues. Conspicuously absent from the House's "Cyber Week" agenda is the Homeland Security Committee's Precise Act, which cleared a subcommittee by voice vote in February. Now, what was once a bipartisan bill is bogged down and on hold and the committee has been sidelined.
The committee will hold at least two hearings this week to highlight cyberthreats, but for a panel that oversees the agency deemed central to the government's civilian cybersecurity efforts, it is a significantly diminished role. House leaders have tapped lawmakers from the chamber's Intelligence and Armed Services committees to lead the efforts. According to House Homeland Security members, House GOP leadership pressed the sponsors of the Precise Act to remove sections that conflicted with other committees' work, or that were too similar to proposals disliked by Senate Republicans. But the changes sparked Democrats to drop their support, and now House leaders appear to be blocking the Precise Act from floor consideration until Democrats support it again.
Why the House Homeland Security Committee is on the cybersecurity sidelines
The General Services Administration is reportedly working on a validation tool to help people verify whether a Tumblr account, Facebook page or Twitter handle that purports to be from a federal official or agency is legitimate. The social media registry will help reporters, researchers and others ensure they're dealing with a credible source. It will be less helpful, though, at combatting the broad effects of misinformation spread by social media imitators and hackers who tend to prey on people who don't double check their news sources.
GSA Tool Will Verify Federal Social Media Accounts
In a candid ruling, a New York judge said a protester can’t stop prosecutors from searching his Twitter account because he doesn’t own the tweets in the first place.
Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. cited a “widely-believed” but “mistaken” notion about online privacy rights and said that search and seizure protections don’t apply because we “do not have a ‘physical’ home on the Internet.” The ruling, which grows out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, reinforces a troubling legal trend that declares people have no privacy right in their online communications — even though they spend more and more of their time on services like Twitter and Facebook.
OWS protestor doesn’t own his tweets, judge rules
A growing number of lawmakers are expressing concern over the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill that's scheduled for a vote later this week in the U.S. House of Representatives. Backers say the bill aims to improve Internet security by making it easier for Internet Service Providers and Internet companies such as Google and Facebook to collect and share a wide range of user data with government security agencies. Privacy and civil rights groups, and even the White House have criticized the bill, contending that it oversteps existing privacy laws and its passage would enable widespread surveillance of all online activities under the pretext of cyber security.
Concerns about CISPA cyber security bill spread
In the past few months, the Mitt Romney campaign has been using Optimizely, a startup that hatched during President Obama's 2008 election campaign. Former Google employee Dan Siroker joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and became the director of analytics, coming up with the idea for the technology that would better target voters during the campaign. But while the idea was launched during Obama's campaign, Siroker commercialized the technology following the 2008 election, giving anyone the chance to test it out. As a result, Optimizely is now being used by a number of companies, and one of its most recent customers is Obama's presumptive competitor, Romney.
Romney uses startup hatched by Obama campaign
The Chicago Tribune will cut about 20 jobs as it outsources some suburban news coverage to Journatic LLC, a Chicago-based company. The newspaper is outsourcing work for its TribLocal suburban newspapers and Web sites following an investment by parent company Tribune Company in Journatic.
Tribune bought a minority stake in the company, said Brian Timpone, a co-founder of Journatic who is also the company's CEO and largest shareholder. Other terms of that investment weren't disclosed. Journatic already provides coverage for the Tribune Company's Daily Press in Virginia and expects to work eventually for other papers in the Tribune family, which include the Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times, Timpone said. He wouldn't say how many papers Journatic works for currently other than to say it includes dozens of titles, including Hearst. Journatic will be ending a contract it has to provide real estate coverage to the Chicago Sun-Times as part of the new “exclusive” agreement with Tribune, Timpone said. The Chicago Tribune will combine the work of Journatic with the 20-some remaining TribLocal editorial staffers to expand coverage, said Brad Moore, vice president of targeted media for the Chicago Tribune. The company isn't shutting any of the current suburban offices. The Chicago Tribune worker cuts include reporters and copy editors as well as Web site producers and designers, among others.
Chicago Tribune to outsource TribLocal content, cutting 20 jobs Tribune Company does deal with Journatic (Chicago Reader) Tribune Invests In Journatic, Extends Hyper-Local Content (MediaPost)
A Q&A with Vint Cerf who invented the protocol that rules them all: TCP/IP.
Most people have never heard of it. But it describes the fundamental architecture of the internet, and it made possible Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LANs, the World Wide Web, e-mail, FTP, 3G/4G — as well as all of the inventions built upon those inventions. Cerf did that in 1973. For most of you that’s probably 20 years before you even knew what the internet was. That’s why he’s known as the father of the internet and earned himself a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cerf didn’t stop there — he went on to co-found the Internet Society (ISOC) and served as president of ICANN, the organization which operates the domain naming system. So it was pretty much a given that Cerf would be inducted, as he was on Monday, into ISOC’s internet Hall of Fame in its inaugural year. Just a few days beforehand Cerf talked with Wired about how the military brought the TCP/IP protocol into being, how he and his co-conspirators knew — almost 40 years ago — what they were unleashing on the world, the threats to the net today, and what he’d like to see next: a vision that includes internet packets raining down from the sky.
Vint Cerf: We Knew What We Were Unleashing on the World
[Commentary] No firm has stayed atop the cellphone pyramid of success for more than a few years. Apple has now been there for a while. While good for Apple, the iPhone and the competition among the carriers to offer it has been very bad for the profitability of the carriers. They want a viable alternative to offer to customers. That is why they are putting big bucks behind the launch of the new Nokia phones even if investors aren’t noticing as they dump Nokia now.
The big debate this week is how much longer Apple’s string of good luck based on its trendsetting products will continue. If it isn’t this quarter, then is it next quarter that the string runs out? I don’t have the answer any more than the next analyst. I do know that I saw nothing so great about the latest iPad which Apple calls the New Ipad to give away my iPad 2 and buy another one. I have a friend who has been a decades long Apple user who just bought a new Mac only to find it was defective. They replaced it. The second one didn’t work either. She had to go to the third machine before Apple delivered one that worked. That is not good quality control. We also know that Apple has embarrassed itself over working conditions in China where workers were committing suicide in despair. On the other side of the ledger, relative to its rate of growth in the last few years, Apple sells at a modest P/E especially when you adjust for its enormous amount of cash in the bank. It’s an interesting reality that for a moment or two in the long sweep of stock market time, Apple has now exceeded Exxon Mobil as the world’s largest company. It will be interesting to look back a few months from now and see if that relationship persists.
How Long Can Apple Remain King Of Mobile Devices?
As the ecology of online attacks has evolved, so have defenders' methods. Now, some security experts are recommending that companies take it farther and that defenders should go on the attack. At the SOURCE Boston security conference, for example, Iftach Ian Amit, an independent security consultant who claims to have conducted several offensive operations, told attendees that companies need to consider counterintelligence operations.
The new cyber defense: Hack the attackers