New York Times

A federal appeals court reversed the conviction of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker and self-described Internet troll, who was accused of stealing the personal data of 114,000 Apple iPad users in 2010.

At the time, Auernheimer and Daniel Spitler, operating as part of a group called Goatse Security, gained national attention when they discovered a security loophole on AT&T’s website that allowed them to gain access to the addresses of the carrier’s customers and their corresponding iPad identification numbers.

In its decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said that the conviction of Auernheimer by a jury in Newark (NJ), and the subsequent 41-month prison sentence could not stand because the case did not belong in that state. Prosecutors had argued at the time that the case should be tried in New Jersey because AT&T’s servers were housed there. But an appeals court judge, writing in the unanimous three-person opinion, noted that evidence at Auernheimer’s trial showed that the servers that had been entered were in Texas and Georgia.

When the Heartbleed bug was disclosed, the attention focused on the fallout for major Internet companies like Yahoo and Amazon. But security experts said the potential for harm could extend much further, to the guts of the Internet and the many devices that connect to it.

Some of the companies that make those devices began revealing whether they had been affected. Cisco Systems, the dominant provider of gear to move traffic through the Internet, said its big routers and servers, as well as its online servers -- a big business -- were not affected. If they had been, that would have had a significant impact on virtually every major company that connects to the Internet.

Certain products the company makes were affected, it said -- some kinds of phones that connect to the Internet, a kind of server that helps people conduct online meetings, and another kind of device used for office communications. Cisco also posted a list of products it had examined for the vulnerability, which it was updating as it continued inspecting its equipment.

Online privacy is heating up as a selling point, at least in Europe. Microsoft’s top lawyer said the company’s cloud computing services had met Europe’s stringent data protection rules -- the only company so far to receive such approval -- and he used the news as a way to woo potential new customers.

“For customers who care about privacy and compliance, there is no more committed partner than Microsoft,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said.

Privacy has become an increasingly important concern for American tech companies following the revelations by Edward Snowden, which tied some of these companies to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program. In response, some companies and governments have starting to look elsewhere for computer services with a greater degree of privacy.

International rivals, from Europe to South America, have gained some customers who are shunning American providers. Many of the major American companies have started to face some damage to their bottom lines because of the revelations.

Listen to executives at Twitter and Facebook talk about how we watch television and you might walk away thinking that Americans are chattering nonstop on the social networks while watching their favorite shows. The reality is that most of us don’t tweet or post at all while we’re plopped in front of the tube.

When we do, half the time we’re talking about something other than TV. And social media conversation is far weaker than traditional factors, like TV commercials for new shows or our sheer laziness in changing channels, in prompting us to tune into each season’s new offerings.

Those are among the crucial findings of a new study to be released by the Council for Research Excellence, a Nielsen-funded group that does in-depth research on how Americans use media that is shared with its member broadcasters, advertisers, publishers and social media companies. The council surveyed 1,665 respondents, ages 15 to 54, who were selected to be representative of the online population.

The participants used a mobile app to report any time they saw, heard or communicated something about prime-time TV shows over the course of 21 days last fall, as the new season’s lineup of TV shows made their debuts. Only 16.1 percent of the survey respondents said they had used social media while watching TV during prime time. And less than half of the people using social media were actually discussing the show they were watching.

Comcast took its case for acquiring Time Warner Cable to Capitol Hill, arguing at a Senate hearing that its proposed $45 billion takeover would benefit consumers by generating greater investment and more competition among cable-television and broadband companies.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees antitrust issues, is reviewing the merger, which has generally been supported by conservative lawmakers and opposed by Democrats, who fear that it will result in higher bills for consumers for cable and high-speed Internet service.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) who is chairman of the committee, said in an opening statement that the impact of the merger on consumers is probably the most important consideration in determining whether the deal should go ahead. “Consumers do not want to hear complex legal jargon or obscure regulatory terms,” Sen Leahy said. “They want to know why their cable bills are going up. They want to know why they do not have more choice of providers.”

Comcast CEO David Cohen did acknowledge that Comcast has a reputation for leaving its customers dissatisfied. “It bothers us that we have so much trouble delivering a high quality of service to customers on a regular basis,” he said. But it is trying to improve, he added, by hiring more service employees and improving training.

Comcast executives are expected to face tough questions from some Judiciary Committee members, like Senator Al Franken (D-MN), who has written to regulators asking them to take a hard look at the deal. “I’m very concerned that consumers are going to get stuck with higher cable and Internet prices, fewer choices and even worse service,” Sen Franken said, when asked what his questions will focus on during the hearing. “Comcast has an army of lobbyists pushing this deal, but during this hearing we need to make sure that consumers’ voices are being heard, too.”

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Communications Commission have begun their inquiries into the merger, which would join the two largest cable-television and broadband companies.

The tiny padlock icon that sits next to many web addresses, suggesting protection of users’ most sensitive information -- like passwords, stored files, bank details, even Social Security numbers -- is broken.

A flaw has been discovered in one of the Internet’s key encryption methods, potentially forcing a wide swath of websites to swap out the virtual keys that generate private connections between the sites and their customers.

Many organizations have been heeding the warning. Companies like Lastpass, the password manager, and Tumblr, the social network owned by Yahoo, said they had issued fixes and warned users to immediately swap out their usernames and passwords.

The vulnerability involves a serious bug in OpenSSL, the technology that powers encryption for two-thirds of web servers. It was revealed by a team of Finnish security researchers who work for Codenomicon, a security company in Saratoga (CA), and two security engineers at Google. Researchers are calling the bug “Heartbleed” because it affects the “heartbeat” portion of the OpenSSL protocol, which pings messages back and forth. It can and has been exploited by attackers. The bug allows attackers to access the memory on any web server running OpenSSL and take information like customer usernames and passwords, sensitive banking details, trade secrets and the private encryption keys that organizations use to communicate privately with their customers.

“It’s a serious bug in that it doesn’t leave any trace,” said David Chartier, the chief executive at Codenomicon. “Bad guys can access the memory on a machine and take encryption keys, usernames, passwords, valuable intellectual property, and there’s no trace they’ve been there.”

In the months before Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s arrival in Beijing, the Obama Administration quietly held an extraordinary briefing for the Chinese military leadership on a subject officials have rarely discussed in public: the Pentagon’s emerging doctrine for defending against cyberattacks against the United States -- and for using its cybertechnology against adversaries, including the Chinese.

The idea was to allay Chinese concerns about plans to more than triple the number of American cyberwarriors to 6,000 by the end of 2016, a force that will include new teams the Pentagon plans to deploy to each military combatant command around the world. But the hope was to prompt the Chinese to give Washington a similar briefing about the many People’s Liberation Army units that are believed to be behind the escalating attacks on American corporations and government networks. So far, the Chinese have not reciprocated -- a point Hagel plans to make in a speech at the PLA’s National Defense University. The effort, senior Pentagon officials say, is to head off what Hagel and his advisers fear is the growing possibility of a fast-escalating series of cyberattacks and counterattacks between the United States and China.

This is a concern especially at a time of mounting tensions over China’s expanding claims of control over what it argues are exclusive territories in the East and South China Seas, and over a new air defense zone. In interviews, American officials say their latest initiatives were inspired by Cold-War-era exchanges held with the Soviets so that each side understood the “red lines” for employing nuclear weapons against each other. President Obama told the Chinese president that the United States, unlike China, did not use its technological powers to steal corporate data and give it to its own companies; its spying, one of President Obama’s aides later told reporters, is solely for “national security priorities.”

But to the Chinese, for whom national and economic security are one, that argument carries little weight. For that reason, the disclosures changed the discussion between the top officials at the Pentagon and the State Department and their Chinese counterparts in quiet meetings intended to work out what one official called “an understanding of rules of the road, norms of behavior,” for China and the United States.

[Commentary] All of my conversational habits have matured beyond the static phone dates of yore. We are now in constant and continuous communication with our friends, co-workers and family over the course of a day.

These interactions can help us feel physically close, even if they happen through a screen. And because this kind of communication is less formal than a phone call or an email, it feels more like the kind of casual conversation you might have over a meal or while watching television together. These conversations can also be infused with a lot more fun than a regular text message, because they often include cutesy features that let you add digital doodles to video messages, or send virtual kisses or cartoon characters. The downside is that it can be hard to juggle all the various ways to communicate.

But a modern kind of application, including one that we were experimenting with on that lazy Sunday, combines all those interactions -- and is designed with couples in mind. This focus on couples is relatively new. The online and mobile dating industry has built many tools and services for single people who are looking for romantic partners and new friends. They’ve evolved from websites like Match.com and OKCupid to mobile apps like Tinder that let people swipe through potential dates and select the ones that pique their interest. But in recent months, several entrepreneurs have been shifting their attention to people after they meet a mate.

“Tech entrepreneurs, long obsessed with making apps to help you find a relationship, have now begun trying to solve the problem of staying happy in one,” wrote Ann Friedman on The Cut, a blog of New York magazine. Friedman points to apps like Avocado, Couple and Between as smartphone apps that “keep you close with your partner through the power of a smartphone alone.”

[Commentary] Today, even as so many barriers have fallen -- whether at elite universities, where women outnumber men, or in running for the presidency, where polls show that fewer people think gender makes a difference -- computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind.

Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away. Tech executives often fault schools, parents or society in general for failing to encourage girls to pursue computer science. But something else is at play in the industry: Among the women who join the field, 56 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School.

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

But computer science wasn’t always dominated by men. “In the beginning, the word ‘computers’ meant ‘women,’ ” says Ruth Oldenziel, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who studies history, gender and technology. Six women programmed one of the most famous computers in history -- the 30-ton Eniac -- for the United States Army during World War II. But as with many professions, Dr Oldenziel said, once programming gained prestige, women were pushed out.

Over the decades, the share of women in computing has continued to decline. In 2012, just 18 percent of computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. This lack of women has become of greater concern in the industry for a number of reasons.

There are simply more jobs than can be filled by available talent. Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in 2022, yet United States universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them, the NCWIT estimates. Tech’s biggest companies say that recruiting women is a priority. “If we do that, there’s no question we’ll more than double the rate of technology output in the world,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, said. Yet at Google, less than a fifth of the engineers are women.

[Commentary] It is hard to say how rugged the questions will be when Comcast goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend its proposed megamerger with Time Warner Cable.

We do know that Comcast is feeling pretty confident about its chances. In a recent interview with C-Span, David Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast and the man who will represent the company, said, “ I have been struck by the absence of rational, knowledgeable voices in this space coming out in opposition or even raising serious questions about the transaction.” Really? How can the largest cable company in the country bid to buy the second-largest and gain control over 19 of the country’s top 20 markets -- corralling a 30 percent market share in cable and a 40 percent share in broadband -- and there be no serious questions? Well, I’ll chime in:

1. Is the merger good for the American consumer?
2. Why isn’t there more competition in the cable business?
3. Should one company own a lot of the pipes and much of what goes through them?
4. Is the cable merger about cable? Cable is a declining legacy business, shrinking even as the merger works its way through the regulatory process. “We want to be a tech company, not a wire company,” Roberts told my colleague James Stewart. In that context, the fact that Comcast is willing to divest about three million cable customers to remain below the threshold of 30 million is far less important than the fact that post-merger, it will own 40 percent of the high-speed broadband in the country.
5. Is the deal really good for innovation?
6. Will a bigger Comcast allow other broadband options to flourish? In 20 states, there are significant obstacles and in some cases, outright prohibitions, for municipal broadband efforts and much of that was engineered by the cable industry. In Colorado, North Carolina and elsewhere, well-funded lobbying efforts and public information campaigns supported by companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable have fought back homegrown alternatives for cheap, reliable broadband.