locateSTYLE

On the eve of the dueling demo-fests, Demo impresario Chris Shipley confesses that she has had it with the shoddy reporting, invective and arrogance that has attended most of the commentary on the phony faceoff between her conference and TechCrunch.

Her post deserves to be quoted at length:

When in a twitter I bemoaned the lack of original reporting (only one reporter (cnet) and exactly zero bloggers writing this week about this silly DEMO v TechCrunch episode actually contacted me), the infamous blogger Robert Scoble suggested that if I’d blog my opinion, he’d link to it. Does that mean that a perspective only exists or matters if it’s expressed in a blog post? Or that Robert’s just moving too fast to do any investigation outside his narrow medium?

Scoble’s not the only guy living in the rarefied air of the echo-chamber. Sarah Lacy, who works for the much-respected Businessweek.com, conducted a five-minute video interview with TC50’s Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, during which the two leveled the usual slander. Did Lacy fire one tough question at the two? Did this journalist call me or the DEMO organization to get a response to serious accusations? Um, the answer to that would be “no.”

In fact, a few weeks ago, when Mike Arrington wrote an assumption-based and error-filled story that demanded an apology from the DEMO organization for a comment that was clearly not made by or on behalf of anyone at DEMO, Lacy picked up the story and wrote with righteous indignation that slander was the highest insult that could be leveled against a journalist. Did she call me or DEMO before posting her story? Again no.

Par for the course.

Not that any of what she wrote today is going to make a whit of difference to the mob baying for her head, but the bloviators choosing sides in this staged “controversy” are attacking one of the good guys (or in this, gals) in the technology business. How do I know? Full disclosure: I got to know Chris in the early 1990s when we worked together on a pre-Internet online publishing platform. Suffice it say that she’s a straight shooter with loads of integrity, the sort of person my father would describe as “a mensch.”

Is Demo making a buck on the backs of entrepreneurs? You bet. They also get to strut their stuff at a high-profile venue. Arrington and Calcanis are smart guys and my guess is that they’re not putting on TechCrunch 50 solely out of the kindness of their hearts. If all this results in a wider venue to startups, more power to everyone concerned. I’ll leave it at that.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor’s $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.

It sounded preposterous 10 years ago, but look now: Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.

Perhaps Google’s biggest test in the next decade will be finding a way to pursue its seemingly boundless ambitions without triggering a backlash that derails the company.

“You can’t do some of the things that they are trying to do without eventually facing some challenges from the government and your rivals,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed Google since its inception and is now editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Google’s expanding control over the flow of Internet traffic and advertising already is raising monopoly concerns.

The intensifying regulatory and political scrutiny on Google’s expansion could present more roadblocks in the future. Even now, there’s a chance U.S. antitrust regulators will challenge Google’s plans to sell ads for Yahoo Inc., a fading Internet star whose recent struggles have been magnified by Google’s success.

Privacy watchdogs also have sharpened their attacks on Google’s retention of potentially sensitive information about the 650 million people who use its search engine and other Internet services like YouTube, Maps and Gmail. If the harping eventually inspires rules that restrict Google’s data collection, it could make its search engine less relevant and its ad network less profitable.

To protect its interests, Google has hired lobbyists to bend the ears of lawmakers and ramped up its public relations staff to sway opinion as management gears up to conquer new frontiers.

“Google will keep pushing the envelope,” predicted John Battelle, who wrote a book about the company and now runs Federated Media, a conduit for Internet publishers and advertisers. “It’s one of the things that seems to make them happy.”

In the latest example of its relentless expansion, Google has just released a Web browser to make its search engine and other online services even more accessible and appealing. Not every peripheral step has gone smoothly, though; several of the company’s ancillary products have flopped or never lived up to the hype.

Extending Google’s ubiquity to cell phones and other mobile devices sits at the top of management’s agenda for the next decade.

But the lengthy to-do list also includes: making digital copies of all the world’s books; establishing electronic file cabinets for people’s health records; leading the alternative energy charge away from fossil fuels; selling computer programs to businesses over the Internet; and tweaking its search engine so it can better understand requests stated in plain language, just like a human would.

“There are people who think we are plenty full of ourselves right now, but from inside at least, it doesn’t look that way,” said Craig Silverstein, Google’s technology director and the first employee hired by Page and Brin. “I think what keeps us humble is realizing how much further we have to go.”

Page and Brin, both 35 now and worth nearly $19 billion apiece, declined to be interviewed for this story. But they have never left any doubt they view Google as a force for good — a philosophy punctuated by their corporate motto: “Don’t Be Evil.”

“If we had a lightsaber, we would be Luke (Skywalker),” Silverstein said.

A “Star Wars” analogy can just as easily be used to depict Google as an imposing empire. It holds commanding leads in both the Internet search and advertising markets. The company processes nearly two-thirds of the world’s online search requests, according to the research firm comScore Inc., and sells about three-fourths of the ads tied to search requests, according to another firm, eMarketer Inc.

The dominance has enabled Google to rake in $48 billion from Internet ads since 2001. Google hasn’t hoarded all of that money: the company has paid $15 billion in commissions to the Web sites that run its ads during the same period, helping to support major online destinations like AOL, Ask.com and MySpace as well as an array of bloggers.

“Google is the oxygen in this ecosystem,” Battelle said.

The company hopes to inhale even more Internet advertising from the biggest deal in its short history — a $3.2 billion acquisition of online marketing service DoubleClick Inc. that was completed six months ago.

Google also is trying to mine more money from its second-largest acquisition, YouTube, the Internet’s leading video channel. YouTube is expected to generate about $200 million in revenue this year, an amount that analysts believe barely scratches the video site’s moneymaking potential.

Eventually, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt wants the entire company to generate $100 billion in annual revenue, which would make it roughly as big as the two largest information-technology companies — Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. — each are now. This year, Google will surpass the $20 billion threshold for the first time.

Schmidt, 53, who became Google’s CEO in 2001, seems determined to stick around to reach his goal. He, Brin and Page have made an informal pact to remain the company’s brain trust through 2024, at least.

But some rivals are determined to thwart Google. TV and movie conglomerate Viacom Inc. is suing Google for $1 billion for alleged copyright infringement at YouTube, while Microsoft signaled how desperately it wants to topple Google by offering to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion this year.

Microsoft withdrew the takeover bid in a dispute over Yahoo’s value, but some analysts still think those two companies may get together if they fall farther behind Google.

The notion that Microsoft — the richest technology company — would spend so much time worrying about Google seemed inconceivable in September 1998, when Page and Brin decided to convert their research project in Stanford University’s computer science graduate program into a formal company.

Page, a University of Michigan graduate, and Brin, a University of Maryland alum, began working on a search engine — originally called BackRub — in 1996 because they believed a lot of important content wasn’t being found on the Web. At the time, the companies behind the Internet’s major search engines — Yahoo, AltaVista and Excite — were increasingly focused on building multifaceted Web sites.

Internet search was considered such a low priority at the time that Page and Brin couldn’t even find anyone willing to pay a couple of million dollars to buy their technology. Instead, they got a $100,000 investment from one of Sun Microsystems Inc.’s co-founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, and filed incorporation papers so they could cash a check made out to Google Inc. In a nod to their geeky roots as children of computer science and math professors, Page and Brin had derived the name from the mathematical term “googol” — a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Later they would raise a total of about $26 million from family, friends and venture capitalists to help fund the company and pay for now-famous employee perks like free meals and snacks.

Even after Google became an official company in 1998, the business continued to operate out of the founders’ Stanford dorm rooms.

Like Google’s stripped-down home page, the company itself had a bare-bones aesthetic. Page’s room was converted into a “server farm” for the three computers that ran the search engine, which then processed about 10,000 requests per day compared with about 1.5 billion per day now. The headquarters were in Brin’s room in a neighboring dorm hall, where the founders and Silverstein wrestled for control of another computer to bang out programming code.

Within a few weeks after incorporating, Google moved into the garage of a Menlo Park, Calif., home owned by Susan Wojcicki, who became a Google executive and is now Brin’s sister-in-law (Google bought the house in 2006). Even back in 1998, there was some free food — usually bags of M&Ms and Silverstein’s homemade bread.

Jump back to today: The company occupies a 1.5 million-square-foot headquarters called the “Googleplex” — as well as two dozen other U.S. offices and hubs in more than 30 other countries. And its search engine — believed to index at least 40 billion Web pages — now runs on hundreds of thousands of computers kept in massive data centers around the world.

The growth dumbfounds Silverstein, whose only goal when he started was to help make Google successful enough to employ 80 people.

“It’s natural when a company gets big that some people become fearful of that,” Silverstein said. “All we can do is to be as upfront and straightforward as possible. We are not trying to be malicious or have some sneaky plan to put you in our thrall. There are some people who will never believe that.”

Apple has issued a Mac OS X patch for the Domain Name System flaw that security researchers agree is one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities on the Internet.

Apple has been criticized for being late with a fix. Some vendors, including Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and various Linux distributors, issued a fix weeks ago.

While Apple was working on its patch, researchers released software that exploits the flaw that IOActive researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered. The attack code was released by developers of the Metasploit hacking toolkit, headed by the infamous HD Moore.

Kaminsky is scheduled to discuss the DNS flaw at the Black Hat hacker convention next week in Las Vegas, but details on how to exploit the vulnerability are widespread.

Sitting (Mac) Ducks

Unpatched Mac users appeared to be sitting ducks for an attack that could redirect legitimate Web traffic to a phishing server.

The DNS flaw now patched by Apple and other vendors is a serious one, according to Graham Cluley, a security analyst at Sophos.

“If exploited, it would allow hackers to poison Internet lookup tables, meaning that even if you typed in the correct name of your online bank, for instance, you would be taken to a malicious forged Web page instead,” he said.

What’s more, he said, hackers could post malicious software updates on the Web and fool legitimate programs into downloading them, thinking they were at the real update sites.

“Some commentators have criticized Apple for taking longer than other vendors in producing a fix — but the most important thing is that a fix is now available,” Cluley said.

“Apple Mac users will be automatically alerted to the availability of new security patches, and would be wise to install them,” he said. “Businesses typically take a little longer to roll out security patches, as they often wish to check that no compatibility issues result.”

A Complicated Threat

The threat emerges from two different issues with the DNS protocol, according to McAfee Avert Labs. DNS primarily uses UDP packets to send questions and receive answers.

A client computer will accept any packet as an answer to its question on three conditions: The packet is coming from the DNS server, the source and destination ports match the destination and source ports of the question packet, and, most importantly, the transaction ID and question match its question.

Complicating matters, when a DNS server replies to a question, it can also include additional information in the answer to make future processes more efficient. Combining the answer-packet spoof with the additional information makes the story more interesting because it makes exploitation easier.

Apple also released a security bulletin to fix at least 17 different security holes in the Mac OS X operating system and other software products late Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. communications regulators voted on Friday to order Comcast Corp to end some of the tactics it uses to manage its broadband network after concluding that they unreasonably restrict Internet users who share movies and other material.

In a precedent-setting decision, the five-member Federal Communications Commission voted by a margin of 3-2 to uphold a complaint accusing Comcast of violating the FCC’s open-Internet principles by improperly hindering peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

Comcast said in a statement that it was disappointed by the decision and was considering all its “legal options.”

PERPIGNAN, France (AFP) - A French youth has been charged with posing online as the star of teen rock band Tokio Hotel to trick young girls into sending him nude photos, police said Friday.

The 18-year-old from southwestern France signed up to a string of online chatrooms mascarading as Tokio Hotel singer and teen heartthrob Bill Kaulitz, striking up relations with young girls aged from 11 to 17.

He convinced several to send him nude photographs, some sexually explicit, which he went on to publish on the Internet.

He was arrested on Tuesday and is to stand trial in the southwestern city of Perpignan, police said.

The German pop group Tokio Hotel released their first album in May 2006 and quickly became a major success in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland.

WASHINGTON - A divided Federal Communications Commission has ruled that Comcast Corp. violated federal policy when it blocked Internet traffic for some subscribers and has ordered the cable giant to change the way it manages its network.

In a precedent-setting move, the FCC by a 3-2 vote on Friday enforced a policy that guarantees customers open access to the Internet.

The commission did not assess a fine, but ordered the company to stop cutting off transfers of large data files among customers who use a special type of “file-sharing” software.

Comcast says its practices are reasonable and the FCC’s so-called network-neutrality “principles” are part of a policy statement and are not enforceable rules.

Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin proposed the enforcement action and was joined by Democratic commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps in voting for approval. He was opposed by members of his own party, commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Taylor Tate, who both issued lengthy dissents.

The commission’s authority to act stems from a policy statement adopted in September 2005 that outlined a set of principles meant to ensure that broadband networks are “widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers.”

The principles are “subject to reasonable network management,” a concept the agency has not explicitly defined.

While the FCC action did not include a fine, it does require Comcast to stop its practice of blocking by the end of the year. The company must also provide details to the commission on the management techniques it has used and to let consumers know details of its future plans.

Martin was particularly critical of the company’s failure to disclose to its customers exactly how it was managing its traffic, saying this action “compounded the harm.”

The Internet is teeming with so much video that searching through it is becoming one of the biggest challenges on the Web.

Video search engines such as Blinkx and EveryZing are among those racing search giant Google to try to solve the problem. Both use speech-to-text and other technologies to make video clips easier to search and view. There’s a lot at stake. The video advertising market is projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, up from $410 million in 2006, researcher eMarketer says.

Search technology can read and analyze text on a website, but the same technology is limited when it comes to video. If a website called “All About Dogs” also offers information about cats, a traditional search engine can figure that out. Not so for video.

Most search engines make educated guesses about the contents of video clips based on the coding used to “tag” or identify them, or by the words other websites use to link to the clips, says Kevin Ryan, global content director for Search Engine Watch, a Web information site.

Google hopes to improve on that. The company has just launched a test of a new video search gadget for its YouTube politician channels. It uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable transcripts of videos. For instance, you can search on “health” to find a clip from John McCain, Barack Obama or many others, and even jump to where those key words appear in the video clips.

Other companies tackling video search:

Blinkx: ‘Snackable’ video

Video search engine Blinkx can take the audio from a video clip, break it down into the smallest distinguishable sounds in any language, and create a transcript of what is being said.

Blinkx also uses the text that appears on screen, such as scores or times displayed during a sporting event, to identify video.

“Video today is very packaged and very linear,” says Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake. “There’s no reason it has to be like that. It can be snackable.”

Truveo: Crawling the Web

Truveo, a video search engine owned by AOL, focuses on “crawling” the Web for video clips. Crawling is the process search engines use to locate media files across millions of websites. Only when a search engine has found and built a list of video clips can users then search for what they want.

One of Truveo’s advantages is that its crawling technology can search for video clips on websites built with advanced Web technologies such as JavaScript and Flash.

While Truveo is also using certain social computing concepts (such as user-generated “favorites” lists) to provide relevant results for video searches, its focus is on building the most comprehensive index of video clips on the Web. “You can’t do anything in video search if you don’t have the video itself,” President Pete Kocks says.

Mefeedia: ‘Social discovery’

Some video search engines are eschewing audio and video analysis in the short term over concerns about whether those technologies are ready for prime-time use.

Mefeedia relies on users to help sort through millions of video clips and TV shows. They can create “channels” or playlists of videos that others can watch or contribute to.

If one of your friends watches a clip on Mefeedia and enjoys it, the clip shows up in your account, letting you know that it might be worth viewing.

EveryZing: Any search engine

EveryZing, like Blinkx, analyzes audio from a video clip and turns it into searchable text. The main difference is that EveryZing focuses on professional content that its clients produce, and uses its technology to “wrap” video clips in data that include the whole transcript of the speech track. Other search engines can then search within the dialogue of video clips without having to invest in their own audio and video analysis technologies.

EveryZing chief revenue officer Stephen Baker says that his company’s software can create transcripts of most professionally produced news programming at an accuracy level above 90%.

Baker believes that as computer processing power gets cheaper, deep video analysis will eventually go mainstream.

He envisions an investor being able to search for every instance of someone like Bill Gates from video clips across the Web in an instant - even if Bill Gates’ name never appears in the title or information associated with the clip.

BEIJING (AFP) - The Beijing Olympics were plunged into another controversy on Wednesday as China announced a backflip on Internet freedoms for the thousands of foreign reporters covering the Games.

China’s decision to reverse a pledge on allowing unfettered web access proved an embarrassment for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which had repeatedly said foreign press would not face any Internet curbs in Beijing.

It was also the latest in a long line of issues to have tarnished the run-up to the Olympics, which start on August 8, following controversies over pollution, human rights and terrorism threats.

Beijing Olympic organising committee spokesman Sun Weide triggered the latest public relations flare-up when he confirmed foreign reporters would not have access to some sites deemed sensitive by China’s communist rulers.

“During the Olympic Games we will provide sufficient access to the Internet for reporters,” Sun said.

However “sufficient access” falls short of the complete Internet freedoms for foreign reporters that China had promised in the run-up to the Games.

Sun specified sites linked to the Falungong spiritual movement, which is outlawed in China, as ones that would remain censored for the foreign press at Olympic venues.

He did not identify any others but reporters trying to surf the Internet at the main press centre for the Games on Wednesday found a wide array of sites deemed sensitive by China’s rulers to be out-of-bounds.

These included sites belonging to Tibet ’s government-in-exile and Amnesty International, as well as those that had information on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in which the military used deadly force to crush democracy protests.

The head of the IOC’s press commission, Kevan Gosper, told AFP early on Wednesday that he would take the matter up with Chinese officials.

“I will speak with the Chinese authorities to advise them of the restraints and to see what their reaction is,” he said.

Australian Olympic team chief John Coates, who is also an IOC member, expressed frustration with China’s Internet about-face, pointing out that the Chinese authorities had gone back on one of their “key” Olympic promises.

“It certainly is disappointing… I think it’s a matter that the IOC will take seriously,” Coates told reporters.

In an exclusive interview with AFP two weeks ago, IOC president Jacques Rogge insisted there would be no censorship of the Internet.

“For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China,” he said.

“There will be no censorship on the Internet.”

The South China Morning Post newspaper quoted Gosper as saying later Wednesday that the IOC knew that some sites would be blocked, and apologised that the foreign press had been misled.

“(Recently) I have also been advised that some of the IOC officials had negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked,” the Hong Kong-based newspaper quoted Gosper as saying in an exclusive interview.

“If you have been misled by what I have told you about there being free Internet access during the Games, then I apologise.”

Gosper said he was disappointed by the developments, according to the South China Morning Post.

“But I can’t tell the Chinese what to do.”

Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom group, said it was surprised the IOC had kowtowed so easily to China’s leadership over web access.

“When China applied to host the Games they promised total press freedom and that must include Internet access,” said Vincent Brossel, the group’s Asia Director.

“What a total humiliation this is for the (IOC President) Jacques Rogge. How can the IOC be so weak and feeble?”

BEIJING (Reuters) - Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive websites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted on Wednesday.

Persistent pollution fears and China’s concerns about security in Tibet also remained problems for organizers nine days before the Games begin.

China had committed to providing media with the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, but journalists have this week complained of finding access to sites deemed sensitive to its communist leadership blocked.

“I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on website access during Games time,” IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said, referring to Beijing’s Olympic organizers.

“I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related,” he said.

Attempts at the main press centre to access the website of Amnesty International, which released a report on Monday slamming China for failing to honor its Olympic human rights pledges, continued to prove fruitless by mid-week.

Other websites, including those relating to the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, are also inaccessible.

Beijing organizers said censorship would not stop journalists doing their jobs in reporting the Games.

“We are going to do our best to facilitate the foreign media to do their reporting work through the Internet,” BOCOG spokesman Sun Weide told a news conference.

“I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil, fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government.”

Reporters without Borders, a Paris-based media watchdog, said it was increasingly concerned that there would be many cases of censorship during the Olympics.

“We condemn the IOC’s failure to do anything about this, and we are more skeptical about its ability to ensure that the media are able to report freely,” the group said in a statement.

SMOG-WATCH

But the admission that the Internet will be partly censored is sure to lead to more criticism for the Olympics host nation, which is already deflecting barbs over everything from the quality of its air to its human rights record.

On Wednesday, Chinese experts said they were working on emergency plans to keep Olympic skies clear, including keeping cars off the roads in nearby provinces, but expected not to need them unless unusual pollution-trapping weather continued.

The city has already banned cars from roads on alternate days under an odd-and-even license plate scheme, suspended some factory production and opened new subway lines to try to clear its notorious pollution.

“The likelihood of needing stronger measures is very small,” said Zhu Tong, a professor at Peking University and leader of a technical group advising Games organizers on air quality.

Slightly cooler temperatures and rain on Tuesday have thinned the haze, but with below-par air quality readings on several days since the emergency measures took effect on July 20, worries remain about athletes wheezing air laced with fumes and dust.

Experts said that given the size of Beijing, the volume of pollutants that flow into the city from other parts of China, and the short time period before the Games open on August 8, there was little more that could be done.

“In this short a time-frame, even if you took all the personal cars off the highway, you might see another 10 percent improvement, but it would be small,” said Staci Simonich, an analytical chemist at Oregon State University who has been studying Beijing’s air quality.

“The best thing that could happen during the Games is to have it rain every night,” she said.

China also has other issues on its mind, including security in the restive region of Tibet, where official media said Chinese police had been mobilized to ensure “absolute security without a single lapse.”

The remote region erupted into rioting in March that sparked protests across China’s ethnic Tibetan areas and brought into focus international criticism of Beijing’s policies on the issue.

The Tibet Daily announced on Wednesday tough policing during the Games on top of a sweeping security crackdown already in place. China is at pains to avoid any shows of defiance by pro-Tibet independence groups that could embarrass the government before a worldwide audience.

San Francisco - Ed Foster, InfoWorld’s The Gripe Line blogger, died this past Saturday of an apparent heart attack. He was 59.

Foster began The Gripe Line as a column in InfoWorld’s print edition in 1993, helping technology users deal with complaints about products, companies, and service providers that proved otherwise unresponsive. He continued this tradition in the online medium as a blogger, still focused on helping readers. Foster had worked for InfoWorld as a reporter, writer, editor, and publication executive for more than 20 years.

“We are all saddened by Ed’s passing but grateful for his 15 years of consumer advocacy in the field of technology products through The Gripe Line column and blog,” said Eric Knorr, InfoWorld’s

eitor in chief. “We will all miss his passion and professionalism.”

Foster’s son Jeff said, “He was very proud of the work he had done and the community he had built here. He was very engaged in what you all had to say, and we had many running instant message conversations about comments or e-mails people had sent. He was an extremely smart man, and he loved to be mentally stimulated, whether it was a good book, an interesting conversation, or one of the many comments you posted that made him look at something in a slightly different way.”

InfoWorld and Foster’s family have asked Foster’s readers to share their remembrances of him at the blog that he cared so deeply about.