Daily Archives: July 17, 2009

A wilderness of mirrors

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From today’s NYTimes..

It is an axiom that “on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog.”

By the same token, it is all but impossible to know whether you are from North Korea or South Korea.

That puzzle is plaguing law enforcement investigators in several nations who are now hunting for the authors of a small but highly publicized Internet denial-of-service attack that briefly knocked offline the Web sites of some United States and South Korean government agencies and companies.

The attack, which began over the Fourth of July weekend and continued into the next week, led to South Korean accusations that the attack had been conducted by North Korean military or intelligence agents, possibly in retaliation for new United Nations sanctions. American officials quickly cautioned that despite sensational news media coverage, the attacks were no different from similar challenges government agencies face on a daily basis.

Cyberwarfare specialists cautioned this week that the Internet was effectively a “wilderness of mirrors,” and that attributing the source of cyberattacks and other kinds of exploitation is difficult at best and sometimes impossible. Despite the initial assertions and rumors that North Korea was behind the attacks and slight evidence that the programmer had some familiarity with South Korean software, the consensus of most computer security specialists is that the attackers could be located anywhere in the world.

“It would be incredibly difficult to prove that North Korea was involved in this,” said Amrit Williams, chief technology officer for Bigfix, a computer security management firm. “There are no geographic borders for the Internet. I can reach out and touch people everywhere.”

This is the back-story to the post by Mark Anderson that I blogged earlier in the week.

Psion founder backs new investigative journalism bureau

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An interesting attempt to address the problem of who will fund investigative reporting if the newspapers go bust. According to this Press Gazette story,

A major new journalism project that aims to be the "counterweight" to the perceived decline of investigative reporting has secured £2m in start-up funding, it was announced today.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism will launch in London in the coming months and claims to be the first organisation of its kind in the UK dedicated to independent public interest journalism.

It will hire a managing editor, two or three reporters and will also fund freelance investigators and researchers. Its aim is to dig out – and then sell – the stories that many news organisations say they can no longer afford to cover in-house.

The not-for-profit bureau has been given the go-ahead as a result of the “extraordinary generosity”of a single donor – the Potter Foundation – which has made the £2m grant.

The foundation is run by David Potter, who made his fortune as the founder, chief executive and now chairman of hand-held computer manufacturer Psion, and his wife Elaine – a former Sunday Times journalist who now chairs the board of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

I hope it works. Wonder what the business model is.

1.5 billion App downloads don’t count — says Google

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From FT.com Tech Blog.

Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.

He claimed that even Google was not rich enough to support all of the different mobile platforms from Apple’s AppStore to those of the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android and the many variations of the Nokia platform.

“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers,” he said.

“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning.

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Well, as Mandy Rice-Davies said…

Rotten Apple

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It’s a rough world out there – as this Reuters report reminds us.

NEW YORK Reuters – Shares of Palm Inc fell more than 3 percent on Thursday after Apple Inc closed a loophole in iTunes that had allowed the music management software to be synchronized with Palms Pre phone.

On Wednesday, Apple released an update to iTunes — which complements the iPod and iPhone devices — meant to fix software bugs and “addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.”

“It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre. As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apples iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players,” said Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr.

Don’t you just love that phrase “addresses an issue”?

So it may be some consolation to Palm stockholders that Apple is about to get it in the neck from Microsoft.

Microsoft is planning to open the first of its planned retail stores next to existing Apple stores this fall.

Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, told partners the news during his Worldwide Partner Conference keynote on July 15. A number of attendees tweeted Turner’s words immediately.

Microsoft officials announced in February that Microsoft was planning to open retail stores but have offered few details since that time as to what the stores would look like or when they’d open. I did hear from some Softies that the stores wouldn’t be clones of Apple’s, and that they’d be more showcases than actual retail outlets.

Turner told Partner show attendees that the knowledge Microsoft gained from running the stores would be “shared with partners.”

According to partners attending the conference, Turner said Microsoft wouldn’t be imitating Apple; it would be innovating with the new stores. Earlier this year, Microsoft officials said the stores would be more about building Microsoft’s consumer brand than distribution.

Microsoft hired David Porter, a former Dreamworks Animation and Wal-mart exec, as Corporate Vice President of Retail Stores earlier this year.