Internet

An open-source approach to tracking stolen laptops

SEATTLE--Imagine your laptop is stolen.

Set aside for a second the likelihood that if it was you wouldn't be able to read this story and think instead about how you might go about tracking it down.

There are existing services, such as LoJack, that are designed to help find purloined laptops by identifying the IP addresses where they are subsequently used and through other assorted methods.

But according to a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington, the price you pay for utilizing such services is a loss of privacy--as well as a reliance on a corporate third party to take care of you.

That's why the team has come up with its own alternative, which it is calling Adeona, the name for the Roman goddess of safe returns.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world's first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn't require a corporate intermediary.

The team is also developing a version of its software for iPhones, though it isn't ready for public use yet.

To Kohno, the danger associated with commercial laptop-tracking services is that it's never possible to know for sure that someone at a company that makes such software wouldn't exploit the company's possession of your personal information--and access to what's on your laptop--for personal gain. Or, he said, that information could be subpoenaed in court cases. … Read more

Sarah Lacy takes on Gnomedex

SEATTLE--Since there is significant attendee crossover between the Gnomedex conference here and the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, it's safe to say that when Sarah Lacy took the stage Saturday, a lot of the audience had some pretty strong memories of the last time they'd seen her.

Last March, it was Lacy whose SXSW keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended up in a Twitter-fueled mutiny by the audience. Many on hand in Austin had felt she conducted that session in an overtly flirty and self-promotional style that left little room for participation from a crowd eager to interact with the young billionaire.

With that recent history, then, the packed house on hand for Lacy's Gnomedex talk Saturday, "What happens when you get what you want: The growing blogosphere angst," was keyed up and wondering what kind of fireworks might erupt this time around.

And fireworks there were, though they came from uber-blogger Robert Scoble, who at one point during the session oddly got up out of his seat near the front of the auditorium and marched toward the back of the room to tensely confront author and entrepreneur Geoff Livingston.

But more on that later. … Read more

The history of I Can Has Cheezburger

SEATTLE--How does one build an empire on pictures of cats with silly, misspelled captions?

As most fans of the Internet now know, I Can Has Cheezburger has become one of the most popular sites online. Its daily collection of LOLCats is the source of endless humor, and you can be pretty sure that someone in your office is reading the site and chuckling to themselves right now.

But how did it happen?

At the Gnomedex conference here Friday, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked about the genesis of the site, and some of the milestones it has gone through as it has become not only a household name but the vanguard--if not the originator--of one of the most popular memes ever to hit cyberspace.

To Huh, the "Lolean Timescale" started several years ago, back when LOLCats were a much edgier phenomenon. Back then, a LOLCat was as likely to have a snarky, sexual theme as not. You may remember the famous, "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate" LOLCat that began to make its way across the Internet a couple of years ago. … Read more

Journalists, residents getting same Net in Beijing

Tests at the main Olympic press center and on other connections around Beijing have shown that both journalists and regular Beijing Internet users are getting less restricted access than usual.

That's according to the OpenNet Initiative's assessment of online censorship after the first week of the Games.

After journalists spent a lot of energy complaining about their inability to reach many Web sites without the use of a proxy, the international and Beijing Olympic committees both seemed to respond, and many restrictions disappeared.

ONI notes that the bulk of the opening occurred for foreign-hosted Chinese-language Web sites, while &… Read more

Viewing a space shuttle launch from high in the sky

One of the first things I did on my Road Trip 2008 project this summer was report on the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It was great to watch the shuttle land, but I was a bit disappointed I hadn't been able to make it to Cape Canaveral just a couple of weeks earlier to watch the launch.

Well, it turns out that all I would have needed to do to see the launch would have been to fly by. At least, that's how it seems, given a video that's … Read more

Report: BitTorrent laying off 22 percent of staff

Things aren't going so good over at file-sharing wunderkind, BitTorrent.

According to a report on Valleywag Wednesday, BitTorrent is laying off its entire sales and marketing department, 12 people out of the company's entire staff of 55.

"The immediate cause of the layoffs," according to Valleywag, is "a failure to sell the Torrent Entertainment Network, BitTorrent's attempt at an online media store, to Best Buy for a rumored $15 million."

The story goes on to state that a source told Valleywag that the Torrent Entertainment Network sale fell apart due to the FCC … Read more

Can you 'report freely' on Olympics with Net restrictions?

The International Olympic Committee has acknowledged that it acceded to Chinese government demands that some Internet censorship be kept in place during the Olympics, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Nevermind that IOC promised journalists could "report freely" from the games. Still, is this really a problem for reporters?

Long story short: this isn't much of a problem. Journalists arriving in Beijing without regularly being stationed there have already spent however much money to get to China and stay in hotels. They can afford a VPN service, which will completely circumvent the government restrictions--that is, if their … Read more

Why Baidu outperforms Google in China

The question of why Baidu continues to outperform Google in the world's largest internet user-base has fueled much discussion. I explore business practices and cultural factors that may have fueled this advantage in an article for China International Business this month.

But while Baidu leads now, there's a possibility that Google's strength in the "cloud computing" world may lead to gains in the long run.

Check out the article here.

Writing 'bass ackwards' to defeat censorship in China

Some people whose posts may otherwise have been deleted by censors in China have taken to writing backwards in an effort to defeat keyword-searching authorities.

"Bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally," write Juliet Ye and Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal.

This is a particularly clever solution in … Read more

Olympics preview: Beijing's Internet censorship, surveillance

Sinobyte commenters have raised two good questions about Internet freedom during the Olympics, set for August 8 to 28 in Beijing. I'm going to give the best kind of answer available for each: an educated guess.

I had written about "free Wi-Fi," which hasn't yet really started working, but is slated to be available during the games in some key areas of the city.

Commenter DangerousOffender asks: How "free" will the access be? Will users be able to access the entire internet, or will it be censored? I was referring, of course, to "… Read more