Coop's Corner

George Stephanopoulos

(Credit: ABC News)

"I can't remember a debate in which the only memorable moment was the audience's heckling of a moderator."

That's the opening line of Frank Rich's eminently entertaining essay in Sunday's New York Times on the recent Clinton-Obama debate.

Rich obviously missed the ruckus over Sarah Lacy's ill-fated interview of Mark Zuckerberg last month at the South by Southwest conference. That episode was well-chronicled elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Lacy wasn't at her best that evening and a crowd of nerds jumped ugly when their patience ran out. What followed was a week full of phony "bitchmeming" with the usual suspects flapping almost nonstop about the horror, the horror of it all.

Well, the world survived somehow (though really, some of you guys need to get a life). I still think Lacy got a raw deal. What's more, I wonder how many of those tut-tutters from the blog commentariat pushed away from their computers to pay attention when ABC co-anchors, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos turned the recent presidential face-off into an unadulterated idiot-fest?

It was some kind of spectacle. The day after the debate, Obama rightly noted that it took 45 minutes before he and Clinton even began talking about a single issue that matters to the American people. "Forty-five minutes before we heard about health care, 45 minutes before we heard about Iraq, 45 minutes before we heard about jobs, 45 minutes before we heard about gas prices," he said.

Gibson and Stephanopoulos were so out of touch with what's going on in America that the post-debate reviews skewered their fatuous line of questioning. (Truth be told, I was this close to tossing a slice at the screen in disgust--but no way was I going to waste good pizza because of those clowns.)

Anyway, it's too bad that neither Gibson nor Stephanopoulos are geeks. In the aftermath of the Lacy-Zuckerberg encounter, there also was constructive discussion about how best to engage an audience. And that's where Twitter commanded recognition as a real-time tool of two-way communication.

Based on what the respective camps are saying, this is likely going to be it for the Clinton-Obama road show. The next televised debate will be between McCain and whoever gets selected at the summer Democratic convention. The anointed interviewers for that occasion will have an opportunity to include the public as part of a two-way conversation. If Gibson and Stephanopoulos do get another crack at prime time, they can redeem themselves.

At least the technology is available to help if they bother to log on.

Everyone remembers their first computer. Well mine was a PCjr and I don't care how history remembers it. The piece of junk stole my heart.

I wouldn't push the analogy too hard, but your first computer's a lot like your first love in one respect: years later, the memory does not fade with the passing of the seasons.

IBM PCjr: They don't make 'em like that any more.

So it was that I was reading Jonathan Zittrain's excellent new book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It (more about that in a future post), when I paged across his disquisition on the early PC era and got pulled back in time.

I missed out on the hobbyist fad of the late 1970s and early '80s. But once I got a job and could scrape together enough money, I was desperate to learn what all the fuss was about. I still remember the day, 20 years ago today, when I marched into the local ComputerLand, plunked down $1,200, and walked out with an IBM PCjr. What a machine: 512K of RAM, a 5 1/4-inch internal floppy drive with 360K of storage and an 8088 Intel chip that ran at 4.77Mhz. It didn't matter that the machine caused more trouble than it was worth--IBM pulled the plug a year later--I really became fond of that miserable hunk of plastic.

Maybe it was because the Junior caused me so much grief. I wound up screwing around with the machine day after day, taking pieces apart and then making a hash of putting them back together the right way. In the process, I received the equivalent of a crash course in personal computing. Even if the real pioneering work had taken place several years earlier, you still felt present at the creation. The computer industry was still in an early state of formation and chaos was everywhere. Booting up the PCjr the first time and watching it cough and whirr until it came alive--man, that was something to behold.

What about you? Any equally treacly love stories about your first PC? Do share.

(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--It turns out al-Qaida's leader and his cohorts aren't the biggest threat to our cybersecurity. You are.

Six years ago, Osama bin Laden represented the nightmare scenario for the computer security establishment. But more immediate cyberdangers lurk on the horizon. Experts attending the RSA conference that began here today say it's you--Mr. & Mrs. Computer User--who keep goofing up.

In fact, they contend, the future of cybersecurity hinges less on a latter-day version of spy-versus-spy against shadowy terror groups than on a more serious effort to instill best practices. Listening to their heeding was something akin to the scene in the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray repeatedly wakes up to the same morning.

Security gurus have long urged the business world to turn network security into part of the corporate DNA. The message is not fully getting through. And now we're seeing the predictable results.

After listening to Symantec's John Thompson's morning keynote, I later kidded him about purposely scaring the hell out of people. He was a good sport about my joshing but pointed out that the information security landscape is increasingly punctuated by cases of data theft. He backed that up by reciting a litany of worrisome stats from his company's latest Internet security threat report. Truth be told, it makes for grim reading.

Symantec CEO John Thompson

(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

Among the report's highlights:

• 65% of the new code being released into the market is malicious

• The U.S. was the top country of attack origin in the second half of 2007

• The education sector accounted for 24 percent of data breaches that could lead to identity theft.

• Government was the top sector for identities exposed, accounting for 60 percent of the total

• Theft or computer loss resulted in the most data breaches that could lead to identity theft

• The United States had the most bot-infected computers worldwide

If the statistics are accurate, rank-and-file computer users are far from internalizing the security mantra. What's more, the findings suggest it will be quite some time before most people treat computer security as more than an afterthought. In the meantime, of course, Thompson didn't preclude the possibility of a terror or state-based organization launching a big cyber attack. But he believes the more likely danger to the nation's infrastructure will emanate from a different quarter.

"The threat landscape has changed," he said. "When people used to talk about the "Big One," they were thinking about that in the context of an attack on the infrastructure itself. That's still possible but less probable today because attackers have shifted to the information itself. They're much more stealth-like. Before, they wanted to become obnoxiously visible. Now they don't. They want to quietly penetrate defenses so they can sell what they steal in what's become a growing underground economy."

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff

(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

(He's got a point. Symantec's report found that bank accounts are the most commonly advertised item for sale on underground economy servers, accounting for 22 percent of all activity tracked.)

In years past, Thompson and other computer security executives have pushed the idea of making cyber-security as familiar to most people as the fire prevention campaign underwritten by the government in the 1960s and 1970s. Considering the amount of money Uncle Sam is spending on cyber-security these days, that's a pipedream.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who also presented a keynote on Tuesday, offered litte indication Washington was about to ride to the rescue. In remarks during his prepared speech and subsequent press conference, Chertoff offered a dutiful recitation of what he described as the President's interest in shoring up the nation's digital security.

But despite Chertoff's repeated commitment to doing the right thing - including a call to arms inviting Silicon Valley's best and brightest technologists to come to Washington to work on cyber-security - I wonder how many industry skeptics he'll win over. Until recently, DHS couldn't get a cyber-security director to stay in what essentially was a figure-head job much longer than a year. Off-the-record interviews with people familiar with the goings-on there have described the situation to me as a bureaucratic mess.

DHS finally staffed up by putting in Greg Garcia, a former official with the Information Technology Association of America trade organization, as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications. More recently, Rod Beckstrom, an author and entrepreneur best-known for starting business collaboration software maker Twiki.net, was in charge of directing a national cybersecurity center that operates inside DHS.

Give Chertoff credit for being candid about where DHS has come up short. He said the government needs to reduce its (literally) thousands of network access points to around 50. At the same time, Chertoff wants his department to faster detect and analyze computer anomalies. A big part of that will involve a revamp of U.S. CERT's early warning system

"Even giving an adversary one bite at the apple before we've figured out the meta data or (digital) signature is one bite too many," he said.

In the end, however, money talks and you-know-what walks. The feds only have a $115 million budget to work with. Chertoff's department has requested $192 million for the new fiscal year but that's still doing it on the cheap. By comparison, we spend $720 million in Iraq each day.

On the eve of the RSA security conference, there's a showdown in the offing between "Old Europe" and U.S. search operators. Earlier Monday word leaked about a European regulatory plan to press search engine providers to dump personal search data after six months.

(Credit: CNET News.com)

Barring the unforeseen, it's likely the European Commission will look kindly upon the plan. This would be quite a big deal, setting the stage for a continent-wide challenge to the way big search engine companies set procedures handling log deletion and browser cookies.

Until now, privacy advocates haven't gotten very far convincing search companies to drastically curtail the length of time they retain data. For instance, the argument made by Google is that keeping log data around can keep you safe, help prevent fraud, and improve search results (using the argument that "better data makes for better science").

That all may be true--though I've known more than a few security experts who argue otherwise--but this is less a matter of computer science than of public policy. And it's not a fight the search engine companies are going to win. Can you see some congressman campaigning back in the home district for reflection on the campaign plank, "What's good for Google is good for all the rest of us?" I don't think so.

On its public policy blog, Google sounded less than thrilled with the news, although it boiled any bitterness out of its official reaction.

We believe that data retention requirements have to take into account the need to provide quality products and services for users, like accurate search results, as well as system security and integrity concerns. We have recently discussed some of the many ways that using this data helps improve users' experience, from making our products safe, to preventing fraud, to building language models to improve search results. This perspective -- the ways in which data is used to improve consumers' experience on the web -- is unfortunately sometimes lacking in discussions about online privacy.

The Working Party's findings also stated that IP addresses should be treated as personal information, with the full weight of data protection laws. Based on our own analysis, we believe that whether or not an IP address is personal data depends on how the data is being used.

The findings are another important step in an ongoing dialogue about protecting user privacy online -- a discussion in which Google will continue to be engaged. It's also a debate in which we hope our users will participate.

Google figures that it's already met privacy advocates' demands by reducing to 18 months from 24 months the length of time it stores private data. I imagine Microsoft, which similarly retains data for 18 months and Yahoo, which keeps data for 13 months, feel the same. They can't be thrilled with what's going on because it presents a threat to their Internet business. Unfortunately for them, there's not a really good counter-argument. (Here's a good primer News.com assembled on the companies' respective privacy policies.)

Greg Sterling of SearchEngineLand.com offered a quote to Bloomberg that was spot on:

"Today's decision may threaten "the golden goose" of the broader business of Internet advertising, which uses customers' online records to offer personally targeted ads, Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview."

That's why you can expect search engine companies to fight as hard as they can, enlisting support from political and business allies. But when it comes to privacy, most people are less concerned with the stock price of big tech powerhouses than they are in keeping their personal data safe.

A journalist's best friend? Maybe, one day.

(Credit: Twitter)

After the derision that greeted The New York Times' blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I'm probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.

Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters--including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch--but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.

I don't pretend to have come up with a statistically representative list. Call it my weekend science experiment. What's more, some people may have crossed me up by hiding behind pseudonyms. Truth be told, I only changed my "coopeydoop" handle to "Charles Cooper" on Saturday after realizing it made searching for me on Twitter that much harder. So, apologies in advance if I inadvertently lumped anyone in with the wrong list.

Out of the 55 names I randomly came up with, 15 were found on Twitter while the remainder were missing in action. When I pinged one of the reporters asking why--sorry, names of the innocent are being withheld--here's what he answered:

"I don't have a Twitter account, because I think it's silly," the answer came back. "Twitter is lame."

OK, but my guess is that by year's end, most of the folks on the holdout list will get with the program. Not because it's necessarily an elegant system--I'm keeping my pet list of Most Needed Improvements on the service if any of the Twitter folks is interested. Rather, it's a question of self-interest. News often breaks on Twitter before it hits blogs. And companies are paying attention to what comes over the transom. For instance, Mike Arrington's Comcast novella over the weekend did not go unnoticed by the company's monitors.

"Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages."

You're going to see more of this in the weeks and months ahead. More than anything else, self-interest will decide the question for the Fourth Estate. As TechMeme's Gabe Rivera twittered a few days ago, resistance is futile.

The Twitterers
Michael Arrington, Techcrunch; Charles Cooper, CNET; Caroline McCarthy: CNET; Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal; Tom Foremski, SiliconValley Watcher; Ina Fried, CNET; Saul Hansell, The New York Times; John Markoff, The New York Times; Om Malik, GigaOm; Duncan Riley, Techcrunch; Dan Farber, CNET; Jim Kerstetter, CNET; Sara Lacy, BusinessWeek; Elinor Mills, CNET;Maggie Reardon, CNET; Stephen Shankland, CNET; and Dan Terdiman, CNET.

The Holdouts

George Anders, the Journal; Mark Boslet, San Jose Mercury News; Anne Broache, CNET Networks; Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek; Ben Charny, Dow Jones; Don Clark, the Journal; Elizabeth Corcoran, Forbes; Don Clark, the Journal; Cliff Edwards, BusinessWeek; Benny Evangelista, San Francisco Chronicle; Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet; Deborah Gage, San Francisco Chronicle; Jim Goldman, CNBC; Dan Goodin, The Register; Rob Guth, the Journal; Quentin Hardy, Forbes; Miguel Helft, The New York Times; Mark Hendrickson, TechCruch; Rob Hof, BusinessWeek; Michael Kanellos, CNET; Rich Karlgaard, Forbes; Verne Kopytoff, San Francisco Chronicle; Matthew Karnitschnig, the Journal; Tom Krazit, CNET; Brian Krebs, The Washington Post; Martin Lamonica, CNET; Adam Lashinsky, Fortune; Declan McCullagh, CNET; Stefanie Olsen, CNET; Therese Poletti, Marketwatch; Benjamin Pimentel, Marketwatch; Mike Ricciuti, CNET; Eric Savitz, Barrons; Erick Shonfeld, TechCrunch; Jon Swartz, USA Today; Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat; Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal; Wendy Tanaka, Forbes; Ashlee Vance, The Register; and Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News.

Oops. The original post lumped Tom Foremski and Saul Hansell with the wrong group (though Saul writes that he doesn't really use the account much.) Also, Benjamin Pimentel is now with Marketwatch. Sorry guys.

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is twisted.

Twisted in a brilliant, kiss my tuchas kind of way.

Wolf Blitzer, eat your heart out.

(Credit: Loren Feldman)

Here I am this morning, sitting in front of the computer with my earphones on, laughing my ass off. My wife walks over and she sees me cutting up over a rooster bouncing around on screen. Of course, she's not hearing Feldman's sarcastic voice-over in a hilarious lampooning of a Shel Israel video interview on Fast Company.

Feldman, who heads a Web video production company in New York, probably upsets a lot of people with his posts, but I think he's one of the freshest voices in digital media. It's a lot of inside baseball about the tech business but newbies to his shtick should leave any tender sensibilities at the door. This dude is raw...big time. (Check out Feldman's "People who should be Jewish" video riff. Steve Jobs will hate it, but it's inspired.)

It may not be Wolf Blitzer, but it's one hundred times more entertaining. The best thing about Feldman? He's got the cojones to upset the prissy assumptions of the TechMeme A-listers. Every now and then he leaves a verbal fart in the room and leers into the camera for effect.

Seriously.

Here comes my Sunday morning rant. This industry has always been a lot of fun to write about. But when it comes to conversations over future directions in technology, these days good humor is in short supply. I'm sure money has something to do with it. A lot of people who have big bets obviously have a vested interest in how things are going to turn out. But there's also a lot of passion even if you don't have any personal skin in the game. So it is that Twitter may be the most revolutionary advance in digital communications or the biggest waste of time since the hula hoop. FriendFeed may mark a major breakthrough in "conversational platforms" or "more hyped yawn."

I'm not smart enough to predict how this is going to turn out. Still, it's quite amazing to watch the opinion-making mandarins freak out on cue when someone has the temerity to put forward a counter-argument to the conventional wisdom. (As I write, they're burning Nick Carr at the stake for his take on Billy Bragg's Saturday op-ed piece in The New York Times.

Wonder how they'd react to Feldman growling about how big business is being "duped by this user-generated crap and how Andrew Keen was right about everything." That's not a popular point of view. Then again, he doesn't a damn what they think. And that's why he's got me hooked.

Google has been caught up in a controversy over anti-Semitic videos that have been circulating on YouTube.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany has gone to court to force the video-sharing site to permanently purge the files, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. The paper quotes Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council, saying he believes Google was culpable for "aiding and abetting racial hatred and discrimination."

Should there be limits to what can be found on YouTube?

This question is especially freighted with extra historical baggage in Germany, where the Holocaust occupies a front row in the nation's historical consciousness. And as much as it breaks my heart to say, I think the Central Council is making a mistake.

In the U.S., hate groups figured among the earliest of the early adopters. They quickly figured out how to exploit the Internet to spread their message and use the medium to raise money. More than half a century after the Holocaust, one might have hoped for better. Then again, people don't really change that much from one generation to the next. The only difference is the quality of the technology at their disposal.

But in Germany, incitement to racial hatred crosses the legal red line. And that's why YouTube finds itself in the cross hairs. German television last year carried a report in which it was stated that, among other racist works, Internet viewers could watch a Nazi propaganda film called Jud Suess on YouTube. I watched Jud Suess years ago in college. The Nazis intended the movie to reveal the depravity of Jews. Instead, the paradox is that Jud Suess is a powerful weapon against racism. It offers compelling video testimony about that particularly insane mix of evil and absurdity that characterized the narrative of the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945.

If other, more current and more graphically horrifying videos have begun circulating on YouTube, would that really surprise you? Not me. When racists get their hands on high technology, you wind up with a high-tech-savvy racist.

But Google shouldn't get hung out to dry. Instead of being on the receiving end of a lawsuit, aren't there more sensible, if not more calibrated ways to figure out the next step? I don't have any quick answer to the question. Let's get a conversation going and let me know how you think the sides should proceed.

Why does AOL have a thing for acquiring companies with silly names? (Last month, it bought widget maker Goowy.

My colleague Dan Farber weighed in earlier Thursday on whether Bebo can "save" AOL, a question that remains impossible to answer in the near term.

Truth be told, I've compiled a stack of old magazine articles since the turn of the century (I love saying that phrase) detailing the "challenge at hand" for, first, the merged AOL Time Warner and then Time Warner, which dropped AOL from its moniker in 2003. At a certain point, however, you have to wonder: why bother?

After the merger with Time Warner, Steve Case and his henchmen at AOL made out quite nicely. But nearly everybody else, including millions of investors, got screwed in what subsequently became reviled as the most idiotic dot-com deal in history.

And so with the Bebo news, we're once again back to asking whether AOL can be fixed. It's sort of like putting lipstick on a sow's head, at this point.

CEO Jeff Bewkes may be an accomplished executive--as was his predecessor, Dick Parsons--but he'd have better luck cleaning up the Augean stables. AOL has been a huge stinker, and nothing management comes up with has stopped its slow state of decay. Too many opportunities have been squandered, too many shifts in technology missed.

Don't look to the corporate M&A types for a way out. These guys always come up with the same tired prescriptions, but they can't buy their way to success. Before today's announcement, management had spent more than $1 billion on acquisitions to revive AOL.

There isn't much, so far, to show for their labors. The New York Times recently described the dysfunctional corporate culture at AOL, where shouting matches regularly break out. If that's not a telling harbinger, what is?

At a certain point, you have to ask whether throwing good money after bad is really the best idea. It's time for Time Warner to give up a failed experiment.

Update at 10:37: Over at All Things Digital, Kara Swisher has a insightful take on what AOL actually is getting for all those shekels:

According to the several sources who were privy to Bebo's financials, for example, Bebo's revenues for 2006 were only $7 million with $3 million in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). In 2007, the results are still small, with $20 million in revenues and $5 million in EBITDA.

Using 2007 results, that means AOL paid a handsome 42.5 times revenues and an incredible 160 times EBITDA. AOL might assert that it makes Bebo a bargain, given (that) Facebook got valued at 50 times revenue when it got that $15 billion valuation from the $240 million investment from Microsoft last year. Still, Facebook has a huge presence in the U.S. and is growing strongly in Europe, including being just ahead in Bebo's strongest territory in the U.K.

Projecting outward, the company estimated--remember, these are not actual numbers, but a best guess by Bebo execs--it would have $50 million in revenue and $10 million in EBITDA in 2008; $117 million in revenue and $48 million in revenue in 2009; and $193 million in revenue and $92 million in EBITDA in 2010.

If Kara's guesstimate is close--and she's a reliable reporter--then AOL is paying through the nose for another Web 2.0 property that has a way to go before ever justifying the original purchase price. Assuming it ever does.

Read more of News.com's coverage: "What Bebo means to AOL"

Oscar Robertson: Few were better.

(Credit: Thebigo.com)

Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have his "Oscar Robertson" moment this week?

Bear with me on this one for a moment.

In case you missed it, Sunday's New York Times sports section carried a wonderful first-person retrospective piece by Robertson, one of the greatest basketball guards in the history of the game. But when he played at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1950s, Robertson was anything but a household name.

That changed after he lit up Madison Square Garden for 56 points in front of the New York media. Unfortunately, the post-game news conference was less stellar. A 19-year-old sophomore from the sticks, Robertson was uncomfortable being on center stage. I'll let him take the narrative from here:

I'm afraid I wasn't a very exciting interview, giving mostly monosyllabic replies and identifying my first state high school championship as my biggest thrill to date. One writer stayed until after all the others had left, and introduced himself as Milton Gross of The New York Post.

"You know, if you're a star, you have to learn how to talk to the media," he said.

"But I don't know them," I replied.

He said he would be willing to give advice on dealing with the press--an offer I was happy to accept--and he became a trusted friend and confidant for the rest of my college and professional careers.

Lesson learned, Robertson subsequently mastered the knack of telling his story to the press with the best of them.

So it was that I found myself wondering about Zuckerberg and his famously press-shy ways. Robertson's column ran the same day as Zuckerberg's now-famous (or perhaps infamous?) interview with Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Festival. Enough ink's already been spilled diagnosing the metaphysical implications of that affair. But this much is clear: If Zuckerberg's handlers are smart, they need to sit down with their meal ticket for a frank one-on-one.

Whether he likes it or not, Zuckerberg's being thrust into the public sphere by virtue of who he is and it's time he got over being shy about dealing with strangers.

As long as Zuckerberg refuses to turn over the CEO reins to somebody else, he is going to find himself fair game for the press' fascination with his personal odyssey as the dropout billionaire boy wonder, etc. So what's the deal with the monosyllabic grunts and the similarly brief--but equally frustrating--verbal evasions? Jeez, the guy went to Harvard for a few semesters. I'm sure he can do better.

If Facebook's CEO is to realize his aspirations, the hoodie, aw shucks routine has to go. The silver lining in the Sunday interview debacle was the magnified public attention to all things Zuckerbergian. For a fair chunk of Sunday and Monday, TechMeme morphed into a 24-hour chronicle of his doings at South by Southwest. You can't buy that sort of coverage these days.

Facebook doesn't have the cyber footprint of a Microsoft--at least not yet. But if Zuckerberg learns how to tell the corporate story to developers as well as the media, he'll turn into the most potent marketing weapon Facebook could ever muster.

And there's no reason he can't. After all, Bill Gates once was a nebbish, too.

All Zuckerberg, all the time.

(Credit: TechMeme)