AllThingsD » Sting

Con Artist Starred in Sting That Cost Google Millions

Thomas Catan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:30:35 +0000

Wearing leg irons and guarded by federal agents, David Whitaker posed as an agent for online drug dealers in dozens of recorded phone calls and email exchanges with Google sales executives, spending $200,000 in government money for ads selling narcotics, steroids and other controlled substances.

Over four months in 2009, Mr. Whitaker, a federal prisoner and convicted con artist, was the lead actor in a government sting targeting Google Inc. that yielded one of the largest business forfeitures in U.S. history.

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Battle of the Bands: Tech Firms Compete for Rock Stars

Ben Worthen — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:44:08 +0000

Shortly before Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison gave his keynote speech about a new cloud-computing effort at his annual customer conference here in October, a surprise guest came on stage: Sting.

“I’m very impressed by the great technology produced by this company,” the superstar singer told 46,000 techies, for whom he performed later that night.

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NPR's Vivian Schiller in Better (Digital) Days: The Full D8 Video

Kara Swisher — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:21:42 +0000

Today, as the left and right continue their epically exhausting battle for hegemony, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned after a series of borks–including a sting video in the public radio’s top fundraiser insulted the Tea Party activists and the fumbled firing of commentator Juan Williams.

Oh dear.

Well, the former New York Times exec was pretty good at moving NPR into the digital age, at least.

In fact, BoomTown interviewed Schiller at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference about the digital future of NPR, which is pretty bright actually.

She talked about prospects for high-quality journalism and the ways the public radio unit could help create a more powerful network of many stations.

Here’s the full D8 video of the Schiller session, as well as a very funny spoof video she brought about some of the more way-out digital initiatives for NPR below it:

[ See post to watch video ]

"Beyond the Search Box": The White Pleather Honeypot Smackdown

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:53:20 +0000

Perusing AOL’s leaked damn-the-journalism-full-speed-ahead business plan, BoomTown was a little late to the Microsoft Bing event this morning called “Farsight: Beyond the Search Box.”

But things had certainly been cooking with gas when I walked into the meeting room at the University of San Francisco, which the organizers had decked out in white nubby rugs, white pleather couches and those white egg-shaped chairs found only in 1970s decor.

Schweeet!

First up was well-known investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, poo-poohing Microsoft’s prospects of ever making money in search.

“It’s difficult to produce a new search company,” said Thiel, noting that even with a growing market share it’s curtains for Bing, given the huge fixed costs. “As far as I can tell, it’s still not breaking even.”

Ouch!

By the way, Thiel sold semantic search engine Powerset to Microsoft for upward of $100 million in 2008 to help it, you know, get ahead in search.

Way to insult your money-bearing hosts!

Then, moderator Vivek Wadhwa harangued the panelists from Google, Microsoft and Blekko in the session “Who Will Win the Spam Wars?”

And they say I’m a snarky moderator! Wadhwa is snarktastic!

Wadhwa did not like any of it–not crappy content sites that sully Web search, not the efforts the companies were making to fix things, not the vision the trio had of the future.

And, by the way, Microsoft was not ever going to make money off all the company’s efforts.

Way to insult your hosts! I like this event!

Of course, what everyone was interested in was a smackdown between Google and Microsoft, given that the search giant accused the software giant of stealing its results today.

In an excellent, if exhaustive, post by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google said Bing was cheating by lifting its search results, which Google said it had proved via a “honeypot” sting operation.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” Google’s Amit Singhal told Search Engine Land. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

The very presence of the word “honeypot” in any story about search algorithms is superb, in my book, even though this “controversy” is pretty much a he-said-he-said geek-off.

Google’s Matt Cutts kept up the cheater pressure at the Bing event, in a short debate with Microsoft’s Harry Shum, who was not having any of it.

“It’s not like we actually copy anything,” he said.

Translation: Actually, we do borrow, just like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevii, resulting in a social networking behemoth that will soon take over all search and make this whole debate moot.

Microsoft is rubber, Google is glue. And Facebook, which was not present at the search event, is the real sticky honeypot.

iLife Gets Better; Just Don't Ask It to Find a Face

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:08:03 +0000

While Apple‘s Macintosh computers are known for handsome hardware design, what really makes the Mac distinctive is its built-in software. That software includes a suite of multimedia programs, called iLife, which is preinstalled, free, on every new Mac.

The iLife software has integrated photo, video, music and Web-design applications meant for average, nontechnical consumers. It is better, in my view, than any comparable offering on the Windows platform, even those that cost extra.

This week, Apple (AAPL) released the latest version of the suite, called iLife ’09, and I have been testing it for a while. It includes five programs: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD. The new version will be bundled on new Macs, and current Mac owners can upgrade to it for $79.

[ See post to watch video ]

This latest iteration isn’t a radical revision of iLife, and I wouldn’t say that it’s a must-have upgrade for current Mac owners. But three of the programs — iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand — have significant new features that make them more appealing and useful.

In particular, iPhoto now has the ability to detect and identify faces in your photos; to identify and map the location where they were shot; and to directly post sets of photos to, and synchronize them with, the popular online services Facebook and Flickr.

I focused my tests on iPhoto’s sexiest new feature — face recognition. It worked OK, but it wasn’t as good as I had expected from software made by Apple.

GarageBand, a powerful but easy tool allowing nonprofessionals to mix and produce music, now offers beautifully produced video lessons in how to play the two most popular instruments: guitar and piano. There are some free lessons built in, but you can also buy, for $5 each, lessons from famous artists such as Sting and Norah Jones.

In iMovie, you can now do precision editing of clips. You also can insert one clip in the middle of another by simply dragging and dropping; insert animated maps into travel movies; and apply handsome themes that can make a home movie look like, say, a scrapbook. There’s also a new tool that stabilizes jerky footage, like video shot from a moving car, although Apple warns that this process can take hours.

For me, however, the most important improvements in iLife ’09 are in iPhoto, Apple’s program for organizing, editing and sharing digital pictures. The top two are face recognition and geo-tagging, the ability to tag a photo with its location. Neither of these features is unique to iPhoto. For instance, the Web-based version of Google’s (GOOG) Picasa photo software has face recognition, and Flickr, a Yahoo (YHOO) online service, has location tagging. But Apple has enabled them in iPhoto in its typical handsome, easy manner.

There are two new views of your photos in iPhoto ’09. One, called Faces, organizes all the photos in which faces have been identified. You click on a thumbnail bearing a person’s face and get an expanded display showing all of the photos identified as including that person.

The second, called Places, shows a Google map with pins in the places where the locations of your photos have been identified. Click on a pin, and see a display of all the photos shot at that location.

Face recognition takes several steps. First, iPhoto analyzes your photos to pick out the faces, which are then shown enclosed in a rectangle when you click the new “name” button. You then are prompted to type in a name under the rectangle identifying each face. Once you’ve identified the same person in multiple photos, iPhoto begins to identify that face in any additional photos. If you bring up a picture of a person you’ve identified, and click “confirm name,” iPhoto will show you other pictures it thinks include the same person, and ask that you confirm its suggestions.

In my tests, on two different Macs with thousands of photos, face recognition worked most of the time. But I was too often disappointed. In a surprisingly large minority of cases, iPhoto failed to detect the presence of a face, even when it was large and clear, or to correctly identify faces it did detect, even after I had named or confirmed the same face in dozens or scores of other pictures.

The program sometimes confused men and women, and in a few cases even claimed animals or inanimate objects were people. It rarely detected faces shot from the side, even if they were sharp and obvious. The program also was slow to analyze newly imported photos, or to synchronize name tags already entered on Facebook, a feature Apple touts.

The Places feature worked much better, automatically recognizing the location of pictures taken from devices with built-in GPS tagging, like Apple’s own iPhone, and optionally showing a map when you click on a photo. It was also easy to manually enter a location for an entire “event,” or group, of photos taken at one time.

I still like and recommend iPhoto and iLife. But, in my opinion, the new face-recognition system isn’t up to Apple’s self-proclaimed high standards, and isn’t reliable enough to justify an upgrade all by itself.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Macworld '09: Garageband "Learn to Play," "Artist Lessons"

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:43:31 +0000

Macworld keynoter and Apple SVP Phil Schiller returns to the stage to explain Apple’s (AAPL) Garageband ’09. Our team was challenged to help people learn to play a musical instrument and they came through, says Schiller. Garageband now offers a feature called “Learn to Play” which offers not just nine basic lessons for guitar and piano, but “Artist Lessons” from the likes of John Fogerty, Norah Jones and Sting. Basic lessons, the first nine anyway, are free. Artist lessons are $4.99.

Schiller moves on quickly, adding that iLife ’09 will also feature updates to iWeb. It will ship at the end of this month for $79. Free with the purchase of a new Mac.

MacWorld 2009 Keynote Photos: GarageBand 09

View photos at SmugMug

Macworld '09: Garageband "Learn to Play," "Artist Lessons"

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:43:31 +0000

Schiller moves on quickly, adding that iLife ’09 will also feature updates to iWeb. It will ship at the end of this month for $79. Free with the purchase of a new Mac.

MacWorld 2009 Keynote Photos: GarageBand 09

View photos at SmugMug