GoDaddy finds sugar daddies

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Timberlake to turn MySpace into online 'Idol'?

For those who live for seeing someone rise from obscurity to reach the heights of temporary fame, seeing "American Idol" once a year just isn't enough.

In any case, it's only on two nights a week. What are you supposed to do with the other five? Pray that Simon Cowell's new show "The X Factor" will somehow be entertaining?

It seems that Justin Timberlake, he who is one of the new purchasers of MySpace, is at one with human feelings.

For, according to the Associated Press, Timberlake's manager, Johnny Smith, said after the purchase that, though the specific format still needs to be worked out, using MySpace as a vehicle for new talent is very much in the plans of Timberlake and Specific Media, the new purchasers.

"Whether it becomes a talent competition or something like that, those are things that we will still flesh out. We definitely want to bring the industry back to MySpace to really look at the talented people that have put their faces there."

This seems like an excellent idea. It seems that half the world now spends its days sitting at desks wearing headphones. They could very easily be sitting in instantaneous judgment over new performers for at least three hours of each of those days.

Perhaps each day of the week could have its own genre. To snap the world into renewed focus, Monday could be rock 'n' roll day, while Wednesday, the so-called hump day, would be a prime candidate for a little R&B.

Saturday, the night that's alright for fighting, would surely be punk day.

Another fine element of this MySpace notion is that Timberlake, unlike some of, say, the "American Idol" judges, is possessed of considerable taste. We might actually see acts that are truly progressive, rather than the strange MAD magazine-cover country figure, Scotty McCreery, who won this year's "Idol."

The new owners say they will hold a press conference on August 17 to announce their plans. After this announcement, office life might experience a radical new musical dawn.

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Extension slurps Facebook contacts into Google+

There are caveats that doesn't make the Facebook-to-Gmail data export process as a single click, but that's how it begins for those who want to bring their Facebook contacts to Google+.

(Credit: Mohamed Mansour)

The biggest challenge to making Google+ a viable competitor to Facebook is that people must reproduce their social graph--their collection of connections--at the new service. But a Chrome extension makes that process a lot easier by automating the extraction of contact information that your Facebook contacts have shared.

The extension, from open-source programmer Mohamed Mansour, is called Facebook Friend Exporter. It's not a simple one-click process, but it's close.

The tool, though, likely won't sit well at the dominant social-networking site. Section 3.2 of Facebook's terms of service states, "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."

The arrival of Google+ has brought new concrete reality to the previously somewhat academic spat in 2010 between Facebook and Google about who owns information about your social-network connections.

Google, which often has championed openness, believes you should be able to extract information about your contacts from the online services you use, and with Google Takeout, you can. Facebook, which sees no particular reason why it should give a powerful rival the keys to its kingdom, disagrees.

Mansour, who by the way also wrote a Chrome extension that lets you cross-post Google+ messages to Twitter and Facebook, said he agrees with Google.

"I am scraping my own data that my Facebook friends allowed me to use and view," Mansour said in a Google+ conversation about the extension. "Facebook doesn't own my friends. I want my friends to be in a place that is easily accessible, extractable, and shareable. And if that results a ban/expulsion/termination, so be it."

The extension cautions users even as it tries to persuade them Facebook's data-export policies are misguided.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

He offers this note of caution, though: "Use at your own risks! From the 30K+ users who used it, no one got a ban notice from Facebook, but I don't guarantee that."

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mansour's extension jumps straight into the fracas by copying the information your contacts have shared with you already on Facebook--name, e-mail address, phone number, birthday, Web site, address--then letting you save it as a spreadsheet file or import it directly into your Gmail address book.

And of course your Gmail address book is the foundation for your social ties on Google+. The service lets you sift through your Google contacts and add them to "circles" such as "friends" or "following," making it easy to send a message to a specific group.

Even though the Chrome extension lets you extract the Facebook contact information, it still can be a lot of work to sort it properly in Google+. If you have 20 friends on Facebook, it's not too big a deal. I have 437, and it's a pain.

The extension doesn't solve the biggest problem with Google+, though: getting people to actually use it. Even when an easy sign-up replaces Google+ beta's hobbled invitation process, you'll still have to convince your Facebook pals to tune into another conversation channel. And people might not necessarily list Gmail addresses at Facebook, making it harder to get in touch over Google+, which of course requires a Google account.

You'll be missing history, too: the photos you've seen and the scads of earlier conversations you've had won't be on Google+ unless people put them there.

But that's going to be a problem with any new Facebook challenger. With more than 15,000 downloads, Mansour's extension apparently already has helped many clear the basic address-book hurdle.

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Boeing, ANA begin flying 787 Dreamliner test routes in Japan

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Fox News reports Twitter hack to Secret Service

A Fox News Twitter feed was hacked and used to publish false items that President Obama had been killed.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Fox News has alerted the U.S. Secret Service that the cable news show's Twitter feed was used today to publish false reports that President Obama had been killed.

The attack apparently was complete about 11 p.m. PT Sunday night, when a tweet appeared that said, "Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th."

Shorly afterward came the first of several Obama-related tweets: "@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July, indeed. President Barack Obama is dead."

Nine hours later, the tweets are still live on the Twitter Web site. The attack was on a verified Twitter account, one that Twitter has verified to belong to a specific person or organization.

Fox News said it alerted the Secret Service, the organization responsible for the president's physical safety. Fox News also is holding Twitter's feet to the fire.

"We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts," said Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital, in the story.

It's possible, though, that Twitter wasn't responsible. For example, an attacker could have acquired a password by breaching Fox News itself, then simply logged on.

Twitter declined to comment beyond sharing its generic advice for keeping Twitter accounts secure.

A group called Script Kiddies claimed responsibility, the BBC reported, but its account has been disabled.

The move is one of a rash of online attacks in recent weeks.

Updated 8:55 a.m. PT with comment from Twitter.

A Fox News Twitter feed was hacked and used to publish false items that President Barack Obama had been killed.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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The delicious irony of MySpace, Zynga, and Owen Van Natta

How's this for irony:

It was less than a year and a half ago that Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of MySpace.

But last week--just as the failed social-networking site sold for a paltry $35 million--Van Natta could have bought it himself for a fraction of his stake in Zynga, the social-gaming phenom that just filed for its IPO and where he's a top exec and shareholder.

Owen Van Natta, chief business officer of Zynga

(Credit: Facebook )

As the San Francisco-based Zynga's chief business officer, he was listed second after CEO and founder Mark Pincus on its S-1 on the list of top management and also serves on its board.

The filing also showed that Van Natta got about $43 million in total compensation in 2010.

That was due to part to his large Zynga holdings, including about 3 million shares he owns outright via restricted stock units that Zynga calls ZSUs, as well as 6.75 million more in options priced at a low $6.43 each.

All told, he has a 1.6 percent stake in the company. That could be worth upward of $325 million if Zynga garners an expected $20 billion valuation. And it could be even more if its public offering pops higher as other recent Internet outings have done.

And that's why when Van Natta arrives at the fancy and exclusive Allen & Company mogul fest in Sun Valley, Idaho, this week, he might want to thank News Corp. digital head Jon Miller--the man who fired him from MySpace.

After the MySpace debacle in February 2010, according to its filing, it appears that Van Natta bounced back quickly to enter into a consulting agreement with Zynga in mid-April via his Luminor Group.

By August, he was hired on full-time by Pincus and also became a director. One reason for getting that plum post, Zynga said, was Van Natta's experience as a longtime Internet exec at Amazon and, more importantly, Facebook.

He left the social-networking giant in mid-2007--where he had served as COO and, later, chief revenue officer--after relations with its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg became somewhat tense.

But that's water under the bridge now; and, in fact, the filing was full of information about the close relationship with Facebook, which is a critical one for Zynga.

And, of course, for Van Natta, who gets the my award for best Silicon Valley recovery of 2011.

Had he stepped up and bought MySpace from his large Zynga proceeds, though, he would have gotten my lifetime achievement award for pure moxie.

Story Copyright (c) 2011 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

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Microsoft signs search pact with China's Baidu

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The secret life of white-space radio

Tim Newton of Neul--the company running the radio side of the white-space trials in the U.K.'s Bute and Cambridge--detailed the engineering challenges of the task when he spoke at the Future of Wireless conference in late June.

His thesis (PDF)--that the radio world white-space systems inhabit is very different to that of classic wireless engineering, and much novel thinking is needed--raised some interesting and important points.

The theory behind white-space wireless is simple. In order to avoid interference, TV transmitters on a common frequency are always geographically distant from each other, leaving the channel unused over much of the intervening land. As TV frequencies are particularly useful--combining good in-building penetration, copious bandwidth, decent range and small antennas--the thinking goes that whole new data services can be rolled out in those gaps, known as white space. To do this, the frequencies need to be carefully interleaved with the TV transmitters and low power used to prevent interference.

The difficult part
It's a powerful concept. The side that sounds difficult--making sure that the white-space systems are properly configured to work alongside the complex interlocking channel allocations of the TV stations--isn't so hard. White-space systems have GPS and every couple of hours interrogate a central database that tells them what frequencies to use: they can also easily refuse to initialize if they detect a strong, unexpected TV station where it's not expected.

White-space radio may solve the country's broadband needs, but it requires some clever thinking.

(Credit: cc Flickr/Frankie Roberto)

The main problem with white space is that despite the maps, it's not white.

In classical radio theory, a receiver tuned to an empty channel picks up random noise that's primarily generated by thermal effects within the receiver, the antenna and the surroundings. Everything that's above absolute zero creates some electromagnetic noise by the random movement of electrons, and it's this very well modeled and understood effect that puts limits on the lowest strength signal you can pick up.

This isn't true for the TV bands in which white-space systems play. Although the transmitter coverage maps for TV stations seem to show large areas of the U.K. blank for each channel, this is only true if you're trying to pick up enough signal to create a watchable picture. Detectable signals turn up much further afield than the maps suggest.

For a start, the TV transmitters themselves are very powerful. Each digital multiplex can be up to 250KW, and there will be six multiplexes per site, with plans for a further two. That's two megawatts from the strongest transmitters. Furthermore, the antennas are perched on top of very tall masts, giving them line of sight to horizons that can be 100km away. Even beyond those horizons, the transmissions refract over the edge of the Earth and can be detected well beyond that limit.

The result is that for almost every part of the U.K., in almost every channel, there are detectable signals from distant transmitters that the white-space system must overcome. And adding to the fun, the local TV transmissions are very strong.

Mixed signals
One of the hardest parts of radio design is preventing very strong signals from mixing with each other and creating internal interference in the initial stages of the receiver. One of the normal tricks for avoiding this is to make the receiver slightly deaf, perhaps increasing the strength of the transmitter it's picking up to compensate, but neither is an option for white-space radio. Thus, the receiver design must be excellent and use top-quality components.

That's rather ironic, as one of the absolute rules for white-space radio is that it mustn't interfere with TV reception--and TVs tend to have some of the worst radio circuits ever perpetrated on the public. Built to a price and with maximum flexibility taking precedence over high performance, TVs are liable to interference from perfectly well-behaved transmitters. That means white-space systems have to use as low a power as possible, even though they'll operate on unused local frequencies.

The final source of noise is gadget-based. All digital electronic equipment emits some radio signals, and various standards exist to minimize the interference this causes. However, there's a lot of it about, as you can easily hear if you hold a radio tuned to a dead channel close to a laptop, network wiring, Wi-Fi router, or other gizmo. Devices such as powerline networks and DSL modems use radio-frequency signals to carry data, and are particularly promiscuous in their emissions.

Again, if you're a TV station or a mobile phone company, you can in general set your transmission level to overcome the low-level interference from all these factors; it's your radio channel. White-space systems can't do that.

Be clever
The answer is to be clever: analyze the noise, find out what's causing it, and work around it. One technique is called kurtotic analysis. In effect, this looks for the characteristic spikes in energy that fingerprint a transmission that may be too weak to decode but is nevertheless strong enough to be a problem.

Digital TV transmissions are very well characterized, and there's a good chance that in the future it'll be practical to mathematically cancel them out in the receiver. Currently, it's too computationally intensive to implement economically, but Moore's Law may fix that.

It's a mark of Neul's confidence in its radio technology that despite this hostile radio environment, it reckons it can cover well over 99 percent of the U.K. population with between 4,000 and 5,000 base stations. A lot depends on the field trials, though: it's not surprising that the first one was in the radio wastelands of the remote Scottish Isle of Bute. The second, in Cambridge, will be more interesting.

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At Bletchley Park, breaking Enigma codes and winning WW II

This is one of just a few surviving photographs of the original Colossus. Based on this and the few others, vintage computer experts and World War II historians have been able to recreate the Colossus machine that helped break the Enigma codes and win the war.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

BLETCHLEY, England--The list of important sites is endless: Omaha Beach, Dunkirk, London, Paris, Toulon. But if you're a real World War II aficionado, you may think of Bletchley Park with special fondness.

This nondescript town about 45 minutes outside London is where famed mathematician Alan Turing led a group of master code breakers in a successful battle against Germany and its once-unbreakable Engima codes.

Over the course of several years, the British government assembled a team and sequestered it here, working on various devices intended to break the codes. In the days prior to the war, the Germans rarely changed the code key for Enigma. But as the war developed, they changed it daily, and sometimes more than that. And that forced the code breakers to find a way to fight back and swiftly.

What that meant was big, sophisticated devices like Colossus, a machine that was purpose-built to take on the daily key changes by the Germans and solve the Enigma codes.

The machines and the work done at Bletchley Park were so secret that not only could those who toiled there not talk about it during the war, but not afterward either. And it's only since the early 1990s that the world really began to understand what Colossus was and the way that it helped the British crack the Enigma codes. I got a chance to visit as part of Road Trip 2011, and being able to see the re-creations of the machines that cracked the Enigma codes was one of the highlights of the project.

Poland had figured Enigma out in 1932 and had in fact fashioned a reconstruction of it. The problem was that in the early days, Enigma's cypher was changed infrequently. But with the outbreak of war, the Germans changed the cypher at least daily. Though the Poles were unable to solve the rapidly changing Enigma code, they transferred their knowledge to the French and British, who promptly put their best code breakers on the job. Those people, whose jobs were so top secret they were not allowed to talk about their work for years after the war, were able to advance the knowledge of the way the Enigma keys were connected to its electrical circuits--something that was not possible without the Polish Enigma machine to work on.

With this, the teams exploited an Enigma weakness, according to the Bletchley Park Web site: "A fundamental design flaw meant that no letter could ever be encrypted as itself; an A in the original message, for example, could never appear as an A in the code," the Web site reads. "This gave the code breakers a toehold. Errors in messages sent by tired, stressed or lazy German operators also gave clues. In January 1940 came the first break into Enigma.

"It was in Huts 3,6,4 and 8 [at Bletchley Park] that the highly effective Enigma decrypt teams worked. The huts operated in pairs and, for security reasons, were known only by their numbers...Their raw material came from the 'Y' Stations: a web of wireless intercept stations dotted around Britain and in a number of countries overseas. These stations listened in to the enemy's radio messages and sent them to Bletchley Park to be decoded and analyzed.

"To speed up the code breaking process, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing developed an idea originally proposed by Polish cryptanalysts. The result was the Bombe: an electro-mechanical machine that greatly reduced the odds, and thereby the time required, to break the daily-changing Enigma keys."

According to Tony Sale, who was the first curator of the Bletchley Park Museum and who spearheaded the efforts to rebuild Colossus--it was destroyed, as was its design documents, after the war--the first information about the machine began to come to light in the 1970s.

"When I and some colleagues started, in 1991, the campaign to save Bletchley Park from demolition by property developers, I was working at the Science Museum in London restoring some early British computers," Sale writes on his Web site, Codes and Ciphers. "I believed it would be possible to rebuild Colossus. Nobody believed me.

"In 1993, I gathered together all the information available. This amounted to the eight 1945 wartime photographs taken of Colossus plus some fragments of circuit diagrams, which some engineers had kept quite illegally, as engineers always do."

And from there the work began--to find a way to re-create the plans for Colossus and then to build a new, fully functional version of the code-breaking machine. And if you take the train from Euston Station in London, or drive your way to Bletchley and visit the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, where the rebuilt machine, and many others used in the battle against the Germans, are kept, you can get a rare view of one of the most important stories in the history of World War II and what it took to defeat the Nazis.

But while you're there, keep an eye for Sale, one of the true heroes of World War II history. Were it not for his efforts and those like him, we wouldn't know much about how the Allies cracked the Enigma code. But you're more likely to find Sale with a screwdriver in hand, tending to George, his humanoid robot. It was featured in a Wallace & Gromit movie, and it was the first-ever walking humanoid robot. It didn't win the war, but with its smile, it will certainly win your attention.

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Microsoft releases Wi-Fi-logging code for privacy check

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Breaking the Nazis' Enigma codes at Bletchley Park (photos)

BLETCHLEY, England--They say that it would have taken at least two more years to defeat the German military had not some of the Nazis' secret codes fallen into the hands of the Allies.

For decades, since 1918, the Germans had been using Enigma cyphers as the core of their intelligence and military communications system. The Enigma was first invented for scrambling financial communications, but while that use never took off, the military saw the promise of the system. For one thing, the Germans thought Enigma was unbreakable.

But the master codebreakers at Bletchley Park, a secret installation about 45 minutes outside London, eventually proved the Germans wrong. Still, it took years to beat Enigma, a machine with "complexity [that] was bewildering," according to information provided on the Bletchley Park Museum's Web site.

This is a rebuild of the famous Colossus Mark 2 machine (left) that finally allowed the code breakers to quickly and efficiently break the daily key. The original Colossus was so secret that after the war was over, it was broken apart and its components destroyed. But because there were 11 surviving pictures of the machine, Bletchley Park museum personnel have been able to build a fully working reconstruction, and visitors to the National Museum of Computing here can see the new Colossus for themselves.

CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman visited Bletchley Park as part of Road Trip 2011. And last year, as part of Road Trip 2010, he visited the U.S. National Security Agency's National Cryptologic Museum in Ft. Meade, Maryland, where many related items such as a collection of Enigmas, are on display. This gallery showcases some items from Ft. Meade that complement what's on display at Bletchley Park.

Photo by Daniel Terdiman/CNET

Caption by Daniel Terdiman

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At retailers, iPad faces new foes

The tablet era has arrived at big-box retailers, which are now setting aside large swaths of floor space previously devoted to traditional PCs.

Best Buy is probably the highest-profile example of this trend. At U.S. stores, it has overhauled--or is in the process of overhauling--display areas. Tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola Xoom, and Hewlett-Packard TouchPad now get prominent placement at stores, rendering the iPad just one among equals.

This is all part of Best Buy's "Tablet Central" strategy. Here's how Bill Seymour, vice president of investor relations at Best Buy, explained it during the company's earnings conference call last month. "We're making a big push in tablets this year...We started rolling out Tablet Central in May. In the beginning of July, we expect it will be in all of our 'big-box' stores," he said.

In fact, this strategy is already obvious at many locations. In the Los Angles area, for instance, when a customer walks into the PC section of some stores, they are greeted by an array of individual displays featuring the Xoom, Galaxy Tab (which both run Google's Android operating system) and the TouchPad (running the WebOS). Walk further into the store and large tables hold a variety of tablets and e-readers from other vendors such as Acer, HTC, RIM, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. And more tablets are on the way, including Toshiba's Thrive.

Best Buy's online home page for tablets. Mirroring its physical stores, Best Buy is now emphasizing tablet brands beyond the iPad.

(Credit: Best Buy)

Aside from giving the iPad much-need competition, what does all of this mean? Even casual observation makes it apparent that a pretty radical change is afoot. As more retail real estate is occupied by tablets, proportionately less is devoted to traditional personal computing devices, such as the clamshell laptop.

And Best Buy likes what it sees so far. "We've been able to sell virtually everything that we're getting as this category continues to generate excitement," said Mike Vitelli, president of Best Buy Americas, when queried about tablets by an analyst in last month's earnings conference call.

Two large tables devoted exclusively to tablets and e-readers at a suburban Los Angeles Best Buy. Individual displays from HP, Motorola, and Samsung also get prominent placement on the floor.

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

But will other brands be able to replicate the iPad's phenomenal success? To date, a lot of Best Buy's success with tablets is due to iPad sales, said Richard Shim, an analyst at DisplaySearch.

Best Buy is "hoping that these other players can bring in the same sort of business as the iPad did," said Shim. HP is even sending their own people to about 100 select stores in the U.S. in an aim to boost sales of the TouchPad, according to Shim. "This is something that has to happen. The brands have to become more involved in the retail experience because the sales associates aren't going to be well-educated on every product," he said.

Staples is going through similar changes in the U.S. Stores are devoting more floor space to tablets like Motorola's Xoom and Samsung's Galaxy Tab. And Staples does not sell the iPad. So, the sales numbers at Staples for tablets in the coming months may say more about the success--or lack of success--of tablets beyond the iPad.

All of the above doesn't change the fact, of course, that the iPad is still far and away the best-selling tablet. And it also doesn't change the fact that tablet suppliers need to do everything in their power to draw attention away from Apple's tablet.

Apple said it sold 4.69 million iPads in its most recent quarter. While Samsung has shipped about 850,000 tablets worldwide in its most recent quarter and Acer about 800,000, according to DisplaySearch.

"The other question is, would some of these guys be better served launching their own retail stores?" said Shim, referring to the Apple store, a big part of Apple's success story. "It's a big risk and big investment," said Shim but may be necessary to "take charge of their destiny," as Apple has done.

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To fight iPad, HP reaches for Russell Brand

What do you do to dethrone the iPad?

Well, you could simply make a device that is so obviously better that people stream to your doors like raccoons to the garbage.

If that doesn't quite work, you could release a good product, call it the TouchPad, and tell people that the iPad isn't your competition at all because you're really after the enterprise customer.

Just in case that doesn't convince everyone, reach for one more resort: make them laugh.

I am grateful to the Silicon Alley Insider for revealing that HP has, indeed, gone for the laughs. HP, which has managed to create one or two very good ads in its time, has reached for Russell Brand to make a series of short videos, each one about a different aspect of its new, non-iPad-competing tablet.

Now some people find Russell Brand very, very funny. He does manage to express the essence of straight-faced medieval English bawdiness, without sounding overly intelligent.

However, as you run through these various videos, you must decide whether this is the Brand of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" or the one that managed to remake "Arthur" into oblivion.

The relatively uninitiated will enjoy the Touch to Share feature--the ability to touch the screen with your phone and download data. Others might be less amused that in the multitasking video, there is actually a butler joke.

Will these videos lift the perception of the TouchPad among those normal consumers who are thinking of disappearing into the iPad eco-world?

Oh, wait, the TouchPad's target is the enterprise customer, right? That's why Russell Brand is advertising it.

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