Instagram will soon begin serving ads.

That’s only what you’d expect from the company that Facebook paid $1 billion for in the spring of last year, just weeks before going public.

“We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business,” reads a blog post from the company. “In the next couple months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you’re in the United States.”

The post acknowledges that photo and video ads aren’t what the average web user has come to expect from the company’s mobile image-sharing service, but if you hadn’t quite realized it, this is the way the online world works. In the beginning, Twitter and Facebook weren’t ad machines either, but eventually, social media must pay for itself. And the pressure for profits only rises when a company sells shares to the public — which even the an idealist like Mark Zuckerberg is eventually forced to do.

The news from Instagram comes just as Twitter as preparing to release the details of its IPO, which could hit Wall Street as early as next month.

Facebook’s IPO was a bit rocky in the beginning, but it has slowly turned things around as it began to convince Wall Street that it could make money from mobile advertisements. Instagram is just another step along this road.

The company says the ads will come from brand names that users do not “follow” on its service, but users will have the option of “hiding” an ad and telling the company what they don’t like about it. The ads will “start slow,” but that just means it will eventually speed up — at least to the point of profit.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661449/s/3206d2f4/sc/21/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbusiness0C20A130C10A0Cinstagram0Eads0C/story01.htm

Twitter has filed to go public, saying it will sell shares under the name TWTR. The IPO will initially seek to raise up to $1 billion.

In its first public disclosure of financial performance, Twitter revealed it is growing revenue fast but losing money. In a registration filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, known as a “form S-1,” Twitter says its revenue increased to $316.9 million in 2012, from $106 million in 2011. Its net loss for 2012 was $79 million.

In the first six months of this year, according to the filing, it pulled in $253.7 million in revenue, up from $122 million in the first six months of 2012. But its losses appear to be widening. The company lost $69 million in the first six months of this year, not far from its total loss for all of last year.

The company said it had 218.3 million users per month, on average, for the three-month period ended in June. That’s up from 85 million users per month in the same period last year.

Before going public, the company must first wait through a three-week quiet period. After a “road show” that markets shares, Twitter and its underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs, will set a price for them. Twitter stock won’t be available to the public, then, until November.

Twitter had reportedly been planning to raise $1.5 billion with an offering of 50 million to 55 million shares priced at $28 to $30 each. Its 2013 revenue had been estimated at $545 million by eMarketer, set to rise to $807 million in 2014.

Twitter said more than 65 percent of its advertising revenue came from mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. Because mobile advertising revenue is growing much more quickly than desktop advertising revenue in developed markets like the U.S., some believe Twitter has as a significant advantage over rivals like Facebook, which gleaned just 41 percent of ad revenue from mobile in its most recent quarter.

Twitter’s IPO filing marks its first release of revenue and profit figures, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the company’s financial health and growth prospects.

More broadly, the filing sets the tone for one of the most anticipated IPOs in the current tech boom, matched only by the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn. Enthusiasm for Twitter shares could encourage more tech companies to go public rather than wait or sell themselves to larger competitors. Among the companies rumored to be weighing an IPO this year are enterprise storage firm Box; big data outfit Palantir; payment provider Square, which shares co-founder Jack Dorsey with Twitter; marketing software company HubSpot; and discount retailer Gilt.

Launched in 2006 as a way to circulate text messages among groups, Twitter quickly expanded beyond the California tech cognoscenti to become a global phenomenon, with everyone from Hollywood celebrities to world political leaders to political dissidents trading messages via the web, smartphone apps, and SMS messages. But Twitter repeatedly hit scaling and stability problems and was slow to monetize its popularity.

That helps explain why Twitter’s IPO will be much smaller than Facebook’s $16 billion offering in May 2012.

Twitter’s lower revenue did help it in one regard: Since the company’s annual sales are below $1 billion, it was able to submit a draft version of its S-1 to federal regulators back in July and was then presumably able to incorporate the feds’ confidential feedback into the final S-1 filed today. Typically, draft filings and SEC feedback are submitted in full public view, but under the recently-enacted JOBS Act smaller companies like Twitter may keep the process private.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661449/s/3206e334/sc/21/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbusiness0C20A130C10A0Ctwitter0Efiles0Efor0Eipo0E20C/story01.htm

Oddly enough, doodling has even been the subject of academic research. In 2009, Jackie Andrade, psychology professor at the University of Plymouth conducted a study to find out whether drawing hinders or improves attention to a primary task.

Forty participants were tested and the results concluded that doodling aids concentration by reducing an individual’s capacity to daydream whether in the workplace or the classroom. The doodlers in the study retained about 29% more information than non-doodlers.

So CNN spoke to author and doodling evangelist Sunni Brown about how sketching at work can make you more productive and whether we’re seeing the dawn of a doodling revolution.

CNN: When did you first make your doodling discovery?

Sunni Brown: I’ve been going into working environments for several years now to teach visual thinking and how to solve business problems through a combination of images, words and thought experiments. What I noticed was a complete lack of competency in all working cultures — except for design, engineering and some creative consulting firms –in visual language.

Because like so many adults today, I, too, was raised in a culture that placed virtually no value on visual language but eventually I learned the importance of developing my own, and now I’m trying to help people to improve their visual literacy and articulation.

CNN: Why should doodling be important to us?

Sunni Brown: People have been doodling for over 30,000 years from cavemen and women to cultures that developed pictographic languages. Simple visual language has always offered a way to share and pass on information and history.

In today’s business world, I refer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, author and professor Clayten Christensen, and Frank Gehry, architect and creator of the Guggenheim Museum, as examples of prolific doodlers who use doodling to think and to solve problems.

CNN: How can doodling be of use in the workplace?

Sunni Brown: My definition of doodling is to make spontaneous marks with your mind and your body in order to help yourself think. So if you look at it through that lens, what it does for people is a variety of things.

Some of those benefits include increased creativity, because you’re liberating your mind from traditional, linear and linguistic thinking and moving into a more organic thinking space, heightened information processing, heightened information retention and the ability to view content from a variety of different angles.

CNN: Can doodling actually help someone’s concentration levels?

Sunni Brown: By physically drawing shapes, images and letters, we are inviting our minds to slow down and to focus on that experience.

Doodling absolutely influences and aids concentration as well as elevating information retention, since it allows people to bring what’s happening right now into a more saturated and sensory experience.

CNN: Could doodling work for a younger generation, who may struggle to concentrate?

Sunni Brown: In the digital age, concentration is a rare commodity. We are constantly having to keep up with vast amounts of content from various platforms and by doodling people can associate that information with a visual aid.

It also encourages insight that you wouldn’t otherwise have. When we are problem solving, we usually have mature ways of thinking about a problem and when people switch into doodling-mode they find themselves looking at that problem from a different angle.

CNN: How can doodling help us to be successful?

Sunni Brown: There’s a number of ways that doodlers can deploy sketching and drawing to be successful.

One way is to maintain focus on what is happening. People doodling are harnessing energy that would otherwise just dissipate, which makes it possible for them to stay present with whatever is happening and relieve boredom. Another way is to allow access to different insights.

By doodling, you’re connecting neurological pathways with otherwise disassociated pathways in the brain, making spontaneous marks with your body to help your mind access insights.

CNN: Can doodling help solve problems in the workplace?

Sunni Brown: People use doodling to think through a problem. These can be called “infodoodles,” using a combination of drawings, shapes and letters to formulate and display an idea. Apple founder Steve Jobs is a great example of this.

He used whiteboards and physical movement to illustrate his concepts, according to people he worked with.

I would call him a “kinesthetic doodler.” He was a person who seemed to think better while making spontaneous actions with his body.

CNN: Is the business world opening up to this?

Sunni Brown: That is my fervent prayer, but leadership and management need to drive it and they need to cultivate organizational cultures that recognize its value and apply it in a way that makes sense for that business context.

Most of us have preconceived ideas about doodling. There’s a lot to overcome. I have seen working cultures that get it and its use is a no-brainer for them, and there are areas where people are embracing it whole-heartedly.

In my view, people are far more open to it than they ever were but there’s still a long road ahead before it’s fully understood and applied.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/03/business/doodlilng-in-a-meeting-drawing/index.html?eref=edition

Clancy’s publisher, the Penguin Group, said the author died in Baltimore on Tuesday. The written statement did not indicate the cause of death.

Clancy’s 1984 novel “The Hunt for Red October” propelled him to fame, fortune and status as a favorite storyteller of the American military. Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin brought the Cold War drama to life in the big screen in 1990.

“Spending time with Tom prior to shooting was the best part of that whole experience for me,” Baldwin said Wednesday. “Tom was smart, a great story teller and a real gentleman.”

Harrison Ford took the big screen role of CIA analyst Jack Ryan in “Patriot Games and “Clear and Present Danger.” Ben Affleck was cast as Ryan for “The Sum of All Fears.”

“I’m deeply saddened by Tom’s passing,” said Penguin executive David Shanks, who worked with Clancy on each of his novels, quoted in the company’s statement. ”He was a consummate author, creating the modern-day thriller, and was one of the most visionary storytellers of our time. I will miss him dearly and he will be missed by tens of millions of readers worldwide.”

“Command Authority,” his last book, is due to be published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in December, the company said. Putnam is an imprint of the Penguin Group.

“It was an honor to know Tom Clancy and to work on his fantastic books,” said Ivan Held, president and publisher of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. ”He was ahead of the news curve and sometimes frighteningly prescient. To publish a Tom Clancy book was a thrill every time. He will be missed by everyone at Putnam and Berkley, and by his fans all over the world.”

A Baltimore-born former insurance agent, Clancy was known for writing meticulous thrillers focusing on political intrigue and military tactics and technology.

Seventeen of his 28 books appeared on the New York Times best-sellers list, according to his website. Many of them reached the No. 1 spot.

His writings also provided the inspiration for the “Rainbow Six,” “Ghost Recon” and “Splinter Cell,” video game series.

His writing gained him a loyal following within the armed forces in the United States and abroad, giving him inside access that frequently informed the plots of his books. But in a 2003 CNN interview, Clancy said he was always careful not to reveal classified information or sensitive details of how the elite troops he often wrote about operated.

“I’ll never decide for commercial reasons to put something in that endangers our national security. You just can’t do that,” he said in a 2003 CNN interview. “There was one thing, I discussed with a friend of mine in the Royal Navy. I told him a story I knew, and he said, ‘Well, Tom, you may never repeat that, as long as you live.’ And I haven’t.”

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/02/us/tom-clancy-obit/index.html?eref=edition

Kate Endress was living the startup dream. Two years out of Stanford’s business school, she was running a website, Ditto, that offered a way of trying on glasses without actually trying them on, and the operation was on the verge of raising its first round of venture capital.

Then came the lawsuit. Wellpoint, the owner of 1-800-Contacts and Glasses.com, sued Ditto for patent infringement. “Just like that, we were faced with an ‘injunction’ threat from a $25 billion competitor,” Endress remembers. “I was terrified our years of hard work were for naught.”

Her account of Ditto’s ongoing tangle with a patent-wielding behemoth arrives as part of a new survey published by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, a not-for-profit organization that seeks to promote a more open exchange of ideas in the world of digital technology. The study details how the startup world is affected by so-called patent trolls — companies that use patents merely to attack other companies — and as you might expect, it’s not pretty reading.

For the study, conducted earlier this year, Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Colleen Chien surveyed about 300 venture capitalists and venture-backed startups. Seventy-five percent of the VCs said their portfolios had been on the receiving end of patent actions, and that rate rose to nearly 90 percent among VCs that deal specifically in digital tech. The rate among individual startups surveyed was much lower — 20 percent — but the impact on those that were targeted was sometimes severe.

The current patent system can severely hamper the growth of software startups here in the U.S., but as this new study arrives, Congress is considering changes to the system, and some startups are finding new ways of fighting back. In their ongoing effort to stay alive, Endress and Ditto are taking a rather counterintuitive approach to the Wellpoint suit. They’ve enlisted the help of someone derided by his critics as a patent troll pioneer.

In her account, Endress alleges that Wellpoint filed suit with a patent that it purchased only after seeing Ditto’s tech — tech for which Ditto itself was seeking patents. “I can only speculate that they fear that the patents we filed (which take years to issue!) will become a weapon towards them down the road,” she writes as part of the Open Technology Institute study. “But if they would have just called me before filling a lawsuit against us, they would know we applied for those patents for defensive purposes, not offensive ones.”

In other words, she insists that Ditto is only interested in defending its turf, not in attacking competitors, as Wellpoint has done. This is a common stance in Silicon Valley — Twitter made such a policy explicit last year — but it only goes so far in deterring suits.

In response to questions from WIRED, 1-800-Contacts blasted Endress’ claims. “Like most other companies operating a business that depends on technology, 1-800-Contacts purchased this patent for a reason — the patent potentially covered what the business was doing so the patent either needed to be licensed or purchased,” the company says, pointing out that the patent was granted in 2006, though the company purchased it in 2012. “Ditto could have licensed or purchased the same patent, but chose to ignore it and launched their website with an infringing virtual try-on feature anyway.”

1-800-Contacts also says it tried to reach a licensing agreement or some other “amicable” arrangement with Ditto. “But instead of responding to our offer, Ditto has spent time and energy engaging in online discussions and issuing an inaccurate and misleading press release,” the company says.

Such “he said-she said” sniping is typical of patent cases. Not so typical is the strategy Ditto has undertaken to sustain its fight against the suit. The company has called in Erich Spangenberg, the founder of IPNav, an outfit that says it’s in the business of “full service patent monetization.” His opponents describe him as “the most notorious patent troll in America.”

When Ditto found its back against the wall, Endress writes, she and Spangenberg made a deal. Spangenberg offered to handle Ditto’s case and pay for all legal expenses in exchange for equity in the company worth about half of what Endress believed it would cost Ditto to fight the case solo. She says her initial reaction to Spangenberg was the same derision felt by many in the software industry. But in her situation, his offer made good business sense.

“Erich Spangenberg sees this as an opportunity to get equity in great startups for doing what he does best. So until the day that we have a properly functioning patent system, his solution is my best option,” Endress writes. “When a huge company puts a target on your back, sometimes you need to powerful friends to have a shot at surviving.”

Before Endress connected with Spangenberg, she says, she went so far as to explore selling Ditto. But would-be buyers were valuing the company at $3 million to $4 million less because of the lawsuit — a big hit for a startup still trying to find its feet. In April, says Ditto co-founder and chief technology officer Sergey Surkov, the company laid off four of its 15 employees to reduce its spending and conserve money for legal expenses. (Endress is on her honeymoon, according to Surkov, and wasn’t available to comment for this story.)

Under such duress, no one should fault any single business or individual for the choices they make in a patent fight, says Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “To ask someone who’s facing a patent troll to do what’s best for the world, which is to fight back or make a lot of noise, is often asking them to do something that’s against their short-term interest,” Samuels says. “The systemic problem is different than the problem that any one company finds itself facing.”

Samuels and a colleague blogged about the suit against Ditto shortly after it was filed, describing the case as an abusive attempt to squelch competition. But 1-800-Contacts contends that the EFF is biased because three of its advisory board members work for the law firm representing Ditto.

For casual observers who don’t follow intellectual property disputes, the whole idea of a system that enables patent trolling is still astonishing. In the mythology of American innovation, inventions aren’t just words and diagrams buried in legal documents. They’re things we make. Patent-trolling seems to directly violate the basic premise of inventing: People who don’t make anything suing people who do.

But the system also seeks to protect startups. In theory, the ability of startups to secure their ideas while still in the design stages should give them the breathing room they need to make the thing they envision.

Ironically, startups themselves sometimes benefit from the very system that supposedly thwarts their ability to innovate. If a startup successfully secures a patent, it now has an asset that it can leverage, sometimes selling it to firms that could then turn around and use that patent to troll others. In such a marketplace, the argument goes, non-practicing entities, or NPEs — aka patent trolls — effectively act as market makers that allow startups to quickly realize real cash value from their intellectual property.

The Open Technology Institute’s survey found that about 5 percent of startups were able to realize such value from their patents, but that rate that pales compared to those that suffer from patent actions taken against them. The study’s results suggest that any such revenue theoretically provided to startups by their own patents is then offset by the chilling effect that patent lawsuits — or even the fear of such suits — can have on companies still in their fragile early stages.

“Though partnering with NPEs to monetize patents can be beneficial to companies as well,” Chien writes, “the benefits do not appear to offset the harms.”

In Congress, patent reform has become one of those rare causes to generate genuine bipartisan support. The SHIELD Act and the STOP Act are designed to curb frivolous lawsuits and reform the system to encourage doers rather than suers. But waiting for Congress to act on anything is clearly bad business strategy. Until then, the patent system will likely continue to breed strange bedfellows.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661449/s/31098ac1/sc/21/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbusiness0C20A130C0A90Cpatent0Etrolls0Eversus0Estartups0C/story01.htm

A year ago, Apple seemed unstoppable. Its share price topped $700. Its cash horde eclipsed the GDP of many countries. Pundits mused about a $1 trillion market cap with a straight face.

But nowadays, Wall Street sees Apple very differently — and this morning’s much-hyped iPhone announcements from the tech giant did little to stop its year-long descent into stagnation. Apple’s gold phones, 64-bit processors, and fingerprint sensors barely budged the needle on Wall Street, as shares fell more than 2 percent from the day’s opening price of $506.20.

The great slide began last September. By April of this year, Apple had shed nearly $300 billion in value, and shares bottomed out below $400. As WIRED wrote at the time, bearish sellers had plenty of reason to doubt that the post-Jobs Apple could still dazzle. Yet Apple CEO Tim Cook did little to reassure investors. As Samsung handsets gained market share and prices on Android phones fell, investors doubted Apple could keep charging the premium prices that kept its margins high.

Worst and most obvious of all, Apple failed to feed the insatiable consumer appetite for the new. As has been widely reported, its new iPhone announcements today mark the end of the longest gap in new hardware releases since at least the launch of the iPad.

As that clock ticked, shares fell or stayed flat. Even the preview of iOS 7, the most radical redesign of Apple’s mobile operating system since its initial release, failed to mollify Wall Street.

If the market’s immediate reaction is any indication — and in the era of high-speed trading, it usually is — the iPhone 5C and 5S unveiled today still don’t go far enough. As the new phones were unveiled and tech writers cooed, investors reacted with a collective “meh.” After the presentation came to a close to the strains of Elvis Costello — no iWatch or new Apple TV in sight — the company’s share price began to trickle lower.

Notably, Apple spent a lot of time at its event highlighting the high-end advances of the new 5S, dashing quickly through the less expensive 5C by comparison. Such a choice makes sense if the goal is to keep investors distracted from the margin-eating potential of less expensive phones. But the extended focus on geeked-out new features didn’t do the trick.

Though the faster, sleeker, more powerful phone is unarguably cool, the steps forward are still incremental. And incremental isn’t what the world expects from Apple. Steve Jobs’ death wasn’t an event of worldwide significance because he could craft better spec sheets. Apple’s brand is synonymous with vision, a corporate identity that was once its greatest asset. Now that asset has become a liability.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661449/s/310eef65/sc/5/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbusiness0C20A130C0A90Capple0Eannoucements0C/story01.htm

Bach won on the second round of voting, beating off the challenge of five other contenders for the top job in the Olympic organization.

He has been elected for an initial eight year term to succeed the 71-year-old Rogge, who has stepped down after 12 years in charge.

Bach paid tribute to Rogge as he addressed IOC members following his election. “You are leaving a great legacy and a strong foundation on which we can continue to build the future of the IOC,” he said.

“This is an overwhelming sign of trust and confidence,” added Bach, who is the ninth president in the 119-year history of the IOC.

Ukrainian athletics great Sergey Bubka, Singapore’s Ng Ser Miang, Wu Ching-Kuo of Taiwan, Switzerland’s Denis Oswald and Richard Carrion of Puerto Rico were the unsuccessful candidates.

Bach achieved a majority in the second round by polling 49 votes. Carrion was the next best with 29. Former world pole vault champion Bubka received just four.

“I want to win your confidence too,” said Bach, referring to his beaten opponents. “I know of the great responsibility of being president of the IOC.”

The 59-year-old Bach is a lawyer by profession, but represented West Germany at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, winning a gold medal in fencing’s foil discipline.

He was one of four IOC vice-presidents, having been a member since 1991, serving during this period on the anti-doping commission.

An outspoken critic of doping, Bach commissioned an academic report, published in July, which alleged that like their East German neighbors, West German athletes had also been involved in malpractice during the Cold War and before the unification of the two countries.

His first task in succeeding Rogge will be to steer the IOC through the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, which has been dogged by controversy of Russia’s new anti-gay legislation, concerns over budget and fears of warm weather.

Under rules adopted in by the IOC in 1999, which ended lifetime terms for its delegates and presidents, Bach will initially serve for eight years, with the possibility of one further term of four years.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/10/sport/olympics-ioc-president-bach-rogge/index.html?eref=edition

Jordan Linn Graham and Cody Johnson had been married just more than a week when an argument allegedly escalated to a case of second-degree murder.

If convicted, Graham would face life in prison. She had an initial court appearance Monday.

According to a criminal complaint, Graham recently told a friend she was having second thoughts about marrying Johnson.

The complaint said the couple argued the night of July 7. Upset, they decided to go hiking in Glacier National Park in Flathead County, Montana, where they continued to fight.

Graham told police that her husband grabbed her by the arm. She turned and removed it.

“Graham stated she could have just walked away, but due to her anger, she pushed Johnson with both hands in the back and as a result, he fell face first off the cliff,” the complaint read.

His body was discovered several days later.

According to the complaint, Graham changed her story about what happened several times.

Graham’s attorney, Michael Donahoe, declined to comment on the case.

“Anytime we asked Cody how the relationship was he always said it was good,” friend Cameron Fredrickson said. “It’s a complete shock to me, Cody is one of the greatest guys I’ve had the opportunity to know.”

According to the complaint, Graham reportedly told a friend she planned to talk with Johnson about her reservations on July 7. The same day, Graham sent the friend a text message saying, “Oh well, I’m about to talk to him.”

The friend responded, “I’ll pray for you guys.”

Graham wrote back: “But dead serious if u don’t hear from me at all again tonight, something happened.”

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/11/us/montana-husband-death/index.html?eref=edition

Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data.

The researchers, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, found that the number generator appeared to have been built with a backdoor — it came with a secret numeric key that could allow a third party to decrypt code that it helped generate.

According to Thursday’s reports by the ProPublica, the Guardian, and The New York Times, classified documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appear to confirm what everyone suspected: that the backdoor was engineered by the NSA. Worse still, a top-secret NSA document published with the reports says that the NSA has worked with industry partners to “covertly influence” technology products.

That sounds bad, but so far, there’s not much hard evidence about what exactly has been compromised. No company is named in the new allegations. The details of the reported modifications are murky. So while much of the internet’s security systems appear to be broken, it’s unclear where the problems lie.

The result is that the trustworthiness of the systems we used to communicate on the internet is in doubt. “I think all companies have a little bit of taint after this,” says Christopher Soghoian, a technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The latest documents show that the NSA has vast crypto-cracking resources, a database of secretly held encryption keys used to decrypt private communications, and an ability to crack cryptography in certain VPN encryption chips. Its goal: to crack in a widespread way the internet’s security tools and protocols.

David Dampier, the director of the Center for Computer Security Research at Mississippi State University, says it’s “wrong” for companies to add backdoors. But he added that the latest revelations of the government’s alleged decryption capabilities aren’t surprising.

“I think that no encryption created by anyone is going to protect you from everyone. The stronger the encryption the harder they are going to work to decrypt it,” he said. “I don’t care what company is selling you encryption software. Whatever they are going to sell you, it can be decrypted. There’s nothing that is infallible.”

The reports talk about the NSA’s attempts to exploit software bugs, break codes and accumulate encryption keys — this is all stuff that most security experts expected the surveillance agency to be doing. But here’s the most unsettling part: A leaked excerpt from the agency’s 2013 budget request talks about the NSA working with “US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products designs.” The document explicitly says: “These design changes make the systems in question exploitable.”

Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, calls the latest leaks disturbing. “We went through this debate with the Clipper Chip, and it was clear where public opinion stood,” he says, referring to a backdoor technology the NSA wanted to install in all encryption two decades ago.

“If these claims are true, and the NSA introduced backdoors into global security standards, this seems like a clear perversion of democracy,” Castro added. “This just further erodes the competitiveness of U.S. tech companies. In particular, I think this enlarges the scope of companies that will suffer backlash since cryptographic standards are often embedded in hardware.”

Castro wrote a report last month predicting that Snowden’s PRISM revelations could cost the U.S. cloud-computing industry as much as $35 billion over the next three years as companies shied away from U.S. internet service providers, which are said to be providing government access to their servers.

You’ll hear much the same from Dave Jevans, the founder of Marble Security, an enterprise mobile security provider and the former chief executive of IronKey, He says that it “would be extremely bad” for a tech company to give the government a backdoor.

“It may not be the death knell,” he added, referring to Crypto AG, a Swiss encryption companies alleged to have rigged their machines for the NSA in the 1990s. ”They’re still around, but barely.”

But not everyone thinks that U.S. competitiveness will be hit. The documents talk about the NSA working with foreign companies too. “I don’t think there’s going to be any direct major impact because there aren’t any other countries that are cherubs in all this either,” says Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research.

The number generator found in 2007 — called Dual_EC_RNG — was hardly a technical triumph. It was clumsy and slow and never widely used, but it is supported in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Microsoft has said in the past that it does not provide the government with “direct and unfettered” access to customer data, and it says much the same today. “We have significant concerns about the allegations of government activity reported yesterday and will be pressing the government for an explanation,” the company said Friday.

But the doubt is still there. And that’s the problem.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661449/s/31010117/sc/15/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbusiness0C20A130C0A90Cnsa0Erevelations0Ecast0Edoubt0Eon0Ethe0Eentire0Etech0Eindustry0C/story01.htm

Along with representatives from Paddy Power, an online betting company, he will put together a “basketball diplomacy” event involving players from North Korea, he said Monday.

At a news conference, he called Kim Jong Un, ruler of the repressive state, a “very good guy.”

Rodman also set tongues wagging over the weekend by leaking the purported name of Kim’s baby daughter.

Returning from his second trip to the reclusive, nuclear-armed nation, Rodman gave an interview Sunday with The Guardian, a British newspaper, in which he described the “relaxing time by the sea” he spent with Kim and his family.

The personal life of Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, is shrouded in secrecy. Even his exact age remains unconfirmed by outsiders. (He is believed to be in his early 30s.)

Speculation sprang up last year that Ri might be pregnant after a photo carried by state media showed her wearing a long coat that could have been hiding a bump. But North Korean authorities kept quiet about the matter.

The flamboyant Rodman, 52, shed more light on the situation in his Guardian interview, including the daughter’s name.

“I held their baby Ju Ae and spoke with Ms. Ri as well,” he told the newspaper.

He described Kim, who sits atop one of the world’s most repressive regimes, as “a good dad.”

The Kim dynasty has ruled North Korea for three generations. Kim Jong Un follows his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, Kim Il Sung.

The regime has pursued the development of nuclear weapons while millions of its subjects have been left impoverished and malnourished.

It’s a little early to start speculating whether Ju Ae is a likely heir to her father, said Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in South Korea.

Lankov, the author of the recent book “The Real North Korea,” said the question of succession was unlikely to arise for at least another 30 years, assuming Kim Jong Un remains healthy.

“And I don’t believe the North Korean monarchy is going to last another 30 years,” he said. If it does, Kim and Ri are young enough to have several other children in the meantime.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they have five more,” he said.

Rodman has so far made no mention on his Twitter account of his bonding time with the Kim family.

But he suggested late Sunday something was afoot.

“Just returned from North Korea. HUGE announcement tomorrow morning in NYC,” he said in a post.

It was unclear what he was specifically referring to. The Guardian reported on his plans to organize a basketball game between American and Korean teams.

Rodman had already poured cold water on speculation he might have been trying to secure the release of Bae, the U.S. citizen serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor in North Korea.

“It is not my job to talk about Kenneth Bae,” he told reporters at the Beijing airport on Saturday.

“Ask Obama about that, ask Hillary Clinton about that,” Rodman said. “Ask those —holes.”

Rodman had previously made no secret about his desire to help Bae, who has been transferred to a hospital after his health deteriorated. The retired NBA player once tweeted that he wanted Kim to “do him a solid” by freeing the American prisoner.

But Rodman’s friendship with Kim, an avid basketball fan, doesn’t appear to carry enough weight to get Bae out of jail.

U.S. officials have repeatedly called on North Korean officials to release Bae, who was convicted earlier this year of attempting to bring down the government. Pyongyang last month abruptly withdrew an invitation to a U.S. envoy who was to travel there to try to secure Bae’s release.

Rodman was criticized over his first visit to North Korea, in February, during which he was pictured laughing and eating while watching a basketball game with Kim.

That visit came during a period of escalating tensions in which North Korea threatened missile strikes on the United States and South Korea. The situation has gradually calmed over recent months.

In his comments to The Guardian on Sunday, Rodman, one of the greatest rebounders in NBA history, continued to defend the North’s young leader.

“Kim is a great guy, he loves basketball, and he’s interested in building trust and understanding through sport and cultural exchanges,” he said.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/09/world/asia/north-korea-rodman-kim-daughter/index.html?eref=edition