UPDATED 8:50 P.M.: Milmont said in
an e-mail exchange tonight that he has suffered from a brain tumor from
an early age that was discovered when he was 16, around when he began
work on the virus.
"It is obvious to me and my family that this greatly affected my
mental, physical and emotional state," Milmont wrote. "Most of the
illegal activity took place before I was 18, and I wouldn't do it
today."
-----
Federal authorities say they have captured the author of an innovative computer virus that infected as many as 15,000 PCs last year.
Jason Michael Milmont, 19, agreed to plead guilty (you can download a PDF of the plea agreement here) in his hometown of Cheyenne, Wyo., to a federal felony charge of unauthorized access to a computer to further a fraud, according to court documents. He reached the deal with prosecutors in Los Angeles and could face as many as five years in prison.
It's unusual for anyone controlling large blocks of so-called zombie computers to be arrested, and even more unusual for a virus author to get caught. Milmont's case is especially interesting because he is credited with being among the first to use peer-to-peer communication among infected computers. That trick makes it much harder for authorities or security experts to stop a virus, since there is no one visible machine or group of machines directing the others.
According to papers filed in the case, Milmont modified the Limewire file-trading program and offered it to others as a free download. Hidden inside was what became known as the Nugache Worm, which spread further through instant messages that invited recipients to view infectious photos on faked MySpace or Photobucket pages.
Apparently working alone, Milmont looked into the computers under his control and extracted credit-card and other personal information, which he used to make purchases. He was tripped up after using the machines to launch a denial-of-service attack against an L.A. area business, which was not named in court papers, overwhelming that website with requests for information.
The number of publicly reported privacy breaches jumped 69% in the first six months of the year from the same period in 2007, according to the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center.
Businesses accounted for much of the increase, the San Diego group found by surveying media accounts, state disclosures and other sources. They reported 37% of the 2008 breaches, up from 29% in the first half of last year and 21% in the year-earlier period.
Educational organizations and government sources, the next two most common sources of exposed personal information, both reported fewer breaches for a second consecutive year. They reported 21% and 17%, respectively, of the latest data leaks.
The Identity Theft Resource Center didn't estimate how many records were involved in total, because almost 40% of the public reports didn't reveal the extent of the compromise.
Just because data is at risk doesn't mean it will be misused. Laptops or other devices that were lost or stolen accounted for 1 in 5 of the incidents, and they might not have been targeted for the information they held.
Insider theft was blamed in 16% of the cases, loss or theft by a contractor in 14% and hacking in 12%.
Mark got his Marc. Facebook made it official this afternoon that Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen was joining the corporate board as its fourth member, confirming a report from Kara Swisher last month and another from Mike Arrington today.
Andreessen has long acted in the role of informal mentor to young Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. No one could better know what the 24-year-old Zuckerberg has gone through and will go through than Andreessen, who started the Internet revolution when he co-founded Netscape at the age of 22.
Andreessen has the kind of entrepreneurial stature that surrounds him with the geek faithful and is sure to impress investors when in the next year or two Facebook finally tests the public markets. His influence is not confined to those who know what he achieved during the first Internet boom; He is a legend to those who have seen what he has already achieved during this one and to those who read his popular blog dispensing advice to those following in his footsteps.
Andreessen, who remains chairman of another social networking site, Ning, joins Zuckerberg and two Facebook investors -- Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund and Jim Breyer of Accel Partners -- on the board. Andreessen, who is also an investor in Thiel's Founders Fund, takes over one of the two vacant board seats Zuckerberg controls. Facebook also has two board observers: David Sze of Greylock Partners and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners.
Andreessen, who declined to comment, joins at a crucial moment for Facebook as it's bringing on new executives to help shepherd the next stage in its corporate evolution and biding farewell to others. With Matt Cohler leaving to pursue a career as a venture capitalist (although he will remain an advisor), Zuckerberg will have someone else at the company he can count on.
And it makes sense to us. Zuckerberg is like the 2.0 version of Andreessen. Who else would Zuckerberg want at his side than the founder-friendly Andreessen, who shares Zuckerberg's belief that Facebook is onto something big?
In a statement, Zuckerberg said: "Marc is an industry leader.... He has experience that is relevant to Facebook in so many ways: scaling companies that are experiencing extraordinary growth, creating successful technology platforms and building strong engineering organizations. I know Marc will be a great mentor to me and our leadership team."
Now that Bill Gates no longer has to worry about running Microsoft, why not help run the country?
The Microsoft co-founder is mentioned by some in political circles as the "dream running mate" for John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, according to the Politico. (No, President Bill Clinton isn't laughing off the suggestion in the photo above. He's just having fun with Gates during a conference in 2000.)
The Capitol Hill publication asked 14 political consultants, campaign staffers, fundraisers and historians to name "their most unconventional -- but reasonably viable" vice presidential choices for McCain and Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Also making the list of eight long shots was Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of EBay and a leading McCain fundraiser. There were no tech celebrities among the suggestions for Obama, although Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary who now is director of the executive committee at Citigroup, made the list.
Because of their public support and fund raising for McCain (their gender probably doesn't hurt either), Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina have been mentioned as possible vice presidential choices by the Arizona senator, including in a story today by The Times' Doyle McManus.
But Gates hasn't gotten much love as a potential presidential running mate. Talk about campaign finance reform: The world's third-richest man could help the McCain ticket obliterate Obama's Internet-fueled fund-raising advantage. Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Watch speculated this month that the newly retired Gates would be "an obvious choice for somebody's administration" but stopped short of suggesting he be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
It got us to thinking: Who else in the tech world would liven up a presidential ticket?
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: a good choice for Obama to show that ...
There's some buzz today about an online mapping service called EveryScape, thanks to a profile of the company by ABC News. Like Google Maps and Microsoft's Live Search Maps, EveryScape lets you look up addresses and driving directions on the Web and offers photos of the places you're going. But the twist: EveryScape lets you go inside some of the shops and restaurants. For example, if you look for Marion Meyer Contemporary Art, a gallery in Laguna Beach, you'd see a photo of the storefront -- but also a button that lets you go inside the shop (pictured above).
EveryScape has a big uphill climb trying to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, which get more Web traffic than just about anyone on the planet. The service launched in beta in October and so far covers only slightly more than a dozen cities (including three in California: Laguna Beach, Beverly Hills and San Francisco).
The Waltham, Mass.-based company dispatches independent contractors to snap pictures of building exteriors and to try to persuade local businesses to let them photograph their interiors. It's good marketing, so some businesses do agree.
But we have to admit that letting cameras in for digital mapping makes us think of this classic video, "Google Maps (Part 1 of the Googling)," by the L.A.-based comic film troupe the Vacationeers. Keep looking over your shoulder while using Google Maps...
-- "Guitar Hero Aerosmith," the first version of the game built around a specific band, went on sale Sunday. Reuters
-- Jon Healey says the most interesting part of Rhapsody's announcement is the partnership to stream music for free to sites including iLike and eventually Yahoo and VH1. Bit Player
-- A French court ordered EBay to pay $59 million to LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton over counterfeit goods sold on the auction site. We think the fashion company should pay a fine for having such a long name. AP via USA Today
-- TiVo and other ad-skipping devices have prompted a surge in product placement. David Lazarus doesn't like it and wants better disclosure. LAT
-- Star video game developer Neil Young is leaving Electronic Arts to launch a start-up devoted to creating games for the iPhone. VentureBeat
-- "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is launching a Web cartoon series. The twist: He's distributing it through Google's AdSense service. NYT
-- Buy a Web-connected Bravia TV, watch "Hancock" at home before anyone else. NYT
-- Some giants of the tech industry, including Google and Hewlett-Packard, are banding together to buy up intellectual property as they try to head off patent infringement lawsuits. WSJ
-- Wall-E the robot dominates at the box office with $62.5 million in ticket sales, the best opening-weekend haul for a Disney movie in June. LAT
Rhapsody America, the Web's top subscription-based music service, opened a digital download store today, becoming the latest company to challenge the dominance of Apple's iTunes.
Like other recent challengers -- and unlike iTunes -- the Rhapsody MP3 store will feature songs that aren't constrained by anti-copying measures. The four major record labels will provide Rhapsody such songs, which work on any digital music player and can be copied an unlimited number of times. Apple has such music from only one major label.
The store from Rhapsody America, a joint venture of RealNetworks and Viacom's MTV Networks, offers another indication that the music industry, in its struggle with Apple over the pricing of music, is cultivating a new breed of Apple competitor.
Rhapsody is charging 99 cents for a single and $9.99 for an album, the same pricing as on iTunes.
One of Rhapsody's selling points, however, is that customers can listen to an entire song before purchasing it. ITunes gives customers a 30-second sample.
Amazon.com and Napster both opened digital download stores in the last year, selling music without copyright protections. In the past, the music industry has required digital locks on songs to make it harder for music to be copied and passed around on the Internet.
The claim: California’s state bird, the quail, is brown and ugly and should be replaced by a parrot.
No, that's not another bizarre California ballot measure. It’s part of an advertising campaign by Parrot, one of the many companies trying to get consumers to buy their hands-free device in advance of Tuesday's ban on driving while talking on a cellphone without using a headset.
Rather than showcase their devices in TV and print ads, many companies have decided instead to go the non-traditional route. They have created viral videos, dreamed up a scheme in which a ticket for driving with a cellphone could be used as a coupon for a hands-free device and created a whole campaign to replace the state bird with a parrot, complete with a petition and a letter to the governor.
Nontraditional advertising "can bring effectiveness and reach that traditional advertising cannot," said Scott Leonard, president of A.D.D. Marketing, a Los Angeles-based ad agency. “It can get people to stop in their tracks and focus on something in a real deep and meaningful way.”
It’s also cheap, Leonard said. That could be important because many companies won’t allocate much money to advertise in only California and Washington, the two states that have bans on driving while talking on a cellphone going into effect July 1.
As if the digital TV transition weren't perplexing enough, consumers now need to worry about being conned.
Polls have consistently shown that many people are confused by the upcoming digital TV transition -- the government-mandated switch by most broadcast TV stations to all digital signals starting Feb. 18. There's a lot to be confused about. People aren't sure if they need a new TV to continue receiving over-the-air signals, or if they should apply for the two $40 coupons available to any U.S. household to purchase a converter box so an old analog set can pick up the new digital broadcasts.
The friendly folks at Universal TechTronics say they are here to help.
In newspaper ads nationwide (above example is from the Cincinnati Enquirer), the Canton, Ohio-based company has been offering two free digital-to-analog converter boxes (a previous version of this post said analog-to-digital), without the hassle of applying for those government coupons. All you need to do is buy a five-year warranty at $59 for each of the Miracle ClearView TV boxes, which according to the ad is, "a real steal."
The problem, according to the Better Business Bureau, is that unsuspecting consumers are the ones being stolen from.
The ads are "a bait-and-switch tactic that prey on consumers' lack of knowledge" about the conversion, the Better Business Bureau said in a recent warning. The group noted that, including shipping and handling, each box ends up costing significantly more than if you used a $40 government coupon for any of several converter box models that sell for from $49 to $59. If ordered within 72 hours of the ad's publication, the box costs $68.30 (including shipping), according to the company. After 72 hours, the total goes up to $97.30.
"They’re really targeting the senior citizens who are going to be confused and not up-to-date on the technology,'' said Alison Preszler, a spokeswoman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
The ad is designed to look like a news article ...
As Bill Gates leaves full-time work as chairman of Microsoft today, he can look back on one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of business -- a rise from college dropout to world's wealthiest individual. Along the way, his forceful execution fulfilled the audacious goal of putting a computer in nearly every home, at least in the U.S.
But the company Gates leaves behind is, at long last, floundering. Its stock price is where it was six years ago. Microsoft has just bungled an attempt to buy Yahoo in what would have been the largest acquisition in Silicon Valley history. And the attention of the technology world, once riveted on the Redmond, Wash., company, has turned elsewhere, to Google and beyond.
Perhaps most surprising, Microsoft appears to be losing ground on the one product that it rode to world dominance: the operating system powering 9 in 10 personal computers.
By coincidence, today also marks the last day of general availability of Windows XP, the operating system that Microsoft finally got right. Its successor, Windows Vista, is so unworthy that even Microsoft's closest partner, top chip maker Intel, is refusing to distribute it to employees.
What do you think? If Gates went wrong, where? Will Microsoft ever command the technology industry again?
-- Joseph Menn
Photo: Bill Gates in 1990. Credit: Marty Lederhandler / Associated Press
Depending on the model, your device features either a hard drive or flash drive that allows you to read and write files to it just like an external drive.
UPDATED 8:50 P.M.: Milmont said in
an e-mail exchange tonight that he has suffered from a brain tumor from
an early age that was discovered when he was 16, around when he began
work on the virus.
The claim: California’s state bird, the quail, is brown and ugly and should be replaced by a parrot. 
RSS: Subscribe to this Blog
The call for urgent improvements in the ...
Nice image used for this article - from ...
great post, I had exactly the same quest...