April 1 damage from Conficker worm not likely to catch up to hype

The Worms in Mud dessert. Credit: PaysImagniaire/ Flickr

Today we unsuspecting L.A. Times tech bloggers were besieged by e-mails from publicists regarding "the Conficker C threat pending for April 1," offering "insight on any scenario that happens tomorrow," and alerting us that companies have been preparing ahead of time "in an effort to prevent the Conficker worm from spreading further and potentially causing substantial damage."

Just like the Y2K hysteria and other bugs du jour, the Conficker worm has been a prime vehicle for the language of terror and fear.  And just like those other instances, the warnings make for better conversation than the reality.

"As you are probably aware," read one e-mail from a PR firm called GlobalFluency, "tomorrow, April 1 is the day that the Conficker worm, possibly the most widespread ever, is predicted to inflict its damage through the hundreds of thousands of computers that it has infected. Nobody knows what Conficker will unleash."

GlobalFluency went on to offer an interview with an expert from a computer security firm that markets anti-virus software. 

Conficker, a digital worm that has reportedly infected millions of Windows computers, has been widely covered in the media, including in the New York Times, which wondered if Wednesday would bring "An April Fools Joke or an Unthinkable Disaster," and on "60 Minutes," which noted that "so far, the bad guys who created it haven't triggered Conficker. It's just sitting out there like a sleeper cell."

Twitter, a useful heat map for online conversations, lit up today with thousands of worried messagesabout Conficker. "I'm terrified of that conficker virus thing," wrote Sarah Rutherford of New York. "Not getting back on here at all for the rest of the week!!"

But as more sober commentators have noted, Conficker is not a ticking time bomb set to ...

Why is Zombies, like other social games, so infectious?

Vampires, a game on Facebook and MySpace. Credit: Zynga.

If you're on Facebook, chances are very good that you've been bitten by a zombie at one point or another.

Zombies is an application on Facebook whereby users of the social network try to create armies of followers by "biting" their contacts. Think of it as a virtual game of tag -- when you've been bitten, you can choose to ignore it (and your friend doesn't get the credit for biting you) or you can add the application and start infecting others.

Why is that interesting? It's not, really — until you find out that more than 230,000 people were infecting their friends on Facebook last month.

Zombies and another Facebook app called Vampires are among a new breed of "social games" that are rapidly accumulating players, almost overnight, as we've mentioned in our previous post on the topic. How do they do it? We picked the brains (Mmmm ... brains!) of three people at the Game Developer Conference last week in San Francisco.

Kristian Segerstrale, the chief executive of publisher Playfish, said social games are built to be "inside out" — they draw people in with their incredibly simple design, but they also have incentives for people to reach out to get their friends involved. One of Playfish's most popular titles is Who Has the Biggest Brain? (sense a theme?). Players take quizzes or solve puzzles to get a score that they can then compare with those of their friends. The game becomes a test to see who among your contacts can get the highest score, said Segerstrale. If that sounds simplistic, tell that to the 3.9 million people who played the game at least once this month.

What most of these games have in common is ... 

First on Mars, Take 2

First On Mars, an online TV site, formally launched a new version today that adds a social twist to the process of deciding what to watch. The site now features two news feeds -- personalized and, umm, impersonal -- that offer links to episodes and related material submitted by users (e.g. reviews, photos, quizzes). The feeds appear on almost every page, chronicling the new material posted by users ("Couch_Potato_75 commented on American Dad today at 5:05AM") and the site's administrators ("FOM added Gossip Girl S02 E19 today at 9:50AM"). It also has added to each episode's page a Facebook-like wall where users' posts are displayed. The changes bring First on Mars more squarely into the social-TV realm occupied by TVLoop and CBS' TV.com, among others.

The site's take on crowdsourcing is a bit more subtle than, say, YouTube's. Users aren't curating the site -- the videos they choose aren't elevated to the home page. Instead, the site's omnipresent news feeds suggest episodes by noting who's commenting on them. "We want users to be an additional way to find content," CEO Tuhin Roy said. Significantly, the feeds don't provide links to the comments themselves, just to the episodes. From there you can toggle over to the wall and see what other users had to say. And just by mousing over the feeds, you can see what shows the commenters are following through the site.

First On Mars remains a work in progress. My quibbles include the overwhelming number of choices displayed on the home page, the need to realign some videos with the site's viewing window and the occasionally nonintuitive navigational controls (would it be so hard to provide a "back" button?). But Roy says the goal is to integrate social tools deeply into the online TV experience, and he's heading in the right direction.

In another bit o' news about online TV, a report released today by Parks Associates estimates that 2.5 million Americans and Canadians would be willing to pay up to $100 extra for a TV if it could connect to the Internet. What they want most, according to Parks' research director John Barrett, is the ability to watch TV shows and movies on demand. Ahh, if only set manufacturers would provide TVs that could connect to any online VOD service, rather than just a hand-picked few.... Anyway, consider those households the first adopters for portals such as Boxee, which offer a TV-style user interface for online video.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Appiphilia: Taxicab confessions of an iPhone user

Last Friday, a routine business trip turned into a series of false starts. A flight from Tampa to Burbank landed me instead in San Diego. Getting back to Glendale sans car required a train and a little experiment.

I was stuck at Union Station, waiting for the Metrolink home with much more time than patience. I made it as far as the bagel joint when I decided it was time to summon a taxi using my iPhone -- not by placing a regular call, but by firing up the Taxi Magic app.

Taxi Magic (Free)
What it is: an app that turns your iPhone into a hand-held taxi hailer. 

Around the Web 3.31.09: New iPhone rumor, micropayments for microbloggers and straitjackets for authors

Newspaper stand in Chicago, with the Sun-Times sold on top left. Credit: Laffy4k via Flickr.

-- Chicago Sun-Times owner files for bankruptcy protection. NYT

-- Game companies pull in lots of revenue, but not profit. NYT

-- Apple to introduce new iPhone with double the memory and a better camera, says analyst. CNet

-- Does FiledByAuthor put writers in a straitjacket? LAT

-- What the heck is Conficker, and how do you protect yourself against it? PCWorld

-- Microbloggers, meet micropayments. TechCrunch

-- It's not easy being green. Consumers don't buy green gadget marketing claims. Twice

-- Google kills Video AdSense program that let publishers share in ad money. paidContent

-- But the search giant will still share the wealth, forms $100-million Google Venture fund. Reuters via Wired

-- Spam is back with a vengeance. Bits

-- Alex Pham

Sony drops PlayStation 2 price to $99

PlayStation 2. Credit: Sony

Sony will cut the price of its PlayStation 2 console by $30, to $99, starting Wednesday, positioning the 9-year-old console as an entertainment bargain.

Sony, which has sold more than 136.8 million PS2s since launching the console in Japan in October 1999, emphasized today that there are more than 1,820 PS2 games for $29.99 or less. More than 250 titles are currently $20. Sony said game publishers are planning to release between 70 to 80 new titles, primarily sports and casual games, this year, bringing the total to nearly 1,900 by the end of the year.

In addition, publishers are poised to release another 70 to 80 titles in 2010, said John Koller, director of hardware marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, the division that manages the PlayStation business in North America.

"We expect that the PlayStation 2 market will remain vibrant for as long as we continue to support the platform," Koller said in an interview this morning. Koller said Sony is reaching out to families and lower-income households that don't currently have a game console.

"This will prolong the life of the PS2," said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, "but it's not going to do a lot to spur sales. The console will just decline more slowly."

Pachter said the large number of games available for the PS2 was "smart marketing" that would resonate well with budget-conscious consumers and in markets such as Latin America, where Sony is making a big push. "So a family can buy a PS2 and several games for less than the cost of a Wii," Pachter said.

-- Alex Pham

Start your own print media company with MagCloud

Kalina Magazine, an independent photo magazine that's printed on-demand with HP's MagCloud. Credit: Noah Kalina

And you thought starting a blog was easy…

Why start a blog when you can start a nice, glossy print magazine? Hewlett-Packard recently launched a new service called MagCloud, which flattens the entire magazine distribution process into one website. Give HP the content in PDF form and out comes a magazine. The cost: 20 cents per page. HP handles all the printing, mailing and subscription management. Users can set the subscription price for their rag (above the base price plus postage), leaving some room for profit if they choose. Gutenberg would be proud. And so was the New York Times. 

It used to be that only companies the likes of Amazon.com had access to such print-on-demand power, but MagCloud lowers the barrier of entry for niche blogs about gourmet cashews or antique typewriters seeking to become 'zines. Print-on-demand allows Amazon to offer a slew of niche titles without investing in the actual books unless they’re sold. For a blogger who’d like to see their stuff in print, it’s the same business model: pay only for what you can sell.

Using MagCloud, a one-person blog can go to print with only a little design experience. In fact, with sites like FeedJournal and Tabbloid (which, by the way, HP developed), a blog could completely automate a not-so-shabby print layout, simply by handing over its RSS feed.

It's not free: A 10-page monthly magazine would cost the blogger $24 plus postage per year, per subscriber. But if a dedicated audience is willing to pay a few dollars per month so that they can hold the blog in their hands, then there’s nothing to lose. Make that into a quarterly, annual or one-time e-book, and the profit margin starts to grow quickly.

This could have a impact on the already woeful print publishing industry. Though it seems like a step in the wrong direction, the indie blogs that bite into their online product can take a shot at their stubborn print subscribers as well. And why not? It’s about as risky as starting a blog.

-- Chris Lesinski

In-flight wireless Internet to expand to hundreds of American Airlines planes

The future of air travel? Credit: Bekathwia via Flickr.

Flights are getting canceled and you have to pay to check a bag. But, hey, at least you can now obsessively check your Gmail on more planes than ever. American Airlines plans to announce Tuesday that it's installing Gogo Inflight Internet service on 318 of its domestic aircraft, up from the 15 planes that currently allow customers to wirelessly access the Internet.

American isn't the only airline ramping up wireless service. Gogo, provided by Illinois company Aircell, is also available on about 80 Delta/Northwest aircraft and some Virgin America planes. Aircell says it is working on making the in-flight wireless service available on United Airlines and Air Canada as well. 

“We’ve really just been charging forward since August,” said John Happ, a vice president at Aircell. American launched the company's in-flight service on Aug. 20, 2008. So far, the airline has focused the service on routes connecting New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami.

The network operates through an air-to-ground system that uses three small antennas installed on the aircraft to connect to Aircell's mobile broadband network, which has 92 cell towers ...

Twitter trouble: Mark Cuban fined, Courtney Love sued -- over tweets

Mark Cuban at South by Southwest. Credit: gorriti via Flickr

Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is apparently just as frank on Twitter as he is courtside at basketball games. The NBA fined Cuban $25,000 on Sunday for a complaint that he tweeted about the refereeing of his team's 103-101 loss to Denver.

Cuban complained that refs didn't call a technical foul on Nuggets guard J.R. Smith for taunting Antoine Wright after a missed shot. Cuban's 100-character protest, broadcast to his more than 13,000 followers on the short-blogging service, translated to $250 per character. That's one pricey tweet.

After telling the world about his slap on the wrist, Cuban quipped on his Twitter page, "can't say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does."

He isn't the only celebrity getting in trouble for a loose tongue -- make that loose fingers. Rock musician and party girl Courtney Love is being sued for defamation because of messages on Twitter. She complained on her Twitter page (sorry, no link due to excessive swearing) about conflicts with clothing designer Dawn Simorangkir, which spurred the lawsuit that was filed in an L.A. court.

Defamation is a sensitive issue among journalists. We weigh the concerns of what may be defamatory in everything we publish. But it has rarely been cause for concern among celebrities — mainly because they used to have to go through the news media to get their statements out to the mainstream.

Now that everyone has a direct line to the public, the courts will either have to redefine the legal definition, or we're all just going to have to play nicer.

-- Mark Milian

Around the Web 3.30.09: Online ad dollars still growing, labels join Google for music downloads in China, video games help vision

A Redbox customer returns a DVD at an Albertsons in Santa Monica. Hollywood studios worry the system could undercut DVD sales. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

-- Google has signed up the four major record labels for a free music download service in China. The labels get a cut of the ad revenue. Ars Technica

-- Is Facebook making college reunions pointless? We already know what our classmates are up to. NYT

-- Here's a study to show mom: Playing video games may be good for your vision. Booster Shots

-- Why the new Skype iPhone app, available Tuesday, doesn't actually threaten AT&T. Silicon Alley Insider

-- Redbox's vending machines dispense dollar-a-day DVDs to consumers -- and worries to Hollywood. LAT

-- Online advertising revenue is slowing down (what isn't these days?) but still grew 10% last year. TechCrunch

-- A major spy operation seems to be looting files from computers across the world, including those of the Dali Lama's office, researchers say. NYT

-- Laid-off workers get connected with potential jobs through social networking. LAT

-- Chris O'Brien: The patent system is broken, and now's the time to fix it. Mercury News

-- Chris Gaither