The world wide web

The second browser war

Sep 3rd 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO
From Economist.com

Google’s new web browser is its most direct attack on Microsoft yet

AP

SEVERAL years ago, Silicon Valley was rife with rumours that Google, then primarily a search engine, might be building a new web browser to rival that of Microsoft, called Internet Explorer (IE), or even an operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows. Google mocked those rumours and they died down. But if Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, is to be believed, the speculation itself made him think that “maybe it’s not a bad idea”. And so this week Google did launch a new browser, called Chrome, that is also, in effect, a new operating system. The rumours, says Mr Brin cheekily, “just happened to migrate from being false to being true.”

Chrome amounts to a declaration of war—albeit a pre-emptive one, in Google’s mind—against Microsoft. So far, Google has been coy about admitting the rivalry (whereas Microsoft’s boss, Steve Ballmer, is obsessed with it). In web search and advertising, Google dominates roughly as Microsoft does in operating systems and office applications. To the extent that Google has challenged Microsoft’s core business at all, it is through its web-based word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. But these, so far, have few users.

Google’s fear has been that Microsoft might use its grip on people’s computers and browsers to tweak the default settings so that Google’s search engine and other services might be disadvantaged. This, after all, is how Microsoft behaved in the 1990s, when it crushed Netscape, an early browser.

Microsoft’s fear, by contrast, has been that computing as a whole might move from the operating system as a platform for applications to the web (or “cloud”). This is why it attacked—also pre-emptively, in its mind—Netscape and landed in antitrust court.

As Google rose to dominate the web during this decade, it therefore invested a lot of energy into a rival web browser to IE, called Firefox. An open-source project (whose code can be altered by anybody), Firefox comes from a foundation, across the street from Google’s offices, that happens to be based on the remnants of the old Netscape. Google’s engineers contribute code to Firefox and pay the foundation a share of advertising when people search Google in the browser’s toolbar. Thus Firefox rose to become the largest browser after IE, with almost 20% of the market.

But Google concluded that even Firefox could not protect it against Microsoft. It began to define its business as “search, ads and apps”, where the apps (applications), with a few exceptions, run on the web and are accessed through a browser. So Google decided to build a browser from scratch, explicitly for those fledgling services, from word processing to snazzy virtual worlds.

Chrome, which it launched with a cheeky comic book instead of a press release, is the result. It is based on tabs, each of which runs independently of the others for security, speed and stability. It even works offline. It is, in short, the scenario that Microsoft has dreaded ever since Netscape. As Arnaud Weber, a Google engineer and one of the characters in the comic book, says in a speech bubble: “We’re applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems.” It is a geek’s way of saying that developers and consumers may soon stop caring about the operating system on their own hard drive altogether.

Ingeniously, Chrome itself need not take a lot of market share to fulfil Google’s objectives. Google does not expect to sell or otherwise “monetise” Chrome directly. Like Firefox’s, Chrome’s source code is free for anybody to change and improve, and even for rival browser-makers to incorporate. That could even include Microsoft. As Mr Brin says, “we would consider it a success” if the next version of IE were “built on Chrome, or even if it were just a lot better as a result of Chrome.” Google wants ever more people doing ever more things on the web, and peace of mind that nobody, not even Microsoft, can interrupt that.

Football crazy

Sep 2nd 2008
From Economist.com

More upheaval in English football, as investors from the Middle East spend $360m on Manchester City

FANS were surprised, in 2003, when a little-known Russian oil billionaire splashed out $226m for Chelsea football club. These days foreigners spending fortunes on English clubs is far more common. The Premier League has become the richest and most famous in the world. On Tuesday September 2nd, Manchester City, a mid-table team, changed hands for the second time in little over a year. Abu Dhabi United Group, a Middle-Eastern consortium backed by oil-rich royals, will pay $360m for the club, quite an improvement on the $165m paid in 2007. We have left out another club, Derby County, which was bought for some $100m in January but relegated in June.

AFP

Chinese city rankings

Chinese city rankings

Streets of plenty

Sep 2nd 2008
From Economist.com

Shanghai tops a new ranking of business conditions in mainland China's cities

THE port city of Shanghai is the best place in mainland China for doing business, according to a new set of rankings from the Economist Intelligence Unit (see background and methodology). Shanghai tops an overall ranking of 44 Chinese cities that were compared in five key areas—economic performance, market opportunities, labour market, infrastructure and environment. Hard on its heels come fast-growing Guangzhou (top for infrastructure) and the capital, Beijing (home to the best labour market). The top 15 also includes large cities focused on the booming domestic market, such as Tianjin and Chengdu. Cities with lower external trade exposure have performed well during the recent slowdown in global growth, and are likely to continue to do well over the next decade as a maturing Chinese economy becomes less dependent on exports for growth. The ranking was compiled by the China Regional Forecasting Service, a new business information service launched by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Chrome

Google veröffentlicht Internet-Browser

Google greift mit einem eigenen Web-Browser die Dominanz von Microsofts Internet Explorer an.

Die neue Software mit dem Namen Google Chrome werde in einer Testversion bereits am Dienstag zum Herunterladen bereitstehen, teilte der Internetkonzern im offiziellen Unternehmensblog mit. Das Ziel sei ein Browser, der schneller, benutzerfreundlicher und sicherer ist als heutige Software.

© dpa

Die Konkurrenz im Browser-Bereich nahm zuletzt deutlich zu. Meistgenutzte Software ist Microsofts Internet Explorer. Sein Marktanteil beträgt derzeit laut Marktforschern knapp 75 Prozent – nach mehr als 90 Prozent noch vor einigen Jahren. Auf Platz zwei folgt demnach mit knapp 20 Prozent das Open-Source-Programm Firefox. Ein weiterer Konkurrent ist Apples Browser Safari. Der Quellcode von Chrome werde wie bei Firefox offen sein, betonte Google. Das heißt, die Software kann von Programmierern frei weiterentwickelt werden. Chrome nutze zum Teil die selben Elemente wie Firefox und Safari.

Zwei Jahre Entwicklungsarbeit

Nach Darstellung von Google sei man wegen Unzulänglichkeiten bisheriger Browser zu dem Entschluss gekommen, eine eigene Software zu entwickeln. Die wichtigste Neuerung dürfte sein, dass einzelne Unterfenster (Tabs) getrennt von einander wie einzelne Prozesse betrieben werden. Das soll die Stabilität des Programms erhöhen.

Dem „Wall Street Journal“ zufolge hat Google etwa zwei Jahre an dem Browser gearbeitet. Beim Internetkonzern sei die Sorge gewachsen, Microsoft könnte mit seinem Browser Nutzer für seine eigene Suchmaschine gewinnen, was Googles Marktanteil drücken würde, hieß es unter Berufung auf informierte Personen.

Droht ein neuer Browser-Krieg

Der Vorstoß von Google weckt angesichts des angespannten Verhältnisses mit Microsoft Erinnerungen an den sogenannten Browser-Krieg Mitte der 90er-Jahre. Microsoft hatte damals binnen kurzer Zeit den zunächst führenden Netscape Navigator zur Bedeutungslosigkeit geschliffen, unter anderem durch die kostenlose Beigabe des Explorer zum Windows-Betriebssystem.

Microsoft hatte erst vor wenigen Tagen die zweite Testversion seines neuen Internet Explorer 8 vorgestellt, der nach Einschätzung von Experten mit den aktuellen Ausgaben von Firefox und Safari mithalten kann. Einige Beobachteter merkten dazu an, neue Datenschutzoptionen im Internet Explorer könnten Google das Geschäft mit sogenannter Kontext-bezogener Werbung erschweren. Solche Anzeigen, die passend zum Beispiel zu Suchergebnissen eingeblendet werden, sind das Kerngeschäft des Internetkonzerns. Der Google-Browser soll aber ähnliche Einstellungen ermöglichen, bei denen der Nutzer Daten für sich behalten kann.


PR-Panne verrät Browser-Pläne

Der Chrome-Browser kommt außerdem pünktlich zum Erscheinen der ersten Handys mit dem von Google initiierten Betriebssystem Android. Die mobile Internetnutzung gilt als das nächste große Wachstumsfeld. Apple mischt hier mit Safari auf dem iPhone mit.

Die überraschende Ankündigung der neuen Software geht laut Google auf eine Panne zurück. Das Unternehmen schickte dem Internet-Blog Google Blogoscoped zu früh eine Kopie eines Comics, in dem auf knapp 40 Seiten in anschaulicher Form die Vorzüge von Chrome dargestellt werden sollen. Nachdem die Information sich dadurch im Netz ausbreitete, reagierte Google mit der offiziellen Stellungnahme.

Im Visier der Datenschützer

Wenn Chrome bei den Nutzern gut ankommt, könnte dies die Gewichte im Internet noch weiter zugunsten von Google verschieben. Der Konzern ist die dominierende Kraft bei Werbung im Internet und bietet zahlreiche Programme und Dienste von E-Mail über Büro-Software bis zum virtuellen Globus an. Zugleich dürfte der Vorstoß sehr genau von Datenschutzaktivisten beobachtet werden: Google wird oft vorgeworfen, zu viele Daten seiner Nutzer zu sammeln.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Turning Visitors into Customers

Visiting a company's website could result in a cold call.

By Erica Naone

Business websites often encourage visitors to leave contact information so that sales staff can get in touch, but this only rarely works. "How do you leverage otherwise anonymous traffic?" asks Martin Longo, chief technology officer of startup Demandbase, based in San Francisco. Last week, his company released a tool, called Demandbase Stream, that aims to answer this question. It digs up information on Web visitors in real time, helping salespeople follow up on a visit with a cold call and a pitch.

Applications such as Salesforce.com already let sales staff keep track of existing customers or potential customers, but Demandbase Stream falls into a newer category of tools designed to help them find new customers in the first place.

Demandbase Stream, which is aimed primarily at companies marketing to other companies, cross-references the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of computers accessing a website with publicly accessible information and data from business databases. On a ticker tape that runs along the top of a user's screen, it shows the last 25 visitors to a website. If the user clicks on a visitor, the software shows her the name and location of the company that the visitor comes from, details about the company, and information about the visitor, such as the search terms that brought her to the site. Together, this offers clues about what the visitor might be interested in buying.

New leads: Demandbase Stream helps businesses with sales and marketing by providing salespeople with relevant information about visitors to a company website. A ticker tape shows visitors in real time and can reveal the company that they come from as well as their geographical location.

Detailed information is vital for spotting potential customers. Just knowing that someone from IBM visited a website won't help much, since Big Blue has offices all over the world. Demandbase Stream, however, shows which IBM office the visitor came from, and what departments are located there. This basic service is free, but the user can choose to access another tool provided by the company--Demandbase Direct--that digs up contact information for specific people for a fee. The software can ignore traffic from nonbusiness users by filtering out data from home Internet service providers like Comcast. It can also filter out traffic that originates from outside a given geographical area of interest.

To use the service, a company just has to embed a snippet of code into pages on its site. The code can be pasted into every page or only at specific points to get information relevant to certain products. The code lets the Demandbase Stream software collect raw data from a visitor--for example, how many pages he views. It also records and sends IP address information to the Demandbase Stream software for further analysis.

When a visitor comes to the site, it is relatively easy to identify her company and geographical location, Longo says. The hard part is combining this raw data with business information from sources such as D&B/Hoovers and Lexis Nexis in order to get much more detailed information. "We have a lot of technology driving matching, linking, and resolving entries correctly," Longo says.

If the user decides to buy contact information, algorithms score the results based on how appropriate they are to his product. The system also checks against contacts that the user already has, in order to avoid selling duplicates. Longo also stressed that all contacts in Demandbase's system have the chance to opt out.

Laura Ramos, a principal analyst at Forrester Research who focuses on business-to-business marketing trends and technology, says that services like Demandbase could prove useful, but adds that it may be hard to measure its impact on sales and marketing. "Until we can demonstrate that automation actually gives a reduced cost of customer acquisition," Ramos says, businesses may be reluctant to spend money on such services. Still, she believes that marketing departments could use Demandbase Stream to build very specific advertising campaigns, targeted at the exact type of company already visiting their website. Ramos also notes that competition with other startups in the field is fierce withother start-ups, including Zoominfo, Leadlander, and Hubspot, is fierce. But Longo says that Demandbase does a better job of integrating relevant data.

Demandbase recently received funding from Adobe Systems, Altos Ventures, and Sigma Partners, and Longo says that the company is working on adding support for the professional social-networking site LinkedIn, so that a user can see links between his network of contacts and visitors to a corporate website.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

A Chinese Challenge to Intel

Researchers have revealed details of China's latest homegrown microprocessor.

By Kate Greene

In California last week, Chinese researchers unveiled details of a microprocessor that they hope will bring personal computing to most ordinary people in China by 2010. The chip, code-named Godson-3, was developed with government funding by more than 200 researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology (ICT).

China is making a late entry into chip making, admits Zhiwei Xu, deputy director of ICT. "Twenty years ago in China, we didn't support R&D for microprocessors," he said during a presentation last week at the Hot Chips conference, in Palo Alto. "The decision makers and [Chinese] IT community have come to realize that CPUs [central processing units] are important."

Tom Halfhill, an analyst at research firm In-Stat, says that the objective for China is to take control of the design and manufacture of vital technology. "Like America wants to be energy independent, China wants to be technology independent," Halfhill says. "They don't want to be dependent on outside countries for critical technologies like microprocessors, which are, nowadays, a fundamental commodity." Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West.

Enter the dragon: This single-core central processing unit, known as Loongson, or "dragon chip," was designed and manufactured in China. Chinese engineers have the goal of deploying quad-core chips by 2009.
Credit: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Despite its late start, China is making rapid progress. The ICT group began designing a single-core CPU in 2001, and by the following year had developed Godson-1, China's first general-purpose CPU. In 2003, 2004, and 2006, the team introduced ever faster versions of a second chip--Godson-2--based on the original design. According to Xu, each new chip tripled the performance of the previous one.

Godson chips are manufactured in China by a Swiss company called ST Microelectronics and are available commercially under the brand name Loongson, meaning "dragon chip." Loongson chips already power some personal computers and servers on the Chinese market, which come with the Linux operating system and other open-source software. "They use a lot of open-source software because it's free," says Halfhill. "The Chinese government wants to get as many PCs into schools and as many workplaces as they can."

The latest Godson chips will also have a number of advanced features. Godson-3, a chip with four cores--processing units that work in parallel--will appear in 2009, according to Xu, and an eight-core version is also under development. Both versions will be built using 65-nanometer lithography processes, which are a generation older than Intel's current 45-nanometer processes. Importantly, Godson-3 is scalable, meaning that more cores can be added to future generations without significant redesign. Additionally, the architecture allows engineers to precisely control the amount of power that it uses. For instance, parts of the chip can be shut down when they aren't in use, and cores can operate at various frequencies, depending on the tasks that they need to perform. The four-core Godson-3 will consume 10 watts of power, and the eight-core chip will consume 20 watts, says Xu.

This latest chip will also be fundamentally different from those made before. Neither Godson-1 nor -2 is compatible with Intel's so-called x86 architecture, meaning that most commercial software will not run on them. But engineers have added 200 additional instructions to Godson-3 to simulate an x86 chip, which allows Godson-3 to run more software, including the Windows operating system. And because the chip architecture is only simulated, there is no need to obtain a license from Intel.

Erik Metzger, a patent attorney at Intel, says that the chip will only perform at about 80 percent of the speed of an actual x86 chip. "That implies that [the Chinese government] is going after a low-end market," he says. This is the same market that Intel is targeting with its classmate PC and low-power atom microprocessor. Metzger adds that the inner workings of the chip, known as its instruction set, have not yet been disclosed, making it difficult to know if or how any x86 patents may have been breeched.

The Chinese team hopes to further boost its chip program through collaboration with other companies and researchers. "We still lag behind the international partners a lot," says Xu. "But we are doing our best to join the international community."

Der Wettkampf der größten ContainerhäfenDer Wettkampf der größten Containerhäfen

Der Wettkampf der größten ContainerhäfenDer Wettkampf der größten Containerhäfen

Nummer 1: SingapurAsien ist der Kontinent der Riesenhäfen, wie Daten des Hamburger Hafens belegen, die Grundlage dieser Bilderserie sind. Mit 27,9 Millionen[Photo] umgeschlagenen Containern pro Jahr führt der Hafen Singapurs weltweit. Immer mehr Frachtschiffe steuern den Stadtstaat an: Zwischen 2006 und 2007 stieg der Containerumschlag um 12,7 Prozent.Im Jahr 2007 wurden hier rund 27,9 Millionen Container (TEU) umgeschlagen. Ein TEU (Twenty-foot-Equivalent-Unit) entspricht einem 20-Fuß-Container mit den Maßen von 6,1 Meter Länge, 2,4 Meter Breite und 2,6 Meter Höhe.

Nummer 2: ShanghaiUm 20,7 Prozent steigerte der Hafen der südchinesischen Boomtown Schanghai seinen Containerumschlag im vergangenen Jahr. Mit 26,2 Millionen Containern überholte Schanghai damit Hongkong und stieg zum weltweit zweitwichtigsten Containerhafen auf 

Nummer 3: HongkongDas Wachstum des Hafens Hongkong blieb dagegen mit 1,5 Prozent bescheiden. 23,9 Millionen Container wurden dort 2007 umgeschlagen. Hongkong muss bereits länger um seine Vormachtstellung kämpfen - manch ein Hafen des chinesischen Festlandes wächst deutlich schneller

 

Nummer 4: ShenzenNur ein Fluss trennt Shenzen von Hongkong. Die Stadt im Süden Chinas gilt als einer der am schnellsten wachsenden Metropolen der Welt. Sie hat mehrere Containerterminals, deren Frachtaufkommen 2007 um 14,2 Prozent wuchs. 21,1 Millionen Container wurden innerhalb eines Jahres in Shenzen umgeschlagen 

Nummer 5: BusanDer Hafen der zweitgrößten Stadt Südkoreas wuchs zuletzt wieder kräftig: Um 10,5 Prozent legte der Containerumschlag im vergangenen Jahr zu - auf 13,3 Millionen

Nummer 6: RotterdamDer größte Hafen Europas rangiert im weltweiten Vergleich an sechster Stelle - und konnte sich damit um einen Platz verbessern. 10,8 Millionen Container wurden 2007 in Rotterdam umgeschlagen und damit 11,8 Prozent mehr als im Jahr zuvor. Der Hafen der südholländischen Stadt gibt direkt und indirekt 320.000 Menschen Arbeit. Unser Bild zeigt ein Öllage

Nummer 7: DubaiDer Frachthafen in der Freihandelszone Jebel Ali südlich der Stadt Dubai: Das Emirat am persischen Golf ist Heimat des siebtgrößten Containerhafens der Welt. Mit 8,8 Millionen umgeschlagenen Containern 2007 konnte sich Dubai innerhalb eines Jahres um zwei Plätze verbessern. Das Wachstum des Frachtaufkommens ist rasant - 19,9 Prozent

Nummer 8: KaohsiungKaohsiung, der wichtigste Hafen Taiwan Chinas, rutschte dagegen im weltweiten Ranking um zwei Plätze ab. 10,2 Milllionen Container wurden 2007 hier umgeschlagen. Das waren 4,4 Prozent mehr als 2006. Im 17. Jahrhundert war Kaohsiung noch ein Dorf, heute wohnen in der Stadt gut 1,6 Millionen Menschen

Nummer 9: HamburgIn Deutschland ist er der größte, weltweit auf Platz neun: Der Hamburger Hafen schlug 2007 rund 9,9 Millionen Container um. Die Steigerung um 11,6 Prozent ist zwar beachtlich, dennoch rutschten die Hanseaten um einen Rang nach unten. Dass man sie auch heute noch als "Kaffeesäcke" tituliert, liegt an der langen Handelsgeschichte: Beim Umschlag von Rohkaffee sind die Norddeutschen weltweit führend

Nummer 10: QingdaoDie Hafenstadt in der chinesischen Provinz Shandong kickte 2007 Los Angeles aus den Top Ten. 9,6 Millionen Container wurden in Qingdao umgeschlagen - 22,9 Prozent mehr als im Jahr zuvor. Es scheint nur eine Frage der Zeit, bis die Metropole südlich von Peking Hamburg überrundet - auch wenn dieses Bild den Eindruck macht, als sei ganz Qingdao ein verschlafener Ort für Hobbysegler

Houston, wir haben einen Virus!

Auf mehreren Laptops auf der Internationalen Raumstation ist ein Schädling gefunden worden, der Daten ausspioniert. Wie der Wurm dort hin gelangen konnte, ist noch nicht abschließend geklärt.

Auch im Weltall ist man offenbar nicht vor Malware sicher. Mehrere Laptops auf der Raumstation ISS, die für unkritische Zwecke eingesetzt werden, sind mit einem Wurm infiziert worden, der Passwörter für Online-Spiele ausspioniert. Wie die NASA bestätigt hat, ist dies nicht der erste Vorfall dieser Art. Die betroffenen Windows-Rechner sind nicht mit Antivirus-Software ausgestattet.

Da jedoch andere Rechner mit Antivirus-Software von Symantec vorhanden sind, ist der Wurm schließlich entdeckt und identifiziert worden. Es soll sich nach Angaben der Website SpaceRef um den bereits ein Jahr alten Wurm W32.Gammima.AG handeln, der sich über Wechselmedien und Netzfreigaben ausbreiten kann. Er schreibt sich als "ntdelect.com" in das Hauptverzeichnis jedes schreibbaren Laufwerks und legt dort auch eine Datei "autorun.inf" an, die den Wurm startet, sobald das Laufwerk eingebunden wird.

Wie kam der Wurm an Bord?

Wie der Schädling auf die Raumstation gekommen ist, konnte die NASA noch nicht klären. Es wird angenommen, dass sich der Wurm auf einem USB-Stick oder einer Speicherkarte befunden hat, die ein Astronaut mitgenommen hat.

Er könnte aber auch bereits von Anfang an in einem oder mehreren der Laptops gesteckt haben. Missionskritische Systeme sind nicht betroffen - sie sind durch Antivirus-Software sowie Zugriffskontrollen und weitere Maßnahmen geschützt.

Real Estate Prices in USA

Simple, flexible Web publishing

TR35

2008 Young Innovator
Dries Buytaert, 29

Drupal

Simple, flexible Web publishing


The Internet has made publishing on a global scale almost effortless. That's the rhetoric, anyway. The truth is more complicated, because the Internet provides only a means of distribution; a would-be publisher still needs a publishing tool. A decade ago, people who wanted such a tool had three choices, all bad: a cheap but inflexible system, a versatile but expensive one, or one written from scratch. What was needed was something in the ­middle, requiring neither enormous expense nor months of development--not a single application, but a platform for creating custom publishing environments. For tens of thousands of sites and millions of users, that something is Drupal.

Credit: Jeff Whatcott

Multimedia

See an interview with Buytaert and view images that show how Drupal works. Streaming Version (5.68 Mb) Full Version (23.9 Mb)

Created as an open-source project by Dries Buytaert, Drupal is a free content management framework--a tool for building customized websites quickly and easily, without sacrificing features or stability. Site owners can choose from a list of possible features: they might, say, want to publish ­articles, offer each user a profile and a blog, or allow users to vote or comment on content. All these features are optional, and most are independent of the others.

With Drupal's high degree of individualization, users can escape cookie-cutt­er tools without investing in completely ­custom-­made creations, which can be time-­consuming, costly, and hard to maintain. The Howard Dean presidential campaign used Drupal in 2004, and today it's used by Greenpeace U.K., the humor magazine the Onion, Nike's Beijing Olympics site, and MTV U.K., among many others.

The diversity of its users has led to many improvements, Buytaert says: "The size, passion, and velocity of the Drupal community makes incredible things happen." There are tens of thousands of active Drupal installations worldwide. Thousands of developers have contributed to the system's core, and more than 2,000 plug-ins have been added by outside contributors.

Buytaert began the work that became Drupal in 2000, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Antwerp. He had a news site called Drop.org, and he needed an internal message board to host discussions. After reviewing the existing options for flexible message boards, Buytaert decided he could write a better version from scratch.

The original version of Drupal (its name derives from the Dutch for droplet) worked well enough to attract additional users, who proposed new features. Within a year, Buytaert decided to make the project open source. He released the code in January 2001 as version 1.0.

Since open-source projects tend to attract expert users, they often lack clear user interfaces and readable documentation, making them unfriendly to mere mortals. But Buytaert understood from the beginning how important usability is to the cycle of improvement, adoption, and more improvement that drives the development of open-source software. The core Drupal installation comes with voluminous help files. The central team regularly polls users as well as developers (which is unusual in an open-source project) to decide what to improve next. The process reveals not just features to add, but ones to remove, and ways to make existing features easier to understand. For example, the project's website has been redesigned to help people new to Drupal figure out how to get up and running.

Buytaert has also founded a company, Acquia, to offer support, service, and custom development for Drupal users, especially businesses. He calls Acquia "my other full-time job" and likens it to Linux distributor Red Hat, which provides custom packaging and support for its version of the open-source operating system.

With Drupal version 7, due later this year, Buytaert hopes to include technologies that will make sites running Drupal part of the Semantic Web, Tim ­Berners-­Lee's vision for making online data understandable to machines as well as people. If Drupal hosts a website containing a company's Securities and Exchange Commission profile, for example, other sites could access just the third-quarter revenues, without having to retrieve the whole profile. The goal of sharing data in smaller, better-defined chunks is to make Drupal a key part of the growing eco­system of websites that share structured data. If this effort succeeds, it will ensure Drupal's continued relevance to the still-developing Web. --Clay Shirky

Auf Nummer sichern

Kassensturz nach den Spielen

Die Olympia-Profiteure

Von Christoph Hein, Peking

25. August 2008 Die Olympischen Spiele in Peking sind vorbei, nun folgt der Kassensturz. Rekorde wurden nicht nur im „Vogelnest“ erzielt, sondern auch auf vielen Konten. Denn Olympia in China bewegt das große Geld. Viel Geld fließt im Land selbst und auf die Konten des Internationalen Olympischen Komitees (IOC), der erfolgreichen Athleten und der Sponsoren. Auch wenn die Auslastung der Hotels und vieler Stadien weit hinter den Erwartungen zurückblieb, dürften die ersten Spiele in China ein wirtschaftlicher Erfolg gewesen sein.

Schwer zu messen bleibt, wie das Land von der internationalen Aufmerksamkeit profitiert. Offiziell beträgt das Olympia-Budget Pekings nur gut 2 Milliarden Dollar. Der niedrige Betrag täuscht freilich. Denn er umfasst nur die Baukosten der Sportanlagen. Viel gewichtiger für die Stadt ist der Ausbau der Infrastruktur – vom Flughafenterminal über U-Bahnen und Brücken bis hin zu Kläranlagen. Schätzungen reichen von 35 bis 45 Milliarden Dollar; für ganz China und alle Wettkampforte werden sogar 70 Milliarden Dollar genannt.

© F.A.Z.
Von diesen Projekten – etwa neuen U-Bahnen – werden die Menschen aber auch weiterhin etwas haben. Gewonnen haben damit auch Unternehmen, die nicht zu den Sponsoren zählen. So weist Siemens rund 1,1 Milliarden Euro als Einnahmen aus dem Geschäft mit den Spielen aus. „Wir hätten kein Projekt übernommen, mit dem wir kein Geld verdient hätten“, sagt der China-Chef von Siemens, Richard Hausmann.

Auch kleine Unternehmen ergatterten Aufträge

Aber nicht nur die Großen haben Geld mit Olympia gemacht. „Deutsche Unternehmen konnten wesentlich von den Olympischen Spielen profitieren“, sagt Hausmann, der auch Vorsitzender der Deutschen Handelskammer in Peking ist. „Auch viele kleine und mittlere Unternehmen ergatterten Aufträge.“ Das Spektrum reicht von Procon Multimedia (Beschallung der Stadien) über die Peter Maier Leichtbau (Aluminumbrücken) bis hin zum Zelthersteller Losberger.

Am meisten dürfte indes die Industrie des Rohstofflieferanten Australien profitiert haben: Wie kein anderer hat der Business Club Australia in Peking Netze geknüpft. Allein der weltgrößte Bergbaukonzern BHP Billiton empfing täglich eintausend Gäste in Peking. Die Handelskammer Austrade schätzt, dass ihre Unternehmen während der Spiele Verträge im Wert von 1,7 Milliarden australischen Dollar (1 Milliarde Euro) vereinbart hat – mehr als während der Spiele in Sydney 2000.

Die Olympischen Spiele sind zu Ende - jetzt beginnt der Kassensturz

Aber auch viele Spitzenathleten sind inzwischen Ein-Mensch-Unternehmen. Neben Superstars wie Usain Bolt und Michael Phelps ist die australische dreifache Goldmedaillen-Gewinnerin Stephanie Rice ein gutes Beispiel: Zu einem Vertrag über 500.000 australische Dollar mit dem Fernsehsender Seven Network kommen dank der Medaillen nun Werbeverträge über 400.000 Dollar im Jahr hinzu. „Sie wird noch schneller schwimmen, sie hat das richtige Aussehen und die Persönlichkeit, um Kunden für die von ihr repräsentierten Marken zu gewinnen“, schwärmt James Henderson, Chef der Sportmarketing-Firma DSEG über „Australiens heißesten weiblichen Sportstar“.

Für deutsche Sieger steht ein Jahr ein Mercedes zur Verfügung

Deutsche Medaillengewinner bekommen vom IOC-Partner Daimler für ein Jahr einen Mercedes zur Verfügung gestellt. Und Singapur hatte Goldmedaillengewinnern die Rekordsumme von einer Million Singapur-Dollar (478.000 Euro) versprochen – nur hat kein Singapurer Gold gewonnen.

Das ganz große Rad bei den Spielen drehen aber die olympische Gemeinschaft und ihre Unterstützer. Dazu zählen zu allererst die zwölf Hauptsponsoren. Ihr Spektrum reicht von McDonald’s über Lenovo bis hin zu Visa. Sie werben mit den Ringen und liefern dafür Produkte oder Bargeld. Denn das weltberühmte Logo ist Eigentum des IOC. „Es ist der beste Weg, eine Marke bekannt zu machen“, sagt Lenovo-Manager Milko van Duijl. Der Gesamtbeitrag der Zwölf liegt nach Angaben des IOC bei 866 Millionen Dollar.

Hinzu kommen die Förderer der Spiele in Peking. Sie waren in drei Stufen organisiert: Partner, Sponsoren, Lieferanten. Nach diesem Titel richtet sich die Höhe ihres Beitrags – auch hier aufgeteilt in Sachlieferungen und Geld. In die erste Gruppe haben sich zum Beispiel Adidas und Volkswagen eingekauft. Auch sie nennen ihren Zuschuss nicht. Immer wieder aber kursieren Werte von 80 bis mehr als 100 Millionen Dollar je Unternehmen. Insgesamt dürfte das Pekinger Organisationskomitee 1,2 Milliarden Dollar von Sponsoren eingenommen haben, heißt es. Sie zu gewinnen war nicht schwer, da alle auf den Wachstumsmarkt China drängen. So verzeichnet Adidas im ersten Halbjahr ein Umsatzwachstum von gut 60 Prozent auf dem nun zweitgrößten Markt nach Amerika. Für Volkswagen ist China schon heute der größte Markt.

Fernsehrechte als wichtigste Einnahmequelle

Die Ausstrahlung Olympias aber reicht über China hinaus. Die Fernsehrechte vermitteln davon ein Bild. NBC, der amerikanische Fernsehsender, Tochterunternehmen von General Electric, zahlte fast 900 Millionen Dollar für die Übertragungsrechte. Ein gewagtes Spiel, das sich aus NBC-Sicht dann rechnet, wenn der Sender die erwarteten 1,1 Milliarden Dollar für die Werbezeiten einnimmt.

Auch für das IOC bleiben die Fernsehrechte die wichtigste Einnahmequelle. Peking allein steht für 1,7 Milliarden Dollar, London 2012 soll gut 2 Milliarden Dollar einbringen. Die Periode von vier Jahren mit den Winterspielen in Turin und den Sommerspielen in Peking dürfte 2,6 Milliarden Dollar gebracht haben, fast ein Drittel mehr, als die vorhergehende Periode von Athen bis Salt Lake City. Die Einnahmen aus den Eintrittskarten nehmen sich dagegen gering aus: Mit einem durchschnittlichen Ticketpreis von 75 Yuan (7,5 Euro) in Peking und 6,7 Millionen Karten betrugen sie knapp 50 Millionen Euro.

Die Gesamteinnahmen des IOC für die vergangenen vier Jahre summieren sich auf gut 5 Milliarden Dollar. Davon behält das Komitee 8 Prozent, diesmal also gut 400 Millionen Dollar. Der Rest wird weitergeleitet an nationale Verbände, vor allem an den Organisator. Das heißt, dass Peking aus diesem Topf etwa 2,5 Milliarden Dollar zufließen. Und der olympische Effekt für China? „Ohne Zweifel haben die Spiele die Wirtschaft und die soziale Entwicklung Pekings vorangetrieben“, sagte Chinas Präsident Hu Jintao zu Beginn Olympias. „Aber Peking macht nur einen kleinen Teil unserer Volkswirtschaft aus.“

Text: F.A.Z.
Bildmaterial: dpa, F.A.Z.

September/October 2008

Where Cell Phones Go to Die

People are recycling more mobile phones each year.

By Kate Greene

If you've recently replaced your cell phone, you're not alone. More than half a billion cell phones were swapped for newer models in 2007, according to a study by the research firm Gartner. In the past, these phones might have been tossed in the garbage or just stashed in a drawer, but an increasing number of cell-phone vendors are promoting take-back programs, which make recycling an easier option for consumers. A discarded phone has a good chance of landing at ReCellular, the nation's largest cell-phone recycling facility, which is based in Dexter, MI. If the phone's in good shape, it'll be refurbished. Otherwise, it will head to Sims Recycling Solutions, a smelter outside of Chicago.

More than half a million phones are sorted...

More than half a million phones are sorted...

and tested at ReCellular each month, says Mike Newman, a vice president at the company.

Batteries are removed from the phones that don't work and recycled separately.

About 60 percent of the phones that arrive at ReCellular can be fixed up and sold again. Of these, 15 percent--the most commonly received models--are refurbished by ReCellular; the company sends the rest to other refurbishing sites in the United States and abroad. Newman says that a phone might come through his ­facility to be refurbished as many as three times.

The phones that can't be saved are sent to Sims Recycling Solutions, which receives more than 30,000 pounds of them each month. When the phones arrive, they are dumped onto a conveyor belt (above and below) that deposits them in a shredder.

Shards of plastic, metal, and fiberglass are spit out the other side (below). The shredded phones are heated in ovens that incinerate the plastic. What's left goes into a melting furnace to produce a metal alloy covered with a brownish layer called slag, which consists mostly of silica. The slag is removed and later sold for use in shingles and road construction.

The remaining alloy is cooled into bars.

Workers sample the alloy to determine the percentage of precious metals. Sims sells these metal-alloy bars to other companies, which separate and purify the metals. Mark Glavin, a Sims vice president, says that the facility can recover 80 ounces of silver, eight ounces of gold, and three ounces of palladium from a ton of cell phones. That's about $1 of metal per phone.

September/October 2008

"It's Not a Revolution if Nobody Loses"

A new age of "technological reproducibility" is here. Ugh.

By Emily Gould

Early in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Clay Shirky--an Internet scholar at New York University who also profita­bly shares his expertise with organizations like Nokia, Procter and Gamble, and News Corp.--reminds his readers that our moment of rapid, technology-abetted social change is not without historical precedent. The ­century-­long "chaotic period" that followed the invention of movable type was even more confusing, he says. At one point, things got so weird that an abbot published a defense of the scribal tradition then being eclipsed by the printing press and, because he wanted it disseminated cheaply and efficiently, had it printed rather than having it copied by the scribes whose livelihoods he was defending.

What would the poor abbot say if he knew that much of what the good old printing press seems to be spitting out these days is books about the technology that ended books' 400-year winning streak? Sure, the Internet has been inspiring dead-tree guides to optimizing its power while minimizing its dangers for almost as long as it has existed, but right now this section of the nonfiction shelf is glutted. From last year's Send, which promised to guide n00bs (newbies, for you n00bs) through the niceties of e-mail correspondence, to Jonathan Zittrain's warning about the dangers of "tethered appliances" like iPhones, to Lee Siegel's wounded polemic against the culture of online meanness he calls "blogofascism," to linguist Naomi S. Baron's warnings about the way IM totes compromises expression and comprehension IRL, to Daniel Solove's musings about the YouTube-diminished "future of reputation," publishers are banking on the notion that whenever we're not busy twittering our lives away, we'd like to be reading a pop-scholarly analysis of why we're doing so and how we could be doing it better. Who do they think is buying these books, anyway?

Media Martyr: Walter Benajmin believed that modern media permitted a revolution in perception that made us prey to dictators and false gods. He might have been talking about Facebook.
Credit: Ullstein Bild/The Granger Collection

Actually, come to think of it, I'm buying them--all of them. I'm doing it for odd reasons, though, and I'm looking in them for something that I never quite find. Like an expatriate who reads every new novel that's set in her homeland, I read books about the Internet to remember the time I spent working and living there, to contrast my memories with the authors' impressions and see how well they hold up. In Shirky's descriptions of the way new Web-based social tools are restructuring businesses, communities, and relationships, I recognize familiar scenery. He knows what he's talking about--he's lived there too. You get the sense, though, that he's somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage.

The thing is, Internet books are inevitably either cheerleadery or chidey, and Shirky [who writes about open-source Web publishing in this issue --Ed.] is a cheerleader. He makes a good case, too, for the rightness of celebrating the ways that blog, wiki, and social-networking technologies have enriched our lives, though he acknowledges that we're losing freedoms as quickly as we're gaining them. "It's not a revolution if nobody loses," he says, and he goes on to describe three kinds of losers: the workers whose industries are undermined by the free dissemination of information they used to control; the journalists who, like those 15th-century scribes, have lost their professional identity and prestige; and the people who come to harm when "bad groups"--his deftly apolitical and therefore inoffensive example is pro-anorexia support groups--are able to assemble and distribute information more easily. In general, however, you get the sense that he doesn't mind sacrificing these losers on the altar of change.

But there is another, larger kind of loss happening, and in order to understand it, we might turn to the tech-trend literature of an earlier era.

In Berlin in the mid-1930s, the German­-Jewish Marxist literary and cultural critic ­Walter Benjamin (who killed himself in 1940, lest the Nazis have that pleasure) wrote a sprawling yet intensely epigrammatic essay called "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," which is assigned in order to confuse nearly every college student who takes a comp-lit class in America today. Freshly translated (it used to be called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which, although more lumberingly Teutonic, has the virtue of evoking an image of robot sex) and newly packaged with an assortment of his other "writings on media" in a hipster-friendly paperback, Benjamin's best-known work is ... well, as they say on Facebook, it's complicated. Man, is it ever complicated. The essay begins by describing the ways film and photography have changed human perception. Benjamin argues that because such exact simulacra of reality can be mass-distributed and mass-consumed, we have a new, more distant relationship to authentic reality--and he concludes that these changes in perception clear a path for fascism.

Not exactly cheerleadery, then. And while it's easy to be distracted by Benjamin's dusty examples--Chaplin's films and Picasso's paintings--and therefore lulled into thinking he's describing a different world from Shirky's ... well, don't be. Substitute blogs and social-networking platforms and Twitter and YouTube and Wikipedia for film and photography, and the nearly century-old essay becomes a relevant, piercing alarm.

In celebrating the tools we're all thoughtlessly adopting, Shirky ably demonstrates how useful they are in allowing us to share our common interests and keep track of each other's whereabouts. Thousands of Xena: Warrior Princess fans, previously unknown to each other, are uniting at Internet-organized meetups. Text-message blogging platform Twitter, normally just a way of bragging about the party you're currently attending in real time, can become a tool of dissent if you happen to become a political prisoner (and somehow manage to hang onto your phone, as an activist blogger recently did in Cairo). Shirky even believes that technology is creating and enabling "love"; when he talks about the hundreds of thousands of people who are collaboratively building Wikipedia, he says they "love one another in its context." He fails to mention--or maybe he fails to notice--that the "love" and "freedom" he describes don't mean quite what they did back when our meat acquaintances outnumbered our Facebook "friends."

Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ("Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!"), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on--talking, being introduced to new people by friends--are threatened.

These concerns probably aren't foremost in the minds of Shirky's readers, who are probably just trying to figure out how to wield more influence in the new world he describes. But it's worth thinking about the kind of book that Shirky, a lucid enough thinker and writer, would compose if he were more concerned with the uses of online "love" and "freedom."

And if we're concerned about that, what can we do? What would Benjamin do, besides worry about what's lost every time a Tumblr post is reblogged?

Here's something to try as (trust me!) a pointless experiment: cease to log in to your instant messenger for a week. You'll find out quickly that for some of the "buddies" on your buddy list, you immediately cease, for all intents and purposes, to exist. Or go one step further: delete your profile from Facebook and stop blogging. Stop reading blogs. Stop attending social events you find out about online. See how your world shrinks, and if you're brave, see if you can stick with your foray into social-media abstention until you start to see your world opening back up again--maybe in different ways.

Temporarily pretending that the world hasn't changed may be instructive, but it is neither Shirkian nor Benjaminian. As Walter Benjamin probably wouldn't put it, there's no point in clinging to what used to seem to be real. But I'm still waiting for the author who, without being like the guy who defended scribes in print, finds a way to say that we shouldn't let this stuff run amok just because it can and it wants to. Because it does want to.

Emily Gould was an editor at Gawker.com from September 2006 to November 2007. in may, she wrote a cover story, "Exposed," for the New York Times Magazine about her time blogging for Gawker. Free Press will publish her first book--of autobiographical stories--in 2010.

September/October 2008

"I Just Called to Say I Love You"

Cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space.

By Jonathan Franzen

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I'm still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw--this is just the way life is now.

I'm not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late 20th century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs. And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise ("pink noise") that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor's television set: I love them. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinema-goers, so many open-mouthed crunchers of popcorn: yes.

Credit: Christina Paige

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives. And so, although my very favorite gadgets are actively privacy enhancing, I look kindly on pretty much any development that doesn't force me to interact with it. If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

The developments I have a problem with are the insults that keep on insulting, the injuries of yesteryear that keep on giving pain. Airport TV, for example: it seems to be actively watched by about one traveler in ten (unless there's football on) while creating an active nuisance for the other nine. Year after year; in airport after airport; a small but apparently permanent diminution in the quality of the average traveler's life. Or, another example, the planned obsolescence of great software and its replacement by bad software. I'm still unable to accept that the best word-processing program ever written, WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS, won't even run on any computer I can buy now. Oh, sure, in theory you can still run it in Windows' little DOS-emulating window, but the tininess and graphical crudeness of that emulator are like a deliberate insult on Microsoft's part to those of us who would prefer not to use a feature-heavy behemoth. WordPerfect 5.0 was hopelessly primitive for desktop publishing but unsurpassable for writers who wanted only to write. Elegant, bug-free, negligible in size, it was bludgeoned out of existence by the obese, intrusive, monopolistic, crash-prone Word. If I hadn't been collecting old 386s and 486s in my office closet, I wouldn't be able to use WordPerfect at all by now. And already I'm down to my last old 486. And yet people have the nerve to be annoyed with me if I won't send them texts in a format intelligible to all-powerful Word. We live in a Word world now, Grampaw. Time to take your GOI pill.

But these are mere annoyances. The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance--the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today--is the cell phone.

Just 10 years ago, New York City (where I live) still abounded with collectively maintained public spaces in which citizens demonstrated respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it. The world 10 years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late 1990s, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn't you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I'd quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother's hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in icky little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.

Needless to say, there wasn't any contest. The cell phone wasn't one of those modern developments, like Ritalin or oversized umbrellas, for which significant pockets of civilian resistance hearteningly persist. Its triumph was swift and total. Its abuses were lamented and bitched about in essays and columns and letters to various editors, and then lamented and bitched about more trenchantly when the abuses seemed only to be getting worse, but that was the end of it. The complaints had been registered, some small token adjustments had been made (the "quiet car" on Amtrak trains; discreet little signs poignantly pleading for restraint in restaurants and gyms), and cellular technology was then free to continue doing its damage without fear of further criticism, because further criticism would be unfresh and uncool. Grampaw.

But just because the problem is familiar to us now doesn't mean steam stops issuing from the ears of drivers trapped behind a guy chatting on his phone in a passing lane and staying perfectly abreast of a vehicle in the slow lane. And yet: everything in our commercial culture tells the chatty driver that he is in the right and tells everybody else that we are in the wrong--that we are failing to get with the attractively priced program of freedom and mobility and unlimited minutes. Commercial culture tells us that if we're sore with the chatty driver it must be because we're not having as good a time as he is. What is wrong with us, anyway? Why can't we lighten up a little and take out our own phones, with our own Friends and Family plans, and start having a better time ourselves, right there in the passing lane?

Socially retarded people don't suddenly start acting more adult when social critics are peer-pressured into silence. They only get ruder. One currently worsening national plague is the shopper who remains engrossed in a call throughout a transaction with a checkout clerk. The typical combination in my own neighborhood, in Manhattan, involves a young white woman, recently graduated from someplace expensive, and a local black or Hispanic woman of roughly the same age but fewer advantages. It is, of course, a liberal vanity to expect your checkout clerk to interact with you or to appreciate the scrupulousness of your determination to interact with her. Given the repetitive and low-paying nature of her job, she's allowed to treat you with boredom or indifference; at worst, it's unprofessional of her. But this does not relieve you of your own moral obligation to acknowledge her existence as a person. And while it's true that some clerks don't seem to mind being ignored, a notably large percentage do become visibly irritated or angered or saddened when a customer is unable to tear herself off her phone for even two seconds of direct interaction. Needless to say, the offender herself, like the chatty freeway driver, is blissfully unaware of pissing anybody off. In my experience, the longer the line behind her, the more likely it is she'll pay for her $1.98 purchase with a credit card. And not the tap-and-go microchip kind of credit card, either, but the wait-for-the-printed-receipt-and-then-(only then)-with-zombiesh-clumsiness-begin-shifting-the-cell-phone-from-one-ear-to-the-other-and-awkwardly-pin-the-phone-with-ear-to-shoulder-while-signing-the-receipt-and-continuing-to-express-doubt-about-whether-she-really-feels-like-meeting-up-with-that-Morgan-Stanley-guy-Zachary-at-the-Etats-Unis-wine-bar-again-tonight kind of credit card.

There is, to be sure, one positive social consequence of these worsening misbehaviors. The abstract notion of civilized public spaces, as rare resources worth defending, may be all but dead, but there's still consolation to be found in the momentary ad hoc microcommunities of fellow sufferers that bad behaviors create. To look out your car window and see the steam coming out of another driver's ears, or to meet the eyes of a pissed-off checkout clerk and to shake your head along with her: it makes you feel a little less alone.

Which is why, of all the worsening varieties of bad cell-phone behavior, the one that most deeply irritates me is the one that seems, because it is ostensibly victimless, to irritate nobody else. I'm talking about the habit, uncommon 10 years ago, now ubiquitous, of ending cell-phone conversations by braying the words "LOVE YOU!" Or, even more oppressive and grating: "I LOVE YOU!" It makes me want to go and live in China, where I don't understand the language. It makes me want to scream.

The cellular component of my irritation is straightforward. I simply do not, while buying socks at the Gap, or standing in a ticket line and pursuing my private thoughts, or trying to read a novel on a plane that's being boarded, want to be imaginatively drawn into the sticky world of some nearby human being's home life. The very essence of the cell phone's hideousness, as a social phenomenon--the bad news that stays bad news--is that it enables and encourages the inflicting of the personal and individual on the public and communal. And there is no higher-caliber utterance than "I love you"--nothing worse that an individual can inflict on a communal public space. Even "Fuck you, dickhead" is less invasive, since it's the kind of thing that angry people do sometimes shout in public, and it can just as easily be directed at a stranger.

My friend Elisabeth assures me that the new national plague of love yous is a good thing: a healthy reaction against the repressed family dynamics of our Protestant childhoods some decades ago. What could be wrong, Elisabeth asks, with telling your mother that you love her, or with hearing from her that she loves you? What if one of you dies before you can speak again? Isn't it nice that we can say these things to each other so freely now?

I do here admit the possibility that, compared with everyone else on the airport concourse, I am an extraordinarily cold and unloving person; that the sudden overwhelming sensation of loving somebody (a friend, a spouse, a parent, a sibling), which to me is such an important and signal sensation that I'm at pains not to wear out the phrase that best expresses it, is for other people so common and routine and easily achieved that it can be reëxperienced and reëxpressed many times in a single day without significant loss of power.

It's also possible, however, that too-frequent habitual repe­tition empties phrases of their meaning. Joni Mitchell, in the last verse of "Both Sides Now," referenced the solemn amazement of saying I love you "right out loud": of giving vocal birth to such intensity of feeling. Stevie Wonder, in lyrics written 17 years later, sings of calling somebody up on an ordinary afternoon simply to say "I love you," and being Stevie Wonder (who probably really is a more loving person than I am), he half succeeds in making me believe in his sincerity--at least until the last line of the chorus, where he finds it necessary to add: "And I mean it from the bottom of my heart." No such avowal is thinkable for the person who really does mean something from the bottom of his heart.

And, just so, when I'm buying those socks at the Gap and the mom in line behind me shouts "I love you!" into her little phone, I am powerless not to feel that something is being performed; overperformed; publicly performed; defiantly inflicted. Yes, a lot of domestic things get shouted in public which really aren't intended for public consumption; yes, people get carried away. But the phrase "I love you" is too important and loaded, and its use as a sign-off too self-conscious, for me to believe I'm being made to hear it accidentally. If the mother's declaration of love had genuine, private emotional weight, wouldn't she take at least a little care to guard it from public hearing? If she truly meant what she was saying, from the bottom of her heart, wouldn't she have to say it quietly? Overhearing her, as a stranger, I have the feeling of being made party to an aggressive assertion of entitlement. At a minimum, the person is saying to me and to everyone else present: "My emotions and my family are more important to me than your social comfort." And also, often enough, I suspect: "I want you all to know that unlike many people, including my cold bastard of a father, I am the kind of person who always tells my loved ones that I love them."

Or am I, in my admittedly now rather lunatic-sounding irritation, simply projecting all this?

The cell phone came of age on September 11, 2001. Imprinted that day on our collective consciousness was the image of cell phones as conduits of intimacy for the desperate. In every too-loud I love you that I hear nowadays, as in the more general national orgy of connectedness--the imperative for parents and children to connect by phone once or twice or five or ten times daily--it's difficult not to hear an echo of those terrible, entirely appropriate, heartbreaking I love yous uttered on the four doomed planes and in the two doomed towers. And it's precisely this echo, the fact that it's an echo, the sentimen­tality of it, that so irritates me.

My own experience of 9/11 was anomalous for the lack of television in it. At nine in the morning, I got a phone call from my book editor, who, from his office window, had just seen the second plane hit the towers. I did immediately go to the nearest TV, in the conference room of the real-estate office downstairs from my apartment, and watch with a group of agents as first one tower and then the other went down. But then my girlfriend came home and we spent the rest of the day listening to the radio, checking the Internet, reassuring our families, and watching from our roof and from the ­middle of Lexington Avenue (which was filled with pedestrians streaming uptown) as the dust and smoke at the bottom of Manhattan diffused into a sickening pall. In the evening, we walked down to 42nd Street and met up with an out-of-town friend and found an unremarkable Italian restaurant in the West 40s which happened to be serving dinner. Every table was packed with people drinking heavily; the mood was wartime. I got another brief glimpse of a TV screen, this one showing the face of George W. Bush, as we were departing through the restaurant's bar. "He looks like a scared mouse," somebody said. Sitting on a 6 train at Grand Central, waiting for it to move, we watched a New York commuter angrily complain to a conductor about the lack of express service to the Bronx.

Three nights later, from 11:00 p.m. to nearly 3:00 a.m., I sat in a frigid room at ABC News from which I could see my fellow New Yorker David Halberstam and speak by video link to Maya Angelou and a couple of other out-of-town writers while we waited to offer Ted Koppel a literary perspective on Tuesday morning's attacks. The wait was not short. Footage of the attacks and the ensuing collapses and fires was shown again and again, interspersed with long segments on the emotional toll on ordinary citizens and their impressionable children. Every once in a while, one or two of us writers would have 60 seconds to say something writerly before the coverage reverted to more carnage and wrenching interviews with friends and family of the dead and the missing. I spoke four times in three and a half hours. The second time, I was asked to confirm widespread reports that Tuesday's attacks had profoundly changed the personality of New Yorkers. I could not confirm these reports. I said that the faces I had seen were somber, not angry, and I described seeing people shopping in the stores in my neighborhood on Wednesday afternoon, buying fall clothes. Ted Koppel, in his response, made clear that I'd failed at the task I'd been waiting half the night to perform. With a frown, he said that his own impression was very different: that the attacks had indeed profoundly changed the personality of New York City.

Naturally, I assumed that I was speaking truth and Koppel merely retransmitting received opinion. But Koppel had been watching TV and I had not. I didn't understand that the worst damage to the country was being done not by the pathogen but by the immune system's massive overresponse to it, because I didn't have a TV. I was mentally comparing Tuesday's death toll with other tallies of violent death--3,000 Americans killed in traffic accidents in the 30 days preceding September 11--because, not seeing the images, I thought the numbers mattered. I was devoting energy to imagining, or resisting imagining, the horror of sitting in a window seat while your plane came in low along the West Side Highway, or of being trapped on the 95th floor and hearing the steel structure below you begin to groan and rumble, while the rest of the country was experiencing actual real-time trauma by watching the same footage over and over. And so I was not in need of--was, for a while, not even aware of--the national televised group therapy session, the vast techno-hugathon, that unfolded in the following days and weeks and months in response to the trauma of exposure to televised images.

What I could see was the sudden, mysterious, disastrous sentimentalization of American public discourse. And just as I can't help blaming cellular technology when people pour parental or filial affection into their phones and rudeness onto every stranger within earshot, I can't help blaming media technology for the national foregrounding of the personal. Unlike in, say, 1941, when the United States responded to a terrible attack with collective resolve and discipline and sacrifice, in 2001 we had terrific visuals. We had amateur footage and could break it down frame by frame. We had screens to bring the violence raw into every bedroom in the country, and voice mail to record the desperate final calls of the doomed, and late-model psychology to explicate and heal our trauma. But as for what the attacks actually signified, and what a sensible response to them might look like, attitudes varied. This was the wonderful thing about digital technology: No more hurtful censoring of anybody's feelings! Everybody entitled to express his or her own opinion! Whether or not Saddam Hussein had personally bought plane tickets for the hijackers therefore remained open to lively debate. What everybody agreed to agree on, instead, was that the families of 9/11's victims had a right to approve or veto plans for the memorial at Ground Zero. And everybody could share in the pain experienced by the families of the fallen cops and firefighters. And everybody agreed that irony was dead. The bad, empty irony of the '90s was simply "no longer possible" post-9/11; we'd stepped forward into a new age of sincerity.

On the plus side, Americans in 2001 were a lot better at saying "I love you" to their children than their fathers or grandfathers had been. But competing economically? Pulling together as a nation? Defeating our enemies? Forming strong international alliances? Perhaps a bit of a minus side there.

My parents met two years after Pearl Harbor, in the fall of 1943, and within a few months they were exchanging cards and letters. My father worked for the Great Northern Railway and was often on the road, in small towns, inspecting or repairing bridges, while my mother stayed in Minneapolis and worked as a receptionist. Of the letters from him to her in my possession, the oldest is from Valentine's Day 1944. He was in Fairview, Montana, and my mother had sent him a Valentine's card in the style of all her cards in the year leading up to their marriage: sweetly drawn babies or toddlers or baby animals voicing sweet sentiments. The front of her valentine (which my father likewise saved) shows a pigtailed little girl and a blushing little boy standing beside each other with their eyes bashfully averted and their hands tucked bashfully behind their backs.

I wish I were a little rock,

'Cause then when I grew older,

Maybe I would find some day

I was a little "boulder."

Inside the card is a drawing of the same two kids, but holding hands now, with my mother's cursive signature ("Irene") at the feet of the little girl. A second verse reads:

And that would really help a lot

It sure would suit me fine,

For I'd be "bould" enough to say,

"Please be my Valentine."

My father's letter in response was postmarked Fairview, Montana, February 14.

Tuesday Evening

Dear Irene,

I'm sorry to have disappointed you on Valentine's Day; I did remember but after not being able to get one at the drugstore, I felt a little foolish about asking at the grocery or hardware store. I'm sure they have heard about Valentine's Day out here. Your card fit the situation out here perfectly and I'm not sure if it were intentional or accidental, but I guess I did tell about our rock troubles. Today we ran out of rock so I'm wishing for little rocks, big rocks or any kind of rocks as there is nothing we can do until we get some. There is little enough for me to do when the contractor is working and now there is nothing at all. Today I hiked out to the bridge where we are working just to kill time and get a little exercise; it's about four miles which is far enough with a sharp wind blowing. Unless we get rock on the freight in the morning, I'm going to sit right here and read philosophy; it hardly seems right that I should get paid for putting in that kind of day. About the only other pastime around here is to sit in the hotel lobby and take in the town gossip, and the old timers who haunt the place can sure put it out. You would get a kick out of it because there is sure a broad cross section of life represented here--from the local doctor down to the town drunk. And the last is probably the most interesting; I heard that he taught at the University of N.D. at one time, and he seems really to be quite an intelligent person, even when drunk. Normally the talk is pretty rough, about like Steinbeck must have used for a pattern, but this evening there came in a great big woman who made herself right at home. It all sort of makes me realize how sheltered a life we city people live. I grew up in a small town and feel quite at home here but I somehow now seem to view things differently. You will hear more of this.

I hope to get back to St. Paul on Saturday night but cannot tell for certain now. I'll call you when I get in.

With all my love,

Earl

My father had recently turned 29. It's impossible to know how my mother, in her innocence and optimism, received his letter at the time, but in general, considering the woman I grew up knowing, I can say that it was absolutely not the sort of letter she would have wanted from her romantic interest. Her valentine's cutely punning conceit taken literally as a reference to track ballast? And she, who spent her whole life shuddering free of the hotel bar where her father had worked as a bartender, getting a kick out of hearing "rough talk" from the town drunk? Where were the endearments? Where were the dreamy discussions of love? It was obvious that my father still had a lot to learn about her.

To me, though, his letter seems full of love. Love for my mother, certainly: he's tried to get her a valentine, he's read her card carefully, he wishes she were with him, he has ideas he wants to share with her, he's sending all his love, he'll call her as soon as he's back. But love, too, for the larger world: for the varieties of people in it, for small towns and big cities, for philosophy and literature, for hard work and fair pay, for conversation, for thinking, for long walks in a sharp wind, for carefully chosen words and perfect spelling. The letter reminds me of the many things I loved in my father, his decency, his intelligence, his unexpected humor, his curiosity, his conscientiousness, his reserve and dignity. Only when I place it alongside the valentine from my mother, with its big-eyed babies and preoccupation with pure sentiment, does my focus shift to the decades of mutual disappointment that followed my parents' first few years of half-seeing bliss.

Late in life, my mother complained to me that my father had never told her that he loved her. And it may literally be true that he never spoke the big three words to her--I certainly never heard him do it. But it's definitely not true that he never wrote the words. One reason it took me years to summon the courage to read their old correspondence is that the first letter of my father's that I glanced at, after my mother died, began with an endearment ("Irenie") that I had never heard him utter in the 35 years I knew him, and it ended with a declaration ("I love you, Irene") that was more than I could stand to see. It sounded nothing like him, and so I buried all the letters in a trunk in my brother's attic. More recently, when I retrieved the letters and managed to read through them all, I discovered that my father had in fact declared his love dozens of times, using the big three words, both before and after he married my mother. But maybe, even then, he'd been incapable of saying the words out loud, and maybe this was why, in my mother's memory, he'd never "said" them at all. It's also possible that his written declarations had sounded as strange and untrue to his character in the 1940s as they now sound to me, and that my mother, in her complaints, was remembering a deeper truth now concealed by his seemingly affectionate words. It's possible that, in guilty response to the onslaught of sentiment he was getting from her notes to him ("I love you with all my heart," "With oh so much love," etc.), he'd felt obliged to perform romantic love in return, or to try to perform it, the way he'd tried (sort of) to buy a valentine in Fairview, Montana.

"Both Sides Now," in the Judy Collins version, was the first pop song that ever stuck in my head. It was getting heavy radio play when I was eight or nine, and its reference to declaring love "right out loud," combined with the crush I had on Judy Collins's voice, helped to ensure that for me the primary import of "I love you" was sexual. I did eventually live through the '70s and become capable, in rare accesses of emotion, of telling my brothers and many of my best male friends that I loved them. But throughout grade school and junior high, the words had only one meaning for me. "I love you" was the phrase I wanted to see scrawled on a note from the cutest girl in the class or to hear whispered in the woods on a school picnic. It happened only a couple of times, in those years, that a girl I liked actually said or wrote this to me. But when it did happen, it came as a shot of pure adrenaline. Even after I got to college and started reading Wallace Stevens and found him making fun, in "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," of indiscriminately love-seeking people like me--

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words--

--those wished-for words continued to signify the opening of a mouth, the offering of a body, the promise of intoxicating intimacy.

And so it was highly awkward that the person I constantly heard these words from was my mother. She was the only woman in a house of males, and she lived with such an excess of unrequitable feeling that she couldn't help reaching for romantic expressions of it. The cards and endearments that she bestowed on me were identical in spirit to the ones she'd once bestowed on my father. Long before I was born, her effusions had come to seem intolerably babyish to my father. To me, though, they weren't nearly babyish enough. I went to elaborate lengths to avoid reciprocating them. I survived many stretches of my childhood, the long weeks in which the two of us were alone in the house together, by clinging to crucial distinctions in intensity between the phrases "I love you"; "I love you, too"; and "Love you." The one thing that was vital was never, ever to say "I love you" or "I love you, Mom." The least painful alternative was a muttered, essentially inaudible "Love you." But "I love you, too," if pronounced rapidly enough and with enough emphasis on the "too," which implied rote responsiveness, could carry me through many an awkward moment. I don't remember that she ever specifically called me out on my mumbling or gave me a hard time if (as sometimes happened) I was incapable of responding with anything more than an evasive grunt. But she also never told me that saying "I love you" was simply something she enjoyed doing because her heart was full of feeling, and that I shouldn't feel I had to say "I love you" in return every time. And so, to this day, when I'm assaulted by the shouting of "I love you" into a cell phone, I hear coercion.

My father, despite writing letters filled with life and curiosity, saw nothing wrong with consigning my mother to four decades of cooking and cleaning at home while he was enjoying his agency out in the world of men. It seems to be the rule, in both the small world of marriage and the big world of American life, that those without agency have sentimentality and vice versa. The various post-9/11 hysterias, both the plague of I love yous and the widespread fear and hatred of the ragheads, were hysterias of the powerless and overwhelmed. If my mother had had greater scope for accomplishment, she might have tailored her sentiments more realistically to their objects.

Cold or repressed or sexist though my father may appear by contemporary standards, I'm grateful that he never told me, in so many words, that he loved me. My father loved privacy, which is to say: he respected the public sphere. He believed in restraint and protocol and reason, because without them, he believed, it was impossible for a society to debate and make decisions in its best interest. It might have been nice, especially for me, if he'd learned how to be more demonstrative with my mother. But every time I hear one of those brayed parental cellular I love yous nowadays, I feel lucky to have had the dad I did. He loved his kids more than anything. And to know that he felt it and couldn't say it; to know that he could trust me to know he felt it and never expect him to say it: this was the very core and substance of the love I felt for him. A love that I in turn was careful never to declare out loud to him.

And yet: this was the easy part. Between me and the place where my dad is now--i.e., dead--nothing but silence can be transmitted. Nobody has more privacy than the dead. My dad and I aren't saying a whole lot less to each other now than we did in many a year when he was alive. The person I find myself actively missing--mentally arguing with, wanting to show stuff to, wishing to see in my apartment, making fun of, feeling remorse about--is my mother. The part of me that's angered by cellular intrusions comes from my father. The part of me that loves my BlackBerry and wants to lighten up and join the world comes from my mother. She was the more modern of the two of them, and although he, not she, was the one with agency, she ended up on the winning side. If she were still alive and still living in St. Louis, and if you happened to be sitting next to me in Lambert Airport, waiting for a New York-bound flight, you might have to suffer through hearing me tell her that I love her. I would keep my voice down, though.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of the novels The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, and The Corrections, as well as the nonfiction works How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone.

Column: How to ensure online shopping is s

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Column: How to ensure online shopping is safe

By Associated Press

Q: With so much talk about Internet security problems and credit card fraud, how do I protect myself while shopping online?

A: One of the biggest risks in shopping online is clicking on a link to what appears to be a legitimate site but is, in fact, a forgery run by criminals interested in your credit card number and other personal information. An estimated $3.2 billion was lost to such "phishing" sites in the United States last year, according to a survey by Gartner Inc.

Watching out for fraudulent sites isn't hard, and is the crucial first step in a secure online shopping experience. The key in most cases is to type in the Web site's address independently, and not to follow links sent in e-mails, as those can often be malicious spam sent by the creators of the bogus sites.

Most Web browsers will alert you when you're navigating to known phishing sites or those serving up viruses, but the key word there is "known." Many harmful sites are set up and dismantled within 24 hours, so it's often a cat-and-mouse game to identify and block them before the criminals have a chance to inflict too much damage.

Also look for your browser's address bar to turn green; that's a sign the site you're visiting has paid for -- and passed -- an extra layer of background checks to verify it's a legitimate business. The so-called Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer certificate is a new feature that also indicates the site is sending your data securely using proper encryption methods.

If a site doesn't have that feature, look for the traditional SSL padlock when you get to a site's order page, and click on that if you have doubts about the site's authenticity. It will identify the site's owner and the agency that issued the SSL certificate. The padlocks are not always foolproof, however, because scammers can spoof them.

Once you're comfortable that the site you're visiting is authentic, the question becomes: how do you pay for things?

Security experts recommend that you never use a debit card, because if criminals intercept the information, any charges are taken directly from your account and it takes longer to get the money back than if it were stolen from a credit card.

Experts also say it's helpful to have a dedicated credit card for online purchases. That makes it easier to monitor for fraudulent activity, since the payments aren't mixed up with daily purchases.

Banks are excellent at resolving cases of credit card fraud quickly, whereas it may take days or weeks to replenish a debit card account that's been drained by thieves.

Security experts also suggest setting up a separate e-mail account to register for online shopping sites, and use a different password for that account than your regular e-mail account.

The danger of linking all your online purchases to your primary e-mail account is that if hackers are able to steal your username and password for that site, they can then use that information to infiltrate your e-mail and get passwords for other accounts. A common way of doing that is to use the "forgot my password" feature on many sites and have the information e-mailed back to an account that they now secretly control.