Slashdot Mirror

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including the "Little Red Hoax", a follow up on the Firefly post-mortem, another episode in the Intelligent Design battle, the EU's Galileo project gets off the ground, deconstructing AOL's decision to go with Google over Microsoft, endgame for the Blackberry patent case and more. Read on for details.

A little red hoax. MyNameIsFred writes "In an earlier Slashdot story, it was reported that a student was investigated for requesting Mao's Little Red Book on inter-library loan. It appears that the story was a hoax."

Firefly franchise death greatly exaggerated. Kazzahdrane writes "Joss Whedon has spoken out against the Entertainment Weekly that claimed he has turned his back on the Firefly/Serenity franchise. From his post at Whedonesque: 'All right, now I have to jump in and set the record straight. EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had "closure", what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips." But EW's always got to put some weird negative spin on it.'"

Intelligent Design tantamount to teaching religion. rcs1000 writes "After much deliberation Judge John Jones has ruled that teaching Intelligent Design is tantamount to teaching religion. The judge was pretty forthright, arguing that 'it is unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.'"

EU launches first Galileo navigation satellite. Xserv writes "The EU launched the first in the series of Galileo Navigation Satellites signifying the start of a lessening of dependency on US Military GPS Systems in Europe. The new Galileo system is touted to be much more accurate and will also be more accessible on higher latitude zones where the US GPS system is known to be less than ideal."

Why AOL chose Google over Microsoft. gambit3 writes to tell us that the Wall Street Journal has a nice article deconstructing AOL's decision to go with Google instead of Microsoft. From the article: "Two weeks ago, when Time Warner Inc. was on the cusp of signing a sweeping online deal with Microsoft Corp., a team of executives from the media company's AOL unit traveled to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to make sure everything was in order. When the executives returned, they reported back to Time Warner's top deal negotiator, Olaf Olafsson, with some less-than-satisfactory findings. They had found some of Microsoft's technology to be clunky, while the contemplated joint venture with the software king contained what they thought were financial pitfalls."

Endgame in Blackberry patent case. waynegoode writes "The New York Times is reporting that a recent decision could spell the end of the NTP vs. RIM Blackberry case. The US Patent Office apparently took the unusual step of telling NTP & RIM it will likely reject all 5 of NTP's patents, meaning the basis for NTP's lawsuit and it's billion dollar claim will most likely disappear. This puts pressure on the judge to not issue an injunction against RIM but to instead delay until the USPTO gets around to actually rejecting the patents."

Katrina aftermath still making waves. An anonymous reader writes "Approximately 50 people have been indicted in relation to a scheme that drained almost $200,000 from a Red Cross fund designed to put money into the hands of Hurricane Katrina victims. From the article: 'Seventeen of the accused worked at the Red Cross claim center in Bakersfield, Calif., which handled calls from storm victims across the country and authorized cash payments to them. The others were the workers' relatives and friends, prosecutors said last week.'"

More cloning doubts emerge. LukePieStalker writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that the South Korean cloning team whose troubles have recently been chronicled here on Slashdot used "borrowed" photos in their Science journal article that "appear in the journal Molecules and Cells, in a research article by another Korean team, submitted before the Science paper". In the earlier article, the cells in the photo are described as having been created without cloning."

Via GamePolitics, a Washington Post article that for once paints gaming as an activity that can bring people together. Apparently you can even learn thing from games. From the article: "I'm sure that not all games are good for you, just as not all movies or newspaper articles improve your intellect or morals. Williams, the professor at the University of Illinois, has studied the impact of computer games on social patterns, and he finds results both good and troubling. But games that teach 11-year-olds about inflation or history can't be all evil, and they may be an improvement on Clue or Monopoly for all I know. Besides, kids clearly enjoy them. That surely ought to count for something."

An anonymous reader writes "A worm called 'Dasher' is exploiting a flaw in Windows that Microsoft issued a patch for in October, dropping keyloggers on infected machines, according to F-Secure. The SANS Internet Storm Center warned earlier this week about the weird traffic generated by the first version of this worm, which apparently was crippled by programming errors. Washingtonpost.com has some information that indicates the worm appears to have originated in China. It appears from the Microsoft advisory that Dasher is a threat mainly to Windows 2000 users, although it could impact Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP users who aren't running SP2." Update: 12/17 17:20 GMT by Z : Fixed link to SANS center.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft issued two security updates today, one of which fixes at least four flaws in its Internet Explorer browser, including one for which an exploit was released over Thanksgiving that is now being used by a handful of porn sites to install spyware, etc. According to Washingtonpost.com, the IE patch also removes a component left behind by a patch from Sony BMG designed to remove some of the more dangerous features of anti-piracy software installed by Sony BMG music CDs. Researchers found that the Sony patch changed settings in IE so that any Web site could install software on those machines."

DC Jeff writes "The Washington Post reports that drinking two cups of coffee or tea daily may reduce the risk of liver disease. From the article: 'The study of nearly 10,000 people showed that those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day.'"

PenguinRadio writes "The Washington Post is writing about Barbara St. Hilaire, a 69-year-old grandma and a fanatic video game player. Apparently, the 'AARP generation' of gamers accounts for about 19 percent of all computer and console gamers. St. Hilaire is, on the internet, Old Grandma Hard Core (previously mentioned on Slashdot). The OGHC blog has gotten a ton of traffic in recent weeks, has been featured on Web sites around the world, and has been hired as a 'senior reporter' for MTV.com to talk about games." From the article: "There is an AARP generation of gamers, a group that logs on to Gamegeezers.com and would qualify for a senior citizen discount if game stores offered them. ... They play a variety of games -- from laid-back, relaxing fare such as solitaire and mah-jongg, to first-person shooters (military-themed titles are hits)."

Thib writes "As widely reported everywhere, University of Kansas chairman of religious studies Paul Mirecki has withdrawn the "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies" course that he was preparing for the upcoming Spring semester. From the AP: "Mirecki recently sent an e-mail to members of a student organization in which he referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course depicting intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." He later apologized, and did so again Thursday in a statement issued by the university." Mirecki was inspired to offer the course after the Kansas Board of Education moved to back intelligent design in state science standards in November."

turbosaab writes "Shortly after learning of the New Orleans plan for free city-wide wireless internet, Bellsouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate a damaged building to be used for police headquarters. According to the Washington Post, 'Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert.'"

xlilacx asks: "The video game industry is worth $25 billion, and predicted to rival the global music industry in the next 10 years. Even Grandma is joining in on the fun. My husband and I bought three video game retail stores two months ago, and so far sales are dismal (down 25% from last year's sales), which seems to be an industry trend. I've noticed a few things that are contibuting to our lack of profits: the people who weren't able to get an XBox 360 have decided they will wait to get one (which most likely will be after Christmas), and they will not buy any games for their old systems in the meantime; people are automatically conditioned to go to the EB-Games and GameStop stores at the malls, even if they give less in trade-ins and have horrible customer servicr; lastly, kids come in with piles of junk games (Madden 2001, etc..), and get enough store credit to buy the latest greatest game that we only mark up like 5%-10%. I'd like to ask Slashdot readers if these observations are a good reflection of the mentality of video-game buyers everywhere, and what suggestions they have for a small ma-and-pa video game store. With all the huge retailers in the video-game market and the EB/GameStop merger, is there a place left for the local game store?"

abscondment writes "An error in the way Internet Explorer parses CSS files has been discovered by Matan Gillon of Israel. The flaw can be exploited by any website, and used to access personal information via Google's Desktop Search program. Of course, Google contends that this is a flaw with IE, and not their search software."

PlayfullyClever writes "A senior telecommunications executive at BellSouth, said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates. Some say Small Firms Could Be Shut Out of Market Championed by BellSouth Officer. William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Next up, well dressed men go door to door collecting their monthly "protection money". 'It sure would be tragic if your users started getting 1500ms ping times, wouldn't it mister dot com?'

I've spent seven years working as a writer and editor for Slashdot's parent company. During this time I've been to at least a dozen mainstream journalists' and editors' conferences where the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the Internet?" You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits. But they haven't. In this essay I will tell you why they've failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the Internet dominates the news business. I'm going to use the Bradenton Herald as an example, not because it's a bad newspaper but because I live in the middle of its circulation area. The Herald is a typical Knight Ridder small-city newspaper in every way except one: it serves Manatee County, an area with a fast-growing population where most new residents are old enough that they grew up reading newspapers every day. Despite these favorable factors, the Herald's circulation has declined by 3.5% in the last year. Of course, newspaper circulation declines are now normal rather than exceptional. Other newspapers have done far worse, with the San Francisco Chronicle recording a 16.4% drop in the last six months alone.

Readership vs. Circulation

Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers. The Boston Globe also stopped a giveaway program and suffered a circulation decline as a result, although only about half as big a loss as the Chron's, but the Globe's marketing people have said that only half of the loss came from stopping the giveaways, and blamed the rest of it on the usual suspects, notably TV and the Internet.

These figures only measure paper newspaper circulation. They don't include Web readership, which generally seems to be trending (slowly) upwards on newspaper Web sites. Circulation figures can also be misleading because they only measure the total number of newspapers distributed, not the kind of people who read them. And readership quality can often be more important, in a business sense, than quantity. This is especially true for those newspapers (namely, just about all of them) that rely on advertising for the bulk of their income.

By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the very bottom of the economic pile. Online readers are also likely to be more open to new experiences, products, and services than those who don't feel they need to use the Internet -- which by some estimates may be as many as half of all households within the Herald's circulation area, which has a higher percentage of retirees than all but a few other U.S. counties.

Journalism professor Douglas Fisher and media executive Alan Mutter have both talked about intentional circulation losses on their blogs. In his post, Fisher says, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the Web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person -- sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."

Meanwhile, when newspapers talk about readership vs. circulation, they're typically trying to estimate how many people read each copy of their print product (pdf download) rather than come up with a total picture of their publication's readership, including its online presence. This is a mistake. Instead of treating their Web sites like unwelcome stepchildren, newspapers should turn them into their primary method of news delivery -- and teach their reporters, editors, and ad sales people how to work effectively with this new -- to them -- medium.

Slashdot Lessons

1. No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.

Imagine a newspaper with a space for comments below each story on its Web site. This Slashdot story has comments directly attached to it, not tucked away from public view the way the Bradenton Herald's site hides reader comments on Bulletin Boards that aren't directly connected to any of the paper's articles or editorials. To make matters worse, the Herald's Bulletin Boards require a separate login to post. Even if you're a logged-in reader you must put in your username and password again to use them.

As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over. Even the Herald's single (hard to find) blog, maintained by token hip-dude entertainment reporter Wade Tatangelo, draws so few daily comments that you could count them on the fingers of one hand -- and usually have four or five fingers left over.

By contrast, the Washington Post's Web site has two blogs, Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.

A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.

2. Not all readers know what they're talking about.

While some readers know more about any given topic than a professional journalist writing about it, most don't. Some, indeed, post anything about anything, including misleading or false information. This is why Slashdot has a moderation system, and why all newspaper Web sites need to have moderation systems in place before they allow reader posts attached directly to stories. Slashdot's, which is built into the code that runs the whole site, is probably too complicated for most newspapers, but everyone (including newspaper publishers) is free to download, use, and modify it. For those who don't want to use the code behind Slashdot, there are many other free (and proprietary) content management programs available that have similar -- and often simpler and less geeky -- moderation features built into them.

3. No matter what you do, some readers will post malicious and/or obscene comments

Slashdot removes posts only in response to Cease and Desist orders or legitimate copyright infringement complaints. We find that malicious or obscene posts are usually moderated into oblivion almost immediately, because our readers -- hundreds of whom have moderation power at any given moment -- have a sharp eye for stupid stuff.

A mainstream newspaper might choose to remove blatantly disgusting posts, which would take some staff time. There would also -- inevitably -- be second-guessing and complaints, including whines from readers who believed their posts were removed because they didn't follow the [fill in political party here] line, not because they used offensive language.

Moderation never makes everyone happy. Someone will always feel the rules are too loose, while someone else will believe they're too tight. And moderates -- I mean moderators -- will always get flak from ____-wingers who think they're biased. But these problems shouldn't stop grown-up newspaper people from soliciting and publishing readers' posts. They should already be accustomed to bias accusations.

4. What if readers post comments that advertisers don't like?

This is a problem, and one to which some newspapers are extremely sensitive --not just over readers' comments but sometimes over their own reporters' stories. A 1999 Washington Monthly article had some examples of how newspapers sometimes cater to advertisers instead of their readers. Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it.

The Business Side of a Newspaper Web Site

Slashdot, like almost all other Web, broadcast, and print media outlets, depends on ad revenue for most of its income. For the first few years of its existence as a commercial entity, major advertisers were afraid to buy ads on Slashdot or other free-wheeling, community-driven sites. They worried that every time they touted a product, all the customers they'd ever irritated would post bad things about them. It's impossible to run a company of any scale without having at least a few dissatisfied customers, no matter how good your products and services are, so this was not an unjustified fear.

Luckily for Slashdot (and our parent company), many companies have learned that they are going to get criticized online whether they like it or not, so at the very worst, running ads on pages where they get slammed gives them a chance to tell their side of the story.

Keyword-based ad placement helps them do this. Imagine making software that's often knocked for its security vulnerabilities, while competing software is available that costs little or nothing and doesn't share your product's problems. You'd want to run a Get the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaign on every Web page where the competing product was being discussed so that you could tell people who are (obviously) interested in the competing product how awful it is, and why they should buy yours instead.

On a local newspaper Web site, a developer intent on replacing pristine wilderness along a scenic river with ugly condominium towers in the face of opposition from local citizens' groups could run a keyword-targeted campaign explaining why their buildings would be better than a swampy, mosquito-ridden riverfront. They could stress the fact that they would reduce the population of turtles, spiders, alligators, shore birds, frogs, and other annoying wildlife, and that runoff from their chemically-fertilized landscaping would help keep local fish populations down by contributing to red tide, thereby reducing the number of smelly fishermen infesting the area.

Other, more sensible, businesses would use the same tactic -- keyword ad placement -- to sponsor discussions in a positive way. An obvious example here in Florida would be resort property owners linking ads to tourism-related stories and the discussions attached to them. With geotargeting becoming common on the Web, ads aimed at visitors could be visible to all of a Florida newspaper's online readers, while ads for a local business would only be shown to local residents -- unless the local advertiser was canny enough to realize that Florida has many thousands of seasonal residents, and that reaching these snowbirds through the local newspaper's Web site before they come South is a great way to get a leg up on competitors.

Some other ways to exploit the Web that newspapers don't seem to do well:

• Print-them-yourself coupons. This is lots cheaper than putting coupons in a print newspaper. Many newspapers boast that today's paper contains $___ worth of coupon savings. Why don't more papers make this boast about their online editions? TV stations could do this on their sites, too. This would be an entirely new source of revenue for them, since there is no way to put a coupon in a TV spot.
• Online ad circulars, similar to the paper ones that pack print newspapers on Sundays and holidays. The print ones are expensive to produce and deliver, especially in color. Online circulars would be far less costly.
• Selling sponsorships for community calendars and other "public interest" sections that should be on every newspaper's Web site -- but often aren't or are produced in too scattered a manner to be useful for readers. C'mon, newspaper (and local TV) people! A well-organized, database-driven events calendar is easy to produce. If you don't have one (and sponsors for it), you should.
• Sponsored, "free to individuals and small businesses," local classifieds. craigslist and eBay are busily taking the classified ad market away from newspapers, with Google getting ready to help them with this effort. The Poynter Institute's Steve Outing suggests that the best way to beat back this threat is to "Turn newspaper classifieds into an active and interactive community, instead of just static, dull listings. A cold-hearted newspaper classifieds database could well be smothered by Google classifieds. A local-focused interactive community may be less vulnerable."

The Local-Focused Interactive Community

I believe the future of not only classified ads but of local news gathering and distribution is the "local-focused interactive community." According to this article, craigslist founder Craig Newmark agrees with me. So do plenty of other Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are busily building and financing "community" sites.

Local newspapers should have dominated all of this interactivity from the beginning. They had the name recognition and -- through their print editions -- the promotional muscle to make their Web sites into unassailable community hubs. But they didn't, and now they're reduced to playing catch-up.

If the Sarasota Herald-Tribune had followed through on its plans to incorporate reader-written blogs into its site, Suncoastblog.com probably wouldn't exist. This group blog is an admittedly lame effort, barely begun, put together by several people in this area (including me) who thought it would be nice to have a local site that might eventually cover events and places that don't make their way into the local papers. We know the Herald-Tribune, whose circulation area overlaps the Bradenton Herald's, had thought about hosting reader blogs at one point, because they asked readers to submit blog ideas several months ago. I submitted one and never heard back.

I also submitted a local computer business column concept to the Herald. I came up with it because the Herald has a Sunday business page it calls "Digital Manatee," on which I have never seen anything other than out-of-town wire service material even though there is more than enough local computer and Internet business activity to fill a weekly column, and enough local computer and computer service vendors to surround that column with profitable advertising.

The Herald's editor didn't respond to my proposal. I've written three computer-oriented books, and thousands of articles that have run online and in print all over the world, but I am apparently not worth even a polite turndown from my local paper's editor. No problem. A week later I was having lunch with a couple of local entrepreneur buddies. I told them what had happened. They suggested an online computer business magazine instead of a Herald column, and offered to finance it on the spot, out of their pockets.

I don't have time to start a new publication. But I am in a position to help someone else start one, and to write a story or two for it now and then. Financing's in place. So is a domain name. So at some point the Herald and Herald-Tribune may have (yet) another niche publication competing with them. It won't be a big competitor, but its ad revenue will come from lucrative business-to-business accounts you'd think a local newspaper would be eager to lock up with a weekly (or more frequent) column for local computer-using business people.

This doesn't mean the Herald has a bad editor or that another small paper would have reacted differently. I use this anecdote only to point out that it is now easier to start an online publication than for even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper. Is it any wonder that local blogs and other online niche publications are springing up like mad? And as a corollary, is it any wonder that newspaper circulation and influence continues to decline?

Newspapers need to open up more to the communities around them. They need to stop confining their interaction with readers to advisory board meetings and questionnaires, and allow readers' stories, opinions, and thoughts to become an integral part of the newspaper itself. They should not allow readers to alter the newspaper's own words, as the Los Angeles Times did back in June with their laughable wikitorial experiment. Moderated comments are a much better way to give readers a voice. So are journals that allow (logged-in) readers the same level of freedom they'd have with their own blogs, but also give them the cachet of being published on a "major brand" Web site.

'Local' is the Key Word

The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.

Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.

It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.

Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.

One important thing a community-oriented, Web-based newspaper must do is credit readers for their story leads unless they specifically request anonymity. Another good idea is to pay readers who submit news stories that are written well enough that they can run with only routine editing and fact-checking. Those readers are, in effect, doing a reporter's work, and they should get some sort of compensation for it. Some may even turn into stringers capable of covering government meetings and other events when staff reporters aren't available, and a few of those stringers eventually ought to become staff members. After all, if a newspaper is going to be about, by, and for its local community, shouldn't that community be its primary recruiting ground?

Newspapers Will Not Die

Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.

The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won't want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.

Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

Senior citizens and others who can't afford (or don't want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those -- a substantial part of the population -- who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they'd get on the Web.

However it is delivered, text will not go away anytime soon. For a fast reader, it is the most efficient way to take in large quantities of information. Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed. Now have a skilled reporter -- whether a staff member, paid contributor or volunteer -- write an intelligent summary of that meeting, and even an average reader can learn what happened there in a few minutes instead of slogging through a two hour audio or video recording.

The Web version of that summary can be posted without waiting for the printing presses and delivery trucks to roll, and can have audio or video snippets embedded in it, but there is no reason not to make the text portion of it available on paper for those who prefer it in that form, unless the paper's editors decide so few people are interested in a city council meeting that it doesn't deserve a spot in the print version -- and tracking page readership on the Web version of the paper before the paper edition goes to press should give those editors a good idea of what they should and shouldn't put on paper.

Printed newspapers will have a significant following for many years to come. They may or may not become "expensive," as Professor Fisher predicts, but they will likely become smaller than they are now, and subscription sales efforts will probably be targeted more closely at groups unlikely to have Internet connections, especially senior citizens.

On the Web side, it's likely that newspapers will end up keeping most of their content free, with specialty sections (and posting privileges) reserved for logged-in users. Whether they'll be able to charge for some or all of their Web content is questionable. I paid $50 for a year's subscription to the NYT's Times Select program, and I don't think it's a good enough value that I'll renew my subscription when it runs out. I would be more likely to pay if I lived in New York and that subscription, in addition to what it gives me now, offered access to additional features like complete transcripts of government meetings. Indeed, I would happily pay at least $30 per year to the Bradenton Herald for a well-organized Web edition that gave me what I now get in the paper edition, plus government meeting transcripts and other useful subscriber-only features.

But if I paid for an online subscription to the Herald, I'd probably drop my subscription to the paper edition. I'd still be the same person, with the same interests, earning power and spending habits. The only thing that would change about me, from the newspaper's perspective, would be my news delivery preference.

The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.

This may not be easy, but it will be a lot easier than explaining to advertisers why they should keep spending money in a newspaper that has fewer readers, and less influence, every year.

I've spent seven years working as a writer and editor for Slashdot's parent company. During this time I've been to at least a dozen mainstream journalists' and editors' conferences where the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the Internet?" You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits. But they haven't. In this essay I will tell you why they've failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the Internet dominates the news business. I'm going to use the Bradenton Herald as an example, not because it's a bad newspaper but because I live in the middle of its circulation area. The Herald is a typical Knight Ridder small-city newspaper in every way except one: it serves Manatee County, an area with a fast-growing population where most new residents are old enough that they grew up reading newspapers every day. Despite these favorable factors, the Herald's circulation has declined by 3.5% in the last year. Of course, newspaper circulation declines are now normal rather than exceptional. Other newspapers have done far worse, with the San Francisco Chronicle recording a 16.4% drop in the last six months alone.

Readership vs. Circulation

Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers. The Boston Globe also stopped a giveaway program and suffered a circulation decline as a result, although only about half as big a loss as the Chron's, but the Globe's marketing people have said that only half of the loss came from stopping the giveaways, and blamed the rest of it on the usual suspects, notably TV and the Internet.

These figures only measure paper newspaper circulation. They don't include Web readership, which generally seems to be trending (slowly) upwards on newspaper Web sites. Circulation figures can also be misleading because they only measure the total number of newspapers distributed, not the kind of people who read them. And readership quality can often be more important, in a business sense, than quantity. This is especially true for those newspapers (namely, just about all of them) that rely on advertising for the bulk of their income.

By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the very bottom of the economic pile. Online readers are also likely to be more open to new experiences, products, and services than those who don't feel they need to use the Internet -- which by some estimates may be as many as half of all households within the Herald's circulation area, which has a higher percentage of retirees than all but a few other U.S. counties.

Journalism professor Douglas Fisher and media executive Alan Mutter have both talked about intentional circulation losses on their blogs. In his post, Fisher says, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the Web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person -- sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."

Meanwhile, when newspapers talk about readership vs. circulation, they're typically trying to estimate how many people read each copy of their print product (pdf download) rather than come up with a total picture of their publication's readership, including its online presence. This is a mistake. Instead of treating their Web sites like unwelcome stepchildren, newspapers should turn them into their primary method of news delivery -- and teach their reporters, editors, and ad sales people how to work effectively with this new -- to them -- medium.

Slashdot Lessons

1. No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.

Imagine a newspaper with a space for comments below each story on its Web site. This Slashdot story has comments directly attached to it, not tucked away from public view the way the Bradenton Herald's site hides reader comments on Bulletin Boards that aren't directly connected to any of the paper's articles or editorials. To make matters worse, the Herald's Bulletin Boards require a separate login to post. Even if you're a logged-in reader you must put in your username and password again to use them.

As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over. Even the Herald's single (hard to find) blog, maintained by token hip-dude entertainment reporter Wade Tatangelo, draws so few daily comments that you could count them on the fingers of one hand -- and usually have four or five fingers left over.

By contrast, the Washington Post's Web site has two blogs, Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.

A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.

2. Not all readers know what they're talking about.

While some readers know more about any given topic than a professional journalist writing about it, most don't. Some, indeed, post anything about anything, including misleading or false information. This is why Slashdot has a moderation system, and why all newspaper Web sites need to have moderation systems in place before they allow reader posts attached directly to stories. Slashdot's, which is built into the code that runs the whole site, is probably too complicated for most newspapers, but everyone (including newspaper publishers) is free to download, use, and modify it. For those who don't want to use the code behind Slashdot, there are many other free (and proprietary) content management programs available that have similar -- and often simpler and less geeky -- moderation features built into them.

3. No matter what you do, some readers will post malicious and/or obscene comments

Slashdot removes posts only in response to Cease and Desist orders or legitimate copyright infringement complaints. We find that malicious or obscene posts are usually moderated into oblivion almost immediately, because our readers -- hundreds of whom have moderation power at any given moment -- have a sharp eye for stupid stuff.

A mainstream newspaper might choose to remove blatantly disgusting posts, which would take some staff time. There would also -- inevitably -- be second-guessing and complaints, including whines from readers who believed their posts were removed because they didn't follow the [fill in political party here] line, not because they used offensive language.

Moderation never makes everyone happy. Someone will always feel the rules are too loose, while someone else will believe they're too tight. And moderates -- I mean moderators -- will always get flak from ____-wingers who think they're biased. But these problems shouldn't stop grown-up newspaper people from soliciting and publishing readers' posts. They should already be accustomed to bias accusations.

4. What if readers post comments that advertisers don't like?

This is a problem, and one to which some newspapers are extremely sensitive --not just over readers' comments but sometimes over their own reporters' stories. A 1999 Washington Monthly article had some examples of how newspapers sometimes cater to advertisers instead of their readers. Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it.

The Business Side of a Newspaper Web Site

Slashdot, like almost all other Web, broadcast, and print media outlets, depends on ad revenue for most of its income. For the first few years of its existence as a commercial entity, major advertisers were afraid to buy ads on Slashdot or other free-wheeling, community-driven sites. They worried that every time they touted a product, all the customers they'd ever irritated would post bad things about them. It's impossible to run a company of any scale without having at least a few dissatisfied customers, no matter how good your products and services are, so this was not an unjustified fear.

Luckily for Slashdot (and our parent company), many companies have learned that they are going to get criticized online whether they like it or not, so at the very worst, running ads on pages where they get slammed gives them a chance to tell their side of the story.

Keyword-based ad placement helps them do this. Imagine making software that's often knocked for its security vulnerabilities, while competing software is available that costs little or nothing and doesn't share your product's problems. You'd want to run a Get the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaign on every Web page where the competing product was being discussed so that you could tell people who are (obviously) interested in the competing product how awful it is, and why they should buy yours instead.

On a local newspaper Web site, a developer intent on replacing pristine wilderness along a scenic river with ugly condominium towers in the face of opposition from local citizens' groups could run a keyword-targeted campaign explaining why their buildings would be better than a swampy, mosquito-ridden riverfront. They could stress the fact that they would reduce the population of turtles, spiders, alligators, shore birds, frogs, and other annoying wildlife, and that runoff from their chemically-fertilized landscaping would help keep local fish populations down by contributing to red tide, thereby reducing the number of smelly fishermen infesting the area.

Other, more sensible, businesses would use the same tactic -- keyword ad placement -- to sponsor discussions in a positive way. An obvious example here in Florida would be resort property owners linking ads to tourism-related stories and the discussions attached to them. With geotargeting becoming common on the Web, ads aimed at visitors could be visible to all of a Florida newspaper's online readers, while ads for a local business would only be shown to local residents -- unless the local advertiser was canny enough to realize that Florida has many thousands of seasonal residents, and that reaching these snowbirds through the local newspaper's Web site before they come South is a great way to get a leg up on competitors.

Some other ways to exploit the Web that newspapers don't seem to do well:

• Print-them-yourself coupons. This is lots cheaper than putting coupons in a print newspaper. Many newspapers boast that today's paper contains $___ worth of coupon savings. Why don't more papers make this boast about their online editions? TV stations could do this on their sites, too. This would be an entirely new source of revenue for them, since there is no way to put a coupon in a TV spot.
• Online ad circulars, similar to the paper ones that pack print newspapers on Sundays and holidays. The print ones are expensive to produce and deliver, especially in color. Online circulars would be far less costly.
• Selling sponsorships for community calendars and other "public interest" sections that should be on every newspaper's Web site -- but often aren't or are produced in too scattered a manner to be useful for readers. C'mon, newspaper (and local TV) people! A well-organized, database-driven events calendar is easy to produce. If you don't have one (and sponsors for it), you should.
• Sponsored, "free to individuals and small businesses," local classifieds. craigslist and eBay are busily taking the classified ad market away from newspapers, with Google getting ready to help them with this effort. The Poynter Institute's Steve Outing suggests that the best way to beat back this threat is to "Turn newspaper classifieds into an active and interactive community, instead of just static, dull listings. A cold-hearted newspaper classifieds database could well be smothered by Google classifieds. A local-focused interactive community may be less vulnerable."

The Local-Focused Interactive Community

I believe the future of not only classified ads but of local news gathering and distribution is the "local-focused interactive community." According to this article, craigslist founder Craig Newmark agrees with me. So do plenty of other Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are busily building and financing "community" sites.

Local newspapers should have dominated all of this interactivity from the beginning. They had the name recognition and -- through their print editions -- the promotional muscle to make their Web sites into unassailable community hubs. But they didn't, and now they're reduced to playing catch-up.

If the Sarasota Herald-Tribune had followed through on its plans to incorporate reader-written blogs into its site, Suncoastblog.com probably wouldn't exist. This group blog is an admittedly lame effort, barely begun, put together by several people in this area (including me) who thought it would be nice to have a local site that might eventually cover events and places that don't make their way into the local papers. We know the Herald-Tribune, whose circulation area overlaps the Bradenton Herald's, had thought about hosting reader blogs at one point, because they asked readers to submit blog ideas several months ago. I submitted one and never heard back.

I also submitted a local computer business column concept to the Herald. I came up with it because the Herald has a Sunday business page it calls "Digital Manatee," on which I have never seen anything other than out-of-town wire service material even though there is more than enough local computer and Internet business activity to fill a weekly column, and enough local computer and computer service vendors to surround that column with profitable advertising.

The Herald's editor didn't respond to my proposal. I've written three computer-oriented books, and thousands of articles that have run online and in print all over the world, but I am apparently not worth even a polite turndown from my local paper's editor. No problem. A week later I was having lunch with a couple of local entrepreneur buddies. I told them what had happened. They suggested an online computer business magazine instead of a Herald column, and offered to finance it on the spot, out of their pockets.

I don't have time to start a new publication. But I am in a position to help someone else start one, and to write a story or two for it now and then. Financing's in place. So is a domain name. So at some point the Herald and Herald-Tribune may have (yet) another niche publication competing with them. It won't be a big competitor, but its ad revenue will come from lucrative business-to-business accounts you'd think a local newspaper would be eager to lock up with a weekly (or more frequent) column for local computer-using business people.

This doesn't mean the Herald has a bad editor or that another small paper would have reacted differently. I use this anecdote only to point out that it is now easier to start an online publication than for even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper. Is it any wonder that local blogs and other online niche publications are springing up like mad? And as a corollary, is it any wonder that newspaper circulation and influence continues to decline?

Newspapers need to open up more to the communities around them. They need to stop confining their interaction with readers to advisory board meetings and questionnaires, and allow readers' stories, opinions, and thoughts to become an integral part of the newspaper itself. They should not allow readers to alter the newspaper's own words, as the Los Angeles Times did back in June with their laughable wikitorial experiment. Moderated comments are a much better way to give readers a voice. So are journals that allow (logged-in) readers the same level of freedom they'd have with their own blogs, but also give them the cachet of being published on a "major brand" Web site.

'Local' is the Key Word

The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.

Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.

It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.

Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.

One important thing a community-oriented, Web-based newspaper must do is credit readers for their story leads unless they specifically request anonymity. Another good idea is to pay readers who submit news stories that are written well enough that they can run with only routine editing and fact-checking. Those readers are, in effect, doing a reporter's work, and they should get some sort of compensation for it. Some may even turn into stringers capable of covering government meetings and other events when staff reporters aren't available, and a few of those stringers eventually ought to become staff members. After all, if a newspaper is going to be about, by, and for its local community, shouldn't that community be its primary recruiting ground?

Newspapers Will Not Die

Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.

The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won't want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.

Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

Senior citizens and others who can't afford (or don't want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those -- a substantial part of the population -- who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they'd get on the Web.

However it is delivered, text will not go away anytime soon. For a fast reader, it is the most efficient way to take in large quantities of information. Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed. Now have a skilled reporter -- whether a staff member, paid contributor or volunteer -- write an intelligent summary of that meeting, and even an average reader can learn what happened there in a few minutes instead of slogging through a two hour audio or video recording.

The Web version of that summary can be posted without waiting for the printing presses and delivery trucks to roll, and can have audio or video snippets embedded in it, but there is no reason not to make the text portion of it available on paper for those who prefer it in that form, unless the paper's editors decide so few people are interested in a city council meeting that it doesn't deserve a spot in the print version -- and tracking page readership on the Web version of the paper before the paper edition goes to press should give those editors a good idea of what they should and shouldn't put on paper.

Printed newspapers will have a significant following for many years to come. They may or may not become "expensive," as Professor Fisher predicts, but they will likely become smaller than they are now, and subscription sales efforts will probably be targeted more closely at groups unlikely to have Internet connections, especially senior citizens.

On the Web side, it's likely that newspapers will end up keeping most of their content free, with specialty sections (and posting privileges) reserved for logged-in users. Whether they'll be able to charge for some or all of their Web content is questionable. I paid $50 for a year's subscription to the NYT's Times Select program, and I don't think it's a good enough value that I'll renew my subscription when it runs out. I would be more likely to pay if I lived in New York and that subscription, in addition to what it gives me now, offered access to additional features like complete transcripts of government meetings. Indeed, I would happily pay at least $30 per year to the Bradenton Herald for a well-organized Web edition that gave me what I now get in the paper edition, plus government meeting transcripts and other useful subscriber-only features.

But if I paid for an online subscription to the Herald, I'd probably drop my subscription to the paper edition. I'd still be the same person, with the same interests, earning power and spending habits. The only thing that would change about me, from the newspaper's perspective, would be my news delivery preference.

The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.

This may not be easy, but it will be a lot easier than explaining to advertisers why they should keep spending money in a newspaper that has fewer readers, and less influence, every year.

I've spent seven years working as a writer and editor for Slashdot's parent company. During this time I've been to at least a dozen mainstream journalists' and editors' conferences where the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the Internet?" You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits. But they haven't. In this essay I will tell you why they've failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the Internet dominates the news business. I'm going to use the Bradenton Herald as an example, not because it's a bad newspaper but because I live in the middle of its circulation area. The Herald is a typical Knight Ridder small-city newspaper in every way except one: it serves Manatee County, an area with a fast-growing population where most new residents are old enough that they grew up reading newspapers every day. Despite these favorable factors, the Herald's circulation has declined by 3.5% in the last year. Of course, newspaper circulation declines are now normal rather than exceptional. Other newspapers have done far worse, with the San Francisco Chronicle recording a 16.4% drop in the last six months alone.

Readership vs. Circulation

Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers. The Boston Globe also stopped a giveaway program and suffered a circulation decline as a result, although only about half as big a loss as the Chron's, but the Globe's marketing people have said that only half of the loss came from stopping the giveaways, and blamed the rest of it on the usual suspects, notably TV and the Internet.

These figures only measure paper newspaper circulation. They don't include Web readership, which generally seems to be trending (slowly) upwards on newspaper Web sites. Circulation figures can also be misleading because they only measure the total number of newspapers distributed, not the kind of people who read them. And readership quality can often be more important, in a business sense, than quantity. This is especially true for those newspapers (namely, just about all of them) that rely on advertising for the bulk of their income.

By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the very bottom of the economic pile. Online readers are also likely to be more open to new experiences, products, and services than those who don't feel they need to use the Internet -- which by some estimates may be as many as half of all households within the Herald's circulation area, which has a higher percentage of retirees than all but a few other U.S. counties.

Journalism professor Douglas Fisher and media executive Alan Mutter have both talked about intentional circulation losses on their blogs. In his post, Fisher says, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the Web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person -- sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."

Meanwhile, when newspapers talk about readership vs. circulation, they're typically trying to estimate how many people read each copy of their print product (pdf download) rather than come up with a total picture of their publication's readership, including its online presence. This is a mistake. Instead of treating their Web sites like unwelcome stepchildren, newspapers should turn them into their primary method of news delivery -- and teach their reporters, editors, and ad sales people how to work effectively with this new -- to them -- medium.

Slashdot Lessons

1. No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.

Imagine a newspaper with a space for comments below each story on its Web site. This Slashdot story has comments directly attached to it, not tucked away from public view the way the Bradenton Herald's site hides reader comments on Bulletin Boards that aren't directly connected to any of the paper's articles or editorials. To make matters worse, the Herald's Bulletin Boards require a separate login to post. Even if you're a logged-in reader you must put in your username and password again to use them.

As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over. Even the Herald's single (hard to find) blog, maintained by token hip-dude entertainment reporter Wade Tatangelo, draws so few daily comments that you could count them on the fingers of one hand -- and usually have four or five fingers left over.

By contrast, the Washington Post's Web site has two blogs, Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.

A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.

2. Not all readers know what they're talking about.

While some readers know more about any given topic than a professional journalist writing about it, most don't. Some, indeed, post anything about anything, including misleading or false information. This is why Slashdot has a moderation system, and why all newspaper Web sites need to have moderation systems in place before they allow reader posts attached directly to stories. Slashdot's, which is built into the code that runs the whole site, is probably too complicated for most newspapers, but everyone (including newspaper publishers) is free to download, use, and modify it. For those who don't want to use the code behind Slashdot, there are many other free (and proprietary) content management programs available that have similar -- and often simpler and less geeky -- moderation features built into them.

3. No matter what you do, some readers will post malicious and/or obscene comments

Slashdot removes posts only in response to Cease and Desist orders or legitimate copyright infringement complaints. We find that malicious or obscene posts are usually moderated into oblivion almost immediately, because our readers -- hundreds of whom have moderation power at any given moment -- have a sharp eye for stupid stuff.

A mainstream newspaper might choose to remove blatantly disgusting posts, which would take some staff time. There would also -- inevitably -- be second-guessing and complaints, including whines from readers who believed their posts were removed because they didn't follow the [fill in political party here] line, not because they used offensive language.

Moderation never makes everyone happy. Someone will always feel the rules are too loose, while someone else will believe they're too tight. And moderates -- I mean moderators -- will always get flak from ____-wingers who think they're biased. But these problems shouldn't stop grown-up newspaper people from soliciting and publishing readers' posts. They should already be accustomed to bias accusations.

4. What if readers post comments that advertisers don't like?

This is a problem, and one to which some newspapers are extremely sensitive --not just over readers' comments but sometimes over their own reporters' stories. A 1999 Washington Monthly article had some examples of how newspapers sometimes cater to advertisers instead of their readers. Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it.

The Business Side of a Newspaper Web Site

Slashdot, like almost all other Web, broadcast, and print media outlets, depends on ad revenue for most of its income. For the first few years of its existence as a commercial entity, major advertisers were afraid to buy ads on Slashdot or other free-wheeling, community-driven sites. They worried that every time they touted a product, all the customers they'd ever irritated would post bad things about them. It's impossible to run a company of any scale without having at least a few dissatisfied customers, no matter how good your products and services are, so this was not an unjustified fear.

Luckily for Slashdot (and our parent company), many companies have learned that they are going to get criticized online whether they like it or not, so at the very worst, running ads on pages where they get slammed gives them a chance to tell their side of the story.

Keyword-based ad placement helps them do this. Imagine making software that's often knocked for its security vulnerabilities, while competing software is available that costs little or nothing and doesn't share your product's problems. You'd want to run a Get the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaign on every Web page where the competing product was being discussed so that you could tell people who are (obviously) interested in the competing product how awful it is, and why they should buy yours instead.

On a local newspaper Web site, a developer intent on replacing pristine wilderness along a scenic river with ugly condominium towers in the face of opposition from local citizens' groups could run a keyword-targeted campaign explaining why their buildings would be better than a swampy, mosquito-ridden riverfront. They could stress the fact that they would reduce the population of turtles, spiders, alligators, shore birds, frogs, and other annoying wildlife, and that runoff from their chemically-fertilized landscaping would help keep local fish populations down by contributing to red tide, thereby reducing the number of smelly fishermen infesting the area.

Other, more sensible, businesses would use the same tactic -- keyword ad placement -- to sponsor discussions in a positive way. An obvious example here in Florida would be resort property owners linking ads to tourism-related stories and the discussions attached to them. With geotargeting becoming common on the Web, ads aimed at visitors could be visible to all of a Florida newspaper's online readers, while ads for a local business would only be shown to local residents -- unless the local advertiser was canny enough to realize that Florida has many thousands of seasonal residents, and that reaching these snowbirds through the local newspaper's Web site before they come South is a great way to get a leg up on competitors.

Some other ways to exploit the Web that newspapers don't seem to do well:

• Print-them-yourself coupons. This is lots cheaper than putting coupons in a print newspaper. Many newspapers boast that today's paper contains $___ worth of coupon savings. Why don't more papers make this boast about their online editions? TV stations could do this on their sites, too. This would be an entirely new source of revenue for them, since there is no way to put a coupon in a TV spot.
• Online ad circulars, similar to the paper ones that pack print newspapers on Sundays and holidays. The print ones are expensive to produce and deliver, especially in color. Online circulars would be far less costly.
• Selling sponsorships for community calendars and other "public interest" sections that should be on every newspaper's Web site -- but often aren't or are produced in too scattered a manner to be useful for readers. C'mon, newspaper (and local TV) people! A well-organized, database-driven events calendar is easy to produce. If you don't have one (and sponsors for it), you should.
• Sponsored, "free to individuals and small businesses," local classifieds. craigslist and eBay are busily taking the classified ad market away from newspapers, with Google getting ready to help them with this effort. The Poynter Institute's Steve Outing suggests that the best way to beat back this threat is to "Turn newspaper classifieds into an active and interactive community, instead of just static, dull listings. A cold-hearted newspaper classifieds database could well be smothered by Google classifieds. A local-focused interactive community may be less vulnerable."

The Local-Focused Interactive Community

I believe the future of not only classified ads but of local news gathering and distribution is the "local-focused interactive community." According to this article, craigslist founder Craig Newmark agrees with me. So do plenty of other Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are busily building and financing "community" sites.

Local newspapers should have dominated all of this interactivity from the beginning. They had the name recognition and -- through their print editions -- the promotional muscle to make their Web sites into unassailable community hubs. But they didn't, and now they're reduced to playing catch-up.

If the Sarasota Herald-Tribune had followed through on its plans to incorporate reader-written blogs into its site, Suncoastblog.com probably wouldn't exist. This group blog is an admittedly lame effort, barely begun, put together by several people in this area (including me) who thought it would be nice to have a local site that might eventually cover events and places that don't make their way into the local papers. We know the Herald-Tribune, whose circulation area overlaps the Bradenton Herald's, had thought about hosting reader blogs at one point, because they asked readers to submit blog ideas several months ago. I submitted one and never heard back.

I also submitted a local computer business column concept to the Herald. I came up with it because the Herald has a Sunday business page it calls "Digital Manatee," on which I have never seen anything other than out-of-town wire service material even though there is more than enough local computer and Internet business activity to fill a weekly column, and enough local computer and computer service vendors to surround that column with profitable advertising.

The Herald's editor didn't respond to my proposal. I've written three computer-oriented books, and thousands of articles that have run online and in print all over the world, but I am apparently not worth even a polite turndown from my local paper's editor. No problem. A week later I was having lunch with a couple of local entrepreneur buddies. I told them what had happened. They suggested an online computer business magazine instead of a Herald column, and offered to finance it on the spot, out of their pockets.

I don't have time to start a new publication. But I am in a position to help someone else start one, and to write a story or two for it now and then. Financing's in place. So is a domain name. So at some point the Herald and Herald-Tribune may have (yet) another niche publication competing with them. It won't be a big competitor, but its ad revenue will come from lucrative business-to-business accounts you'd think a local newspaper would be eager to lock up with a weekly (or more frequent) column for local computer-using business people.

This doesn't mean the Herald has a bad editor or that another small paper would have reacted differently. I use this anecdote only to point out that it is now easier to start an online publication than for even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper. Is it any wonder that local blogs and other online niche publications are springing up like mad? And as a corollary, is it any wonder that newspaper circulation and influence continues to decline?

Newspapers need to open up more to the communities around them. They need to stop confining their interaction with readers to advisory board meetings and questionnaires, and allow readers' stories, opinions, and thoughts to become an integral part of the newspaper itself. They should not allow readers to alter the newspaper's own words, as the Los Angeles Times did back in June with their laughable wikitorial experiment. Moderated comments are a much better way to give readers a voice. So are journals that allow (logged-in) readers the same level of freedom they'd have with their own blogs, but also give them the cachet of being published on a "major brand" Web site.

'Local' is the Key Word

The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.

Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.

It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.

Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.

One important thing a community-oriented, Web-based newspaper must do is credit readers for their story leads unless they specifically request anonymity. Another good idea is to pay readers who submit news stories that are written well enough that they can run with only routine editing and fact-checking. Those readers are, in effect, doing a reporter's work, and they should get some sort of compensation for it. Some may even turn into stringers capable of covering government meetings and other events when staff reporters aren't available, and a few of those stringers eventually ought to become staff members. After all, if a newspaper is going to be about, by, and for its local community, shouldn't that community be its primary recruiting ground?

Newspapers Will Not Die

Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.

The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won't want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.

Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

Senior citizens and others who can't afford (or don't want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those -- a substantial part of the population -- who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they'd get on the Web.

However it is delivered, text will not go away anytime soon. For a fast reader, it is the most efficient way to take in large quantities of information. Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed. Now have a skilled reporter -- whether a staff member, paid contributor or volunteer -- write an intelligent summary of that meeting, and even an average reader can learn what happened there in a few minutes instead of slogging through a two hour audio or video recording.

The Web version of that summary can be posted without waiting for the printing presses and delivery trucks to roll, and can have audio or video snippets embedded in it, but there is no reason not to make the text portion of it available on paper for those who prefer it in that form, unless the paper's editors decide so few people are interested in a city council meeting that it doesn't deserve a spot in the print version -- and tracking page readership on the Web version of the paper before the paper edition goes to press should give those editors a good idea of what they should and shouldn't put on paper.

Printed newspapers will have a significant following for many years to come. They may or may not become "expensive," as Professor Fisher predicts, but they will likely become smaller than they are now, and subscription sales efforts will probably be targeted more closely at groups unlikely to have Internet connections, especially senior citizens.

On the Web side, it's likely that newspapers will end up keeping most of their content free, with specialty sections (and posting privileges) reserved for logged-in users. Whether they'll be able to charge for some or all of their Web content is questionable. I paid $50 for a year's subscription to the NYT's Times Select program, and I don't think it's a good enough value that I'll renew my subscription when it runs out. I would be more likely to pay if I lived in New York and that subscription, in addition to what it gives me now, offered access to additional features like complete transcripts of government meetings. Indeed, I would happily pay at least $30 per year to the Bradenton Herald for a well-organized Web edition that gave me what I now get in the paper edition, plus government meeting transcripts and other useful subscriber-only features.

But if I paid for an online subscription to the Herald, I'd probably drop my subscription to the paper edition. I'd still be the same person, with the same interests, earning power and spending habits. The only thing that would change about me, from the newspaper's perspective, would be my news delivery preference.

The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.

This may not be easy, but it will be a lot easier than explaining to advertisers why they should keep spending money in a newspaper that has fewer readers, and less influence, every year.

Lawrence_Bird writes "The Washington Post is reporting that New Orleans will deploy a city wide wi-fi network with free public access. Much of the equipment has been donated, but New Orleans will own and operate the network. Interestingly, they are only able to do this while a state of emergency remains in place as technically their planned 512Kbps service violates state law prohibiting municipalities from offering access at speeds in excess of 144Kbps, a restriction the city plans on fighting even though they will eventually outsource the whole operation."

drDugan writes "The Washington Post is reporting the next phase of American progress authorizing intelligence agencies to spy on law-abiding citizens without oversight. Primarily, new legislation allows an 'intelligence exception' to the privacy act 'allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.'"

Last week you submitted questions for Dr. Herb Thompson, author of the latest Microsoft-sponsored Windows vs. Linux study. Here are his answers. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions. Dr. Thompson says he'll respond to as many as he can. He's registered a new Slashdot username, FFE4, specifically to participate in this discussion. All others claiming to be him are imposters. So read, post, ask, and enjoy. 1- A better way of putting it:
by einhverfr

It seems that your study attempted to simulate the growth of an internet startup firm on Windows or Linux. One thing I did not see in the study was a good description of assumptions you made. What assumptions were made in both the design of the requirements and the analysis of the data? What limitations can we place on the conclusions as a result of these assumptions?

Dr. Thompson

This is a really important question. I think there are two sections of the study: the assessment methodology and then the experiment we undertook to illustrate how to apply that methodology. I'll answer the assumption question for both parts:

Methodology - For the methodology, we wanted to provide a tool that organizations could use and apply their own assumptions. Maintaining a system is all about context; some environments favor Linux, others Windows. The question is, how do you know what's likely to be the most reliable (which includes manageable, secure and supportable) solution for your environment? We proposed a methodology a recipe - that looks at a solution in its entirety instead of just individual components. Policies like configuration control vary from organization to organization and to get something that's truly meaningful in your environment, the methodology needs to be carried out in your context. Enterprise customers can and should do this when they are about to trust their critical business processes to a platform. That said, the basic assumptions of the methodology are that patches are applied at 1 month intervals and that business needs evolve over time. How those business needs evolve depends on the scenario you're looking at (in our experiment we looked at ecommerce for example). The methodology doesn't cover steady state reliability, meaning the uptime of a system that is completely static. While this is important, our conversations with CIOs, CTOs, CSOs and IT folks lead us to believe that this was a smaller contributor to pain in a dynamic environment. In an appliance for example, though, steady state reliability is king, and I think an important limitation of this methodology is that we don't capture that well, and I think it's amazingly difficult quality to measure in a time-lapse way.

The purpose of the experiment was to illustrate how to apply the methodology and to begin to get some insights into some of the key model differences between two platforms. For the experiment we picked the ecommerce scenario, for no other reason than there has been a clear shift in how ecommerce sites have serviced their customers in recent years moving from static sites to personalized content. Some specific assumptions were:

* The transition from a basic purchasing site to a personalized portal based on order/browsing history takes place over a one year period.

* The period we looked at was July 1st, 2004 to June 30th, 2005 (the most recent full year at the time of the study).

* A configuration control policy exists that mandates OS version but not much else meaning administrators had fairly free rein to meet business requirements.

* All patches marked as critical or important supplied by the vendor are applied.

* We assume the system to be functioning if the original ecommerce application is running and meets some basic acceptance tests (same for both platforms see Appendix 1 of the report) and the new installed components are also running.

* To add new capabilities, we use leading 3rd party components as opposed to building custom code in-house.

* The business migrates operating system versions at the end of the one year period to the latest versions of the platform.

* The administrators that participated in the experiment reflect the average Linux (specifically SuSE) and Windows administrators in skill, capability and knowledge. While this was strived for, it's important to recognize the small sample size in drawing any conclusions from the data.

As far as limitations, the experiment looks at one specific case with a total of six administrators. I'd love to have done it with a hundred admins on each side on a wide range of business requirement scenarios and my hope is that others will do that and publish their results. Our experiment, however, shows that for this particular, clearly documented scenario, experienced Linux Admins had conflicts between meeting business needs and a recommended best practice like not introducing out-of-distribution components. If one is aware of potential conflicts and challenges upfront, I think you can put controls in place to make reasonable tradeoffs. In the linux case, a precise and specific configuration control policy may have prohibited the problematic upgrade of one of the components that the 3rd party solutions required. This would have likely reduced the number of failures but would have put some hefty constraints on 3rd party solutions. To understand the implications for your environment you really need to run through the methodology with the assumptions and restrictions of your organization and I hope that this study either prompts or provokes people to do that.

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2 - Meta-credibility?
by Tackhead

Where I come from (non-management, grunt-level techie), appearing in any of these analysts' journals *costs* an author more credibility than it gains him or her. For example, if $RAG says that $CORP has the best customer support, I immediately assume that $CORP has such horrid customer support that they had to pay someone to make up some research that proves otherwise.

To be sarcastic, I'd ask "who the heck actually takes these studies seriously?", but obviously *somebody* does. Who are these people, and why do these people take these industry analyst firms/journals/reports seriously? Are they right or wrong to do so? This isn't an attack (or endorsement :) of your research -- I'm talking about the credibility gap in industry research, and my observation that it's an industry-wide problem.

The meta-credibility question is this: Given the amount of shoddy pay-for-play research out there, does being published in an analyst journal tend to cost (a researcher, his consulting company, his financial backers) more credibility than it can gains him/her/them? If not, why not -- and more importantly, if so, is there any way to reverse the trend?

Dr. Thompson

This is a really interesting question because it cuts to the heart of what a real research study should provide to the reader. It should provide a baseline and I think research should always be questioned, scrutinized and debated because one can always find reasons for bias. Particularly, if a subject of the study (vendor for example) is behind its funding, whether directly (as in this study) or indirectly (meaning that they are big clients) I think it's critical that the study not provide just a baked cake for readers but the recipe as well. The recipe has to be inherently fair and simple, meaning that it has to map directly to a the quality or pain one is trying to measure without taking into account how the subjects try and provide that service or mitigate that pain. I think slanted opinion pieces, with no backup for those opinions, seriously hurts credibility, at least in my book. If you're presenting facts though and encouraging others to question them then I think that actually helps credibility, even if the search for those facts was paid for.

I agree though that one is tempted to dismiss research a priori though because of funding or some vendor tie. I think a good way to reverse the trend is to open the process up to public scrutiny; that's probably the main reason I came on Slashdot. To use this specific study as an example, some folks disagreed with several points in the experiment from counting patches, to reasons for upgrading key components, to the ecommerce scenario we used. For me, the study's key value is the methodology. Could different applications/scenarios have been chosen: absolutely!

The value I think that this study gives to the practitioner is arming them with a tool to help measure in their own environment. By applying the methodology, the results should take into account things like administrators skillsets, support policies, configuration control policies and the tradeoffs between customizability, maintainability, visibility, security and usability. It's only by looking at this stuff in context can one make a sound judgment; and a true research paper, especially one where funding is in question, needs to fully disclose the method and the funding source. In our case, the methodology has been vetted by industry analysts, IT organizations and several academics. That doesn't mean much, though, if you don't find the methodology meaningful for the questions you want answered. One reason I've come on Slashdot is to get the thoughts, opinions and assessments of the methodology itself from administrators in the trenches. I'm really pleased with the great questions and comments amidst the inevitable flames and I'm looking forward to this being posted so that others can weigh-in with their feedback and I can jump into the threads to get some discussion going.

If the research helps give real insight, and the methodology makes sense, I think there's real value no matter who paid the bill. At the end of the day, you need to decide whether or not you can extract any value from the information presented to you. In the case of this study, my hope is that it will leave you thinking hmmm.... maybe we should actually run through a process like this and check out how this works for ourselves. My more ambitious hope is that you'll implement it and tell me what challenges you faces on Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD, whatever platform you choose to compare. It may not even venture into the perennial Windows versus Linux battle; maybe you're a linux shop trying to decide between multiple distributions for example. Either way, if it's got people thinking about the topic and asking questions, well, that's all any researcher can really hope for.

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3 - Weak setup
by 0xABADC0DA

If I understand the study correctly, the windows side had to do nothing but set up a server to do a few different tasks over time and run windows update. The linux side had to have multiple incompatible versions of their database server running simultaneously on a single system and had to run unsupported versions of software to do it.

Why wasn't the windows side required to run multiple versions of IIS or SQL server simultaneously? In real life if you need to run multiple database versions you use virtualization or multiple systems, especially if one requires untested software. You don't run some hokie unstable branch on the same system as everything else. Why was a linux solution picked that required this level of work? My other related question is, did any of the unix administrators question why there were being asked to do such a thing? For example, did they come back and say they need a license for vmware? If they did not they do not seem like very competent administrators in my opinion.

Dr. Thompson

The Windows Admins and Linux admins were given the exact same set of business requirements which doesn't necessarily translate into the same tasks as they went about fulfilling them. The 3rd party components installed were chosen solely based on their market leadership position and any upgrades of OS were unknown at the time of selection. That said, on the Windows side, it turned out that no upgrades of IIS were needed (except for patches) and SQL Server was upgraded to SP4 as part of patch application. On the Linux side, at a high-level there were two main classes of upgrades: MySQL and GLIBC and they were both prompted by the installed components. After the experiment, the administrators were asked on both sides if this kind of evolution of systems met with their real-world experience. They said yes, with the caveat of if they were asked to install a component that required an upgrade of GLIBC that they would likely upgrade the operating system as long as their configuration control policy allowed it.

You make a great point about installing components on some sort of staging system (which is almost always done) as opposed to live running systems. That still means that the problems that the administrators had equal real IT pain. If something weird had to be done to get the system running but it does run and it's then put into production it's like a fuse that gets set on a bomb. A careful configuration control policy would almost certainly help and thats why I think it's so important to conduct this kind of experiment in your own environment with your own policies.

As far as selection of the Linux administrators go, they all had at least 5 years of enterprise administration experience, and two years of experience on SuSE specifically. With three people there's certainly likely to be a lot of variability and to get some conclusive results, I'd love to get a huge group of administrators across the spectrum in terms of experience. I'd also love to do it across multiple scenarios, beyond the ecommerce study. For this experiment, basically the bottom line is that we Illustrate one clearly documented scenario with six highly qualified admins that we selected based on experience. We cant ensure equal competency levels, but there was nothing in our screening that would lead us to believe there were gaps in knowledge on either side. When it comes down to it though, the really meaningful results are the ones you get when you perform the evaluation in your environment. Hopefully this study provides a starting point for asking the right questions when you do that.

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4- Who determined the metrics
by Infonaut

Did Microsoft come to you with a specific set of metrics, or did you work with them to develop the metrics, or did you determine them completely on your own?

Kudos to you for braving the inevitable flames to answer people's questions here on Slashdot.

Dr. Thompson

Great question! The metrics and the methodology were developed completely on our own and independent of Microsoft. They were created with the help and feedback of enterprise CIOs as well as industry analysts. I think that this relates to a couple of other questions on Slashdot with the gist of if Microsoft is funding the study aren't you incentivized for them to come out ahead. Besides the standard we would never do that and that would put our credibility at risk which is our primary commodity which are both very true, let me explain a little more about how our research engagements work.

Company X (in this case Microsoft) comes to us and says can you help us measure quality Y (in this case Reliability) to get some insight into how product Z stacks up. We say, sure, BUT we have complete creation and control of the methodology, it will be reviewed and vetted by the community (end users and independent analysts) and must strictly follow scientific principles. The response will either be: great, we want to know whats really going on or um, heres some things to focus on and I think you should set it up this way. In the first case we proceed, in the second case we inform that company that we don't do that kind of research. We are also not in the opinion business, so we present a methodology to follow and illustrate how that methodology is applied with the hope that people will take the methodology and apply it in their own environment.

All of our studies are written as if they will be released publicly BUT it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released. The vendor knows that they're taking a risk. They pay for the research either way but only have control over whether it is published, not over content. So if their intent is to use it as an outward facing piece, they may end up with something they don't like. Either way, I think it's of high value to them. If there are aspects of the results that favor the sponsor's product, in my experience, it goes to the marketing department and gets released publicly; if it favors the competitors product it goes off to the engineering folks as a tool to understand their product, their competitor's product, and the problem more clearly. Either way, we maintain complete editorial control over the study and there is no financial incentive for us if it becomes a public study or is used as an internal market analysis piece. The methodology has to be as objective as possible to be of any real value in either case.

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5 - ATMs vs. Voting Machines
by digitaldc

How is it that Diebold can make ATM machines that will account for every last penny in a banking system, but they can't make secure electronic voting machines?

Also, does the flame-resistant suit come with its own matching tinfoil hat? (don't answer that one)

Dr. Thompson

This is a question that has passed through my mind more than once. The voting world is very interesting. I don't have experience with the inner workings of Diebolds ATM machines but I can say that the versions of their tabulation software that Ive seen have some major security challenges (see this Washington post documentary for some of the gory details). I'd say I'm concerned about the e-voting systems Ive seen but that would be a serious understatement.

I question whether the economic incentive is there for them to make their voting systems more secure. Take an ATM for example. Imagine the ATM has a flaw and if you do something to it, you can make it give you more money than is actually deducted from your account. Anything involving money gets audited and sometimes audited multiple times and chances are good that the bank is going to figure out that they're loosing money. On the flip side, if there was a flaw in the ATM in the banks favor, someone balancing their checkbook is going to notice a discrepancy. The point is that there's always traceability and there's always someone keeping score. If you think about voting tabulators though we've got this mysterious box that vote data gets fed into and then, in many states, only a fraction of these votes are audited. That means we don't really know what the bank balance is other than what the machine tells us it is. If the system is highly vulnerable and its vulnerability is known by the manufacturer *but* it's going to be expensive to fix it and shore up defenses, there seems to be no huge incentive to fix the problems. I think the only way to get some decent software that counts votes that people can have confidence in is to allow security experts to actually test the systems, highlight potential vulnerabilities, and put some proper checks and balances in place. That would give the general public some visibility into a critical infrastructure system that we usually aren't in the habit of questioning and will hold voting manufacturers directly accountable to voters.

As for the tin foil hat to go with the flame resistant suit; it hasn't been shipped to me yet - apparently the manufacturing company is still filling backorders from SCO :).

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6 - Why are the requirements different?
by altoz

Looking at your research report's appendices, it seems that the requirements for Windows Administrators were somewhat different than the Linux Administrators. For instance, you ask for 4-5 years sys admin experience minimum for Windows, whereas it's 3-4 years sys admin experience minimum for Linux.

Why wasn't it equal for both? And doesn't this sort of slight Windows favoring undermine your credibility?

Dr. Thompson

Short answer: Typo. Long answer: We originally were looking for 4 years of general administration experience for both Linux and Windows which is what is reflected in the desired responses to the General Background questionnaire for Linux. We then raised it to 5 years for both Linux and Windows which is reflected in the General Background of the Windows questionnaire. The difference in the two was just a failure to update the response criteria on that shared section of one of the questionnaires. On page 5 though we've got the actual administrator experience laid out:

Each SuSE Linux administrator had at least 5 years experience administering Linux in an enterprise setting. We also required 2 years minimum experience administering SuSE Linux distributions and at least 1 year administering SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and half a year administering SLES 9 (released in late 2004). Windows administrators all had at least 5 years experience administering Windows servers in an enterprise environment. These administrators also had at least 2 years experience administering Windows Server 2000 and at least 1 year administration experience with Windows Server 2003.

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7 - Scalability of Results?
by hahiss

You tested six people on two different systems; how is that supposed to yield any substantial insight into the underlying OSes themselves?

[At best, your study seems to show that the GNU/Linux distribution you selected was not particularly good at this task. But why does that show that the ``monolithic" style of Windows is better per se than the ``modular" style of GNU/Linux distributions?]

Dr. Thompson

First, let's look at what we did. We followed a methodology for evaluating reliability with three Windows admins and three Linux admins. This is small sample set and it looked at one scenario: ecommerce. Is this enough to make sweeping claims about the reliability of Linux/Windows? No way. I do however think the results raise some interesting questions about the modularity vs. integration tradeoffs that come with operating systems. I don't think that either the Windows or Linux models are better in a general sense but they *are* different; the question is which is likely to cause less pain and provide more value for your particular business need in your specific environment. Hopefully these are the questions that people will ask after reading this study, and with any luck it will prompt others to carry out their own analysis within their own IT environment, building on what we started here. I think the methodology in this paper has provided a good starting point to help people answer those questions in context.

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8 - Convenience vs. security
by Sheetrock

Lately, I've felt that Microsoft is emphasizing greater trust in their control over your system as a means of increasing your security. This is suggested by the difficulty of obtaining individual or bulk security patches from their website as opposed to simply loading Internet Explorer and using their Windows Update service, the encouragement in Service Pack 2 of allowing Automatic Update to run in the background, and the introduction of Genuine Advantage requiring the user to authenticate his system before obtaining critical updates such as DirectX.

In addition, Digital Rights Management or other copy protection schemes are becoming increasingly demanding and insidious, whether by uniquely identifying and reporting on user activity, intentionally restricting functionality, and even introducing new security issues (the most recent flap involves copy protection software on Sony CDs that not only hides content from the user but permits viruses to take advantage of this feature.)

I would like to know how you feel about the shift of control over the personal computer from the person to the software manufacturers -- is it right, and do we gain more than we're losing in privacy and security?

Dr. Thompson

This is an interesting problem because manufacturers have to deal with a wide range of users. If there was real visibility and education for users on the security implications of doing A, B or C then we'd be ok. It's scary though when that line gets crossed. Sony's DRM rootkit is a good example. But if you think about it, we are essentially passively accepting things like this all the time. Every time we install a new piece of software,especially something that reads untrusted data like a browser plugin,we tacitly accept that this software is likely to contain security flaws and can be an entryway into your system; NOW are you sure you want to install it? The visceral immediate reaction is no but then you balance tradeoffs of the features you get versus potential risks. Increasingly, were not even given that choice, and components that are intended to help us (or help the vendor) are installed with out our knowledge. This also brings up the question of visibility; how do we know what security state were really in with a system? Again, there are tradeoffs, some of this installed software may actually increase usability or maintainability but it's abstracting away what's happening on the metal. So far, it seems as though the market has tended towards the usability, maintainability, integration that favors bundling on both the Linux and Windows sides. It's kind of a disturbing trend though.

As another example, think about how much trustaverage programmers put into their compiler these days. Whenever I teach classes on computer security and then go off into x86 op codes or even assembly, it seems to be a totally foreign concept and skillset. We've created a culture of building applications rapidly in super high-level languages which does get the job done, but at the same time seems to have sacrificed knowledge of (or even the desire to know) what's happening on the metal. This places a heavy burden on platform developers, compiler writers and even IDE manufacturers because we are shifting the cloud of security responsibility over to them in big way. Under the right conditions it can be good because the average programmer knows little about security, but we need to make sure that the components we depend on and trust are written with security in mind, analyzed by folks that have a clue, and are tested and verified with security in mind. This means asking vendors the tough questions about their development processes and making sure they've got pretty good answers. Here's what I think is a good start. If that fails, theres always BSD. :).

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9 - Apache versus IIS
by 00_NOP

Simple one: of course I accept that Windows and Linux are a priori equally vulnerable - C programmers make mistakes. The question is which model is most likely to deliver a fix fastest. Given that the one area where Linux is probably in the lead over Microsoft's software is in the realm of the webserver - why are my server logs filled with artifacts of hacked IIS boxes but apache seems to remain pretty safe?

Dr. Thompson

You bring up a couple of interesting points. The first is patch delivery. It's true that on Linux if there's a high profile vulnerability you're likely to be able to find a patch out on the net from somebody in a few hours. Sometimes the fix is simple, a one-liner, and other times it may be more complex. Either way, there could be unintended side effects of the patch which is why there's usually a significant lag between these first responder patches and a blessed patch released from the distribution vendor. Most enterprises I know wait for the distribution patch as a matter of policy, and even then, they go through a fairly rigorous testing and compatibility verification process before the patch gets deployed widely. In the Windows world, one doesn't get the alpha or beta patches, just the blessed finished product. So the question is which solution is likely to provide a patch that fixes the problem and doesn't create any more problems the fastest. That's a tough one to answer. I think theres something to be learned by looking historically and that in general theres a big discrepancy between perception and reality. Here's a (pdf) link to a study we did earlier this year based on 2004 data that I think provides a good starting point for answering that question.

As far as why you've got so many attempts on your Windows/IIS box, I think there are two distinct issues: vulnerability and threat profile. In the past, I would argue that the path of least resistance was through Windows because desktop systems were often left unprotected by the home computer user. Bang-for-the-packet favored creating tools that exploited these problems and some of the attacks actually worked on poorly configured servers as well. Then there's the targeted vs. broad attacks. Theres no question that the high-profile worms and viruses in the last several years have favored Windows as a target. The issue gets even more complicated when you look at targeted attacks. These targeted attacks are much harder to measure, even anecdotally, because either an organization gets compromised and doesn't disclose it (unless they're compelled to by law) or the attack goes undetected because it doesn't leave any of the standard footprints, in which case no pain is felt immediately. That may help to explain it but the truth is that there's a lot of conflicting data out there. I remember reading this on Slashdot last year which claims Apache was more attacked than IIS but I've also read reports to the contrary. The reality is that any target of value is going to get attacked frequently. If there is an indiscriminant mass attack like a worm or virus, that's pretty bad and can be really painful. What's scarier though is the attack that just targets you.

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10 - Do you agree with Windows Local Workflow
by MosesJones

Microsoft and Linux distros have had a policy for some time of including more and more functionality in the base operating system, the latest example is the inclusion of "Local Workflow" in Windows Vista.

As a security expert do you think that bundling more and more increases or decreases the risks, and should both Windows and Linux distros be doing more to create reduced platforms that just act as good operating systems?

Dr. Thompson

Three years ago I bought my mother a combination TV, VCR and DVD player. It was great; she didn't have to worry about cables or the notorious multi-remote control problem. She didn't even really need the VCR because she hardly ever watches Video tapes, but I thought, why not. It worked great for two years, mom watched her DVDs, and on a blue moon a video tape from a family vacation would find its way into the VCR. All was well at the Thompson household. This past year, tragedy struck. The VCR devoured a videotape, completely entangling it in the machine. This not only knocked out the VCR but the television too (it thought it was constantly at the end of a tape and needing to rewind it). So here's the issue: mom probably only needed a TV and a separate DVD player. I probably could have gotten better quality components individually too, and with some ebay-savvy shopping, the group may have been cheaper. For my mom though, the integration and ease of operation of the three were key assets. The flipside of that is that the whole is only as strong as the weakest of its constituent parts, and by the manufacturer throwing some questionable VCR components into the mix, it caused the whole thing to fail. The meta-question: did I make the right choice, going for the kitchen-sink approach versus individual components? I think for mom I made the right call. For me, my willingness to program a universal remote and my love of tweaking the system would have lead me down a different route.

In operating systems, it depends what you're looking for and what the risk vs. reward equation is for you, and I would argue that the answer varies from user to user. The ideal would be something that gave you integration, ease of use, visibility, manageability and the ability to truly customize and minimize functionality and maintenance requirements. No operating system I've ever seen strikes that balance optimally and for every user. As far as bundling functionality with the distribution, I think it's a question of market demand. There's no question though that from a simple mathematical perspective, the less code processing untrusted data the better. That means if I need a system to perform one specific function, and that function was constant over time, then from a security perspective I only want the stuff on that box that does what I need to serve that goal. For example, I don't ever want X Windows on my linux file server. I just want the minimal code base there because as long as the code itself is reliable, I'll only have to mess with the box to apply patches (and much fewer patches if I strip the system down). That's true of my home fileserver. If I have an army of systems to manage though, my decision is going to come down to which platform is reliable and extends me the most tools to manage it efficiently and effectively. That's a question that can only be answered in context. I can tell you what I run at home though. File server: Red Hat EL 4 (no X windows). Laptop: Windows XP SP2. Desktop: Windows Server 2003 with virtual machines of everything under the sun from Win 9x to SuSE, Red Hat and Debian.

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com is reporting that Sony BMG today detailed a program that should allow customers who bought one of the 52 titles known to be tainted with the company's deeply flawed anti-piracy software to exchange them for CDs of the same title, sans rootkit of course. Oddly enough, Sony is offering those who want to return the CDs the chance to download MP3 versions of the discs, but only after Sony has received the returned discs. Amazon.com also is sending out e-mails to customers who bought the discs, offering to replace or refund them at no cost."

Not only is Sony no longer selling the RootKit CDs, Arend writes "According to a USAToday article, Sony is to pull their controversial rootkit CDs from store shelves." A nice gesture, but a little late. bos writes "Sony's DRM rootkit has been found by Dan Kaminsky to have infected at least half a million networks, according to an article by Quinn Norton for Wired News. Dan has even put together some pretty pictures of the breadth of the infection." With so many people infected, it's unfortunate that wiredog writes "From The Washington Post comes the news that serious security flaws have been found in the software that Sony is distributing to users who want to remove the Sony rootkit. The article says: 'Because of the way the tool is configured ... it allows any Web page that the user subsequently visits to download, install and run any code that it likes.'" Oops. Even Microsoft is getting into the act. ares284 writes "Microsoft said it would remove controversial copy-protection software that CDs from music publisher Sony BMG install on personal computers, deeming it a security risk to PCs running on Windows."

Rick Zeman writes "Blackberry addicted US Feds have entered into the patent dispute between Canadian company Research in Motion and US patent-holders NTP. From the article: 'The Justice Department has filed a legal brief in a patent dispute, asking a federal court to delay any immediate shutdown of the popular wireless e-mail system to ensure that state and federal workers can continue to use their devices.' Apparently 10% of US Blackberry users are government users."

An anonymous reader writes "Bowing to public outrage, Sony BMG has temporarily halted the use of its controversial anti-piracy software in all of its music CDs, the company said in a statement today. The move comes just a day after a top Bush administration official chided Sony and the entertainment industry for going too far: according to this story over at Washingtonpost.com, Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security's policy czar warned would-be DRM makers: 'It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.' The Post has the full text and video of his commentary." We've reported on this story previously.

carre4 writes "Lawyers in California have filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony and a second one may be filed today in New York. The lawsuit was filed Nov. 1 in Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles by Vernon, CA attorney Alan Himmelfarb. It asks the court to prevent Sony from selling additional CDs protected by the anti-piracy software, and seeks monetary damages for California consumers who purchased them. The suit alleges that Sony's software violates at least three California statutes, including the "Consumer Legal Remedies Act," which governs unfair and/or deceptive trade acts; and the "Consumer Protection against Computer Spyware Act," which prohibits -- among other things -- software that takes control over the user's computer or misrepresents the user's ability or right to uninstall the program. The suit also alleges that Sony's actions violate the California Unfair Competition law, which allows public prosecutors and private citizens to file lawsuits to protect businesses and consumers from unfair business practices. EFF has released a list of rootkit affected CD's and Slashdot user xtracto also has a list."

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that the FBI has drastically increased its use of National Security Letters (NSL), which permit it to collect information without judicial oversight. According to the article, the use of NSLs is up by a factor of 100, and the records are kept forever (in the past they were thrown away if the subject was cleared). Deep in the article, the author reports that NSLs were used to collect records '[...] of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in [Las Vegas]' for a two week period, in response to a terrorism threat in 2003. Those records, apparently, will be kept forever by the federal government. There's an ombudsman, and a procedure to resolve complaints, but the mere existence of an NSL is secret, so it's not clear how anyone can complain!

tabdelgawad writes "Brian Krebs, who writes the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog notes that Microsoft has just asked Congress to enact a new federal privacy law to preempt the growing hodge-podge of state laws that regulate how companies can use personal information. Go Microsoft!?"

tabdelgawad writes "Brian Krebs, who writes the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog notes that Microsoft has just asked Congress to enact a new federal privacy law to preempt the growing hodge-podge of state laws that regulate how companies can use personal information. Go Microsoft!?"

A couple of days ago we posted a story about Sony DRM installing a rootkit. Since then we have seen many more stories on the subject that I thought were worth sharing. manno gave us a link to the inquirer and salemnic sent us a page from the washington post. smallfries gave us one from PC Pro. It's nice to see this story not getting lost in the cracks since the implications are gigantic.

An anonymous reader writes "Robots might allow for delicate surgeries in space, reports the Washington Post." From the article: "The tiny, wheeled robots, which are about 3 inches tall and as wide as a lipstick case, can be slipped into small incisions and computer-controlled by surgeons in different locations. Some robots are equipped with cameras and lights and can send back images to surgeons. Others have surgical tools attached that can be controlled remotely ... Officials hope that next spring, NASA will teach astronauts to use the robots so that surgeries could one day be performed in space. Delays in communication because of the distance to space would mean surgeons on earth would have tell astronauts what commands to give the robots"

An anonymous reader writes "With iTunes selling a couple of popular TV shows now there has been significant hesitation from other television producers to follow suit and put their content on the Web. It has also sparked activity from the actors unions who want additional compensation for what appears online. But there is also existing content that stands to be revived in this new context, older television shows from the 50's and 60's that have been squeezed out of the traditional broadcast by popular shows of more recent vintage. It was suggested to a producer who is presently digitizing 27 episodes of a 1950's show called Captain Zero to offer it up on iTunes for a buck an episode. Is this an opportunity for these old shows to strike while the iron is hot and while the owners of more contemporary content are caught like deers in a headlight? As the Captain Zero article points out purveyors of old time radio programs have enjoyed a significant revival by embracing web-based technology. Why not old time TV?"

EvilTwinSkippy writes "According to the Washington Post (free registration), Two Federal Courts have seperately ruled that the FBI may not track the location of cell phone users without proof that a crime has been committed, or is in progress. The cases involve the FBI seeking court orders to track suspects in real-time using the mobile phone network as part of an ongoing investigation."

connah0047 writes "The Washington Post reports that US passports will be getting RFID chips by October of 2006. Despite security concerns, the U.S. has now committed to putting RFID chips in the passports of all U.S. citizens. The new regulations will mean that all new and renewing U.S. passports will contain RFID chips by October 2006. While some believe this is a step forward, there are major privacy and security issues with the wireless technology."

Noksagt writes "The Washington Post is reporting that recently discovered documents indicate serious intelligence violations by the FBI. This comes just months after the U.S. House voted to extend the Patriot Act, EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center) has obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act of thirteen cases of possible misconduct in intelligence investigations. The case numbering suggests that there were at least 153 investigations of misconduct at the FBI in 2003 alone."

Felix the Cat writes "After budgets cuts led to the layoff of engineers and scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a US Senate committee has approved a $3 billion dollar subsidy to assist Americans in their difficult transition to digital television in 2009. The old analog television spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The transition date was chosen to not interfere with college football bowl games or basketball playoffs." From the article: "The draft of a House bill would end analog transmissions on Dec. 31, 2008. It does not mention a subsidy for set-top converter boxes. So, lawmakers will likely have to work out differences between the two bills, though Stevens said he did not anticipate a big fight with the House over the deadline or the subsidy."

The Washington Post has a piece discussing the suck that is a movie based on a videogame. From the article: "At the heart of this competitive marriage is this question: How do you successfully turn an interactive experience (playing an Xbox game) into a passive one (watching a movie version of an Xbox game)? For whatever reasons, the recent crop of video game movies -- including 2003's 'House of the Dead' and this year's 'Alone in the Dark,' both helmed by the German director Uwe Boll -- have consistently disappointed gamers. Someone even started a Web site called Uwebollsucks.com. Is it for real? A joke? No one is sure."

Nilmat writes "A Washington Post Article notes that 2005 will probably have the highest mean global temperature of any year since the advent of systematic temperature records. At the moment, the mean temperature is about 0.75 degrees C above the global mean from 1950 to 1990, approximately .04 degrees higher than 1998, the year of the previous record. Only something dramatic, such as a major volcanic eruption, could cause enough cooling to miss setting a new record."

goombah99 writes "The Washington Post is criticizing a little-noticed bill wending it's way through congress that would allow unlimited and unreported campaign contributions by corporations and individuals as long as it was confined to internet advertising and publicity buys. While internet spending was only $14 million last year it is growing at a rate of 30 fold over four years poising it to overtake conventional media spending."

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com is reporting that adware purveyor 180Solutions has finally decided to stop letting third-party companies install their programs for commission without 180's approval. The story says 180 announced the move after pressure from public interest groups who threatened to file a formal complaint with regulators at the Federal Trade Commission."

fishdan wrote to mention that the Darpa Grand Challenge is getting underway again. The qualifying rounds started yesterday. National media has picked up on the story, with pieces at the Washington Post and Seattle Times. From the Post: "The autonomous robotic vehicles began competing Wednesday in the first of a series of qualifying rounds at the California Speedway. Half will advance to the Oct. 8 starting line of the so-called Grand Challenge. The grueling, weeklong semifinals are designed to test the vehicles' ability to cover a roughly 2-mile stretch of the track without a human driver or remote control. Participants ranging from souped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles _ hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars _ while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers."

auckland map writes "China set new regulations on Internet news content which ban the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest. Established news media needed permission to run a news Web site, while new operators had to register themselves with government information offices. This move further widens a campaign of controls Chinese government has imposed on web sites, communication, leisure and businesses." From the article: "The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest ... [internet news sites] must be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."

protagoras writes "According to a bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, suspects arrested or detained by federal authorities may have their DNA forcibly collected for permanent storage in a central database. The bill is supported by the White House as well, but has not yet gone to the floor for a vote. Current law permits this only for those convicted of a crime. So even though completely innocent, should the Feds decide to detain you for any reason, your genetic data will grace their database beside that from murders, terrorists, and other miscreants." From the article: "The provision, co-sponsored by Kyl and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), does not require the government to automatically remove the DNA data of people who are never convicted. Instead, those arrested or detained would have to petition to have their information removed from the database after their cases were resolved. Privacy advocates are especially concerned about possible abuses such as profiling based on genetic characteristics."

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com is reporting that a fairly nasty exploit has been released for a security hole that Firefox patched just yesterday. This is sure to add fuel to the ongoing heated debate over whether Mozilla is any safer the Internet Explorer." From the article: "This is not your run-of-the-mill proof of concept exploit code. It appears to be quite comprehensive, and would allow any attacker to use it with only slight modifications. According to the advisory, the code is designed to be embedded in a Web site so that anyone computer visiting the evil site with Firefox or Netscape would open up a line of communication with another Internet address of the attacker's choice, effectively letting the bad guys control the victim computer from afar."

elrous0 writes "In spite of TiVo's continuing insistence that recent appearances of 'red flag' recordings are mere "glitches," the AP is reporting that customers are beginning to get nervous about the new content-blocking feature added in a recent TiVo upgrade. The story quotes Matt Haughey, of PVRblog.com, as saying 'TiVo would be of limited utility in the future if the studios were allowed to do this with regular broadcast content ... This is like cell-phone jammers. What if you couldn't talk on your cell phone? If customers can't do something with their TiVo that they could in the past, they will stop using it.'" We've touched on this topic in the past.

Pichu0102 writes "Reported by the Washington Post, Sony says it will cut about 7% of its jobs as well as sell about $1 billion of it's assets. It also will declare a loss for this year." From the article: "To help boost efficiency, Sony said it has abolished the company system that Stringer said was preventing different business units from communicating freely, causing overlap in development and missed opportunities in the market. The electronics group will be reorganized to place centralized decision-making over key business areas under Ryoji Chubachi, who became Sony's new president and electronics CEO in a major overhaul of management in June." Another reorg on the heels of Microsoft's decision from earlier this week.

Buford C Nuzzle-Chunks writes "PhysOrg is reporting that 'The FBI and New Jersey officials have started a hushed but intensive search for three missing lab mice reportedly infected with deadly strains of plague'. The Washington Post says it's not that big a deal, but I was dismayed at the PhysOrg article's quote from Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist, about certain federal bio-terrorism labs: 'You have more security at a McDonald's than at some of these facilities.'"

Buford C Nuzzle-Chunks writes "PhysOrg is reporting that 'The FBI and New Jersey officials have started a hushed but intensive search for three missing lab mice reportedly infected with deadly strains of plague'. The Washington Post says it's not that big a deal, but I was dismayed at the PhysOrg article's quote from Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist, about certain federal bio-terrorism labs: 'You have more security at a McDonald's than at some of these facilities.'"

Loconut1389 writes "According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has a revised doctrine to be signed in the next few weeks would give the president the authority for a preemptive nuclear strike. I would hope that this is a move designed to say we mean business and then never use it, but the means is there for mutual assured destruction."

christchurch writes "Russia unmanned cargo ship Progress M-54, carrying food and supplies, docked at the International Space Station safely yesterday. A two-man replacement crew is scheduled to head to the station on 1st of October, along with an American scientist-businessman, Gregory Olsen, who is paying the Russian space agency $20 million for a weeklong visit."

capouch writes "The Washington Post reports that school administrators for the DC public school system are having an awful time getting their new administrative software to work properly." From the article: "'In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,' Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer. 'In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.' The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all...Barlow said officials plan to replace Windows with a different operating system."

hsuwh writes "Google has hired Internet pioneer Vint Cerf away from MCI as its "Chief Internet Evangelist". "He is one of the most important people alive today," said [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt, who has been friends with Cerf for more than 20 years. "Vint has put his heart and soul into making the Internet happen. I know he is going to jump right in here and start shoveling out new ideas for Google.""

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an excerpt of an online interview with "Diabl0", the 18-year-old that Moroccan authorities arrested on suspicion of writing the Zotob and Mytob worms, as well as the Rbot trojan. In the back-and-forth, Diabl0 says his worms "spread only for money" and hints that the motive was receiving commissions from installing spyware on infected computers."

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post is running a lengthy article today about Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems, an Indiana-based company that says its developed a nonlethal weapon that shoots lightning bolts. This article is an in-depth look at a company that's stirred up some controversy on Slashdot in the past. From the article: 'Lightning guns, heat rays, weapons that can make you hear the voice of God. This is what happens when the war on terror meets the entrepreneurial spirit.'"