FTC dumps on scammers who blasted millions of text messages

The Federal Trade Commission today said it has filed eight court cases to stop companies who have sent over 180 million illegal or deceptive text messages to all manner of mobile users in the past year.

The messages -- of which the FTC said it had received some 20,000 complaints in 2012 -- promised consumers free gifts or prizes, including gift cards worth $1,000 to major retailers such as Best Buy, Walmart and Target. Consumers who clicked on the links in the messages found themselves caught in a confusing and elaborate process that required them to provide sensitive personal information, apply for credit or pay to subscribe to services to get the supposedly "free" cards. In some cases if users responded to the texts, they were subjected to other scams.

[ MORE: FTC: Identity theft retains its throne as No. 1 worst scourge in top 10 consumer complaint list

MORE: IRS warns of Dirty Dozen tax scams ]

According to the FTC, once consumers entered their personal information, they were directed to another site and told they would have to participate in a number of "offers" to be eligible for their gift card. In some cases, consumers were obligated to sign up for as many as 13 of the offers. These offers frequently included recurring subscriptions for which consumers were required to provide credit card information. In other cases, they required consumers to submit applications for credit that would be reflected in their credit reports and possibly affect their credit score. If a consumer completed all of the "offers," they were then notified that to get the promised gift card, they had to find three others who also would complete the offers, the FTC stated.

"Today's announcement says 'game over' to the major league scam artists behind millions of spam texts," said Charles Harwood, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. " The offers are, in a word, garbage."

The FTC complaints targeted defendants who sent the unwanted text messages, as well as those who operated the deceptive websites. In addition, the FTC is pursuing a contempt action against a serial text message spammer, Phil Flora, who was barred in 2011 from sending spam text messages and who is accused of being part of this spam texting scheme as well.

The FTC complaints were filed against the alleged senders of the unsolicited text messages and included:

Telecom seeks critical infrastructure status for IT vendors

The Obama administration excluded the information technology (IT) industry from its definition of the nation's critical infrastructure, giving them immunity from security-related requirements unless changed by Congress.

While this is good for tech companies, the telecom industry is crying foul, saying IT businesses should share any regulatory burden.

The tech industry's exclusion, the result of lobbying by the Software & Information Industry Association, was included in President Barack Obama's executive order, issued last month.

In directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to identify critical infrastructure, the order said DHS "shall not identify any commercial information technology products or consumer information technology services under this section."

The executive order is meant as a framework for protecting power plants, telecommunication networks, water filtration systems, manufacturers and financial systems from cyberattacks by terrorists or hostile governments.

Congress is considering proposed legislation to require the sharing of attack information between government and companies that own or operate critical infrastructure. The Obama administration wants to include some security regulations.

Because additional regulations are possible, telecommunication companies such as Verizon Communications and AT&T want the IT industry to share the burden. They argue that some IT companies should be considered critical infrastructure, since the products and services they provide are a crucial part of communication networks and are usually the targets of hackers.

While not naming which companies, candidates could include Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco and other leading tech companies.

"Network security must go beyond what is traditionally considered critical infrastructure," a Verizon spokesman said on Thursday. "The Internet ecosystem is far more interconnected and dependent on a host of players than it was even five years ago."

Tech companies contacted by CSO Online either declined comment or did not respond.

Cybersecurity experts believe it doesn't matter whether IT vendors are considered critical infrastructure, since whatever security requirements are handed down by the government will be passed on to them by the utility, telecom company or defense manufacturer.

"As a practical matter, commercial products won't escape secondary regulation," said Stewart Baker, a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson and a former assistant secretary for policy at DHS.

[Also see: Hackers use corporate attacks as staging grounds for other cyber assaults]

Letting critical infrastructure owners and operators hand off security requirements also avoids having to decide which of a vendor's products need to be regulated, Jacob Olcott, principal consultant for cybersecurity at Good Harbor Consulting, said.

NASA has Mars rover Curiosity sleep through radiation blast

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity is running again after engineers put it to sleep for a day this week to protect it from a powerful solar storm.

On Tuesday, the sun unleashed what appeared to be a major blast of radiation and solar wind, called a coronal mass ejection, that was heading straight at Mars.

NASA feared the blast could disrupt Curiosity's electrical charge. The rover has been working on Marssince last August.

A working rover hit with a heavy load of radiation could suddenly perceive a zero as a one or a one as a zero, said Richard Cook, Curiosity's project manager.

"When [a rover is] on and you zap it with radiation, which is itself a little electrical charge, you can disrupt it," Cook told Computerworld . "If it's off, these radiation hits don't really affect it."

So when Curiosity awoke from its normal night's sleep on Wednesday, NASA scientists immediately had it to go back to sleep for the rest of the day.

The rover, which is steeled against normal space radiation, awoke again on Thursday without any apparent damage from the radiation blast, according to Cook.

The radiation blast wasn't as strong as scientists had feared. Cook called it a "big event, but not a very big event." However, he did say it was good that NASA engineers were prepared for the event and acted cautiously.

NASA had to deal with the solar burst at the same time it was repairing a computer problem onboard Curiosity.

NASA engineers last week had detected a hardware problem that was causing multiple memory errors on the rover's main computer, which is called the A-Side. The NASA team put Curiosity into a safe mode and switched it over to run on its backup computer system, or its B-Side.

NASA, though, is still trying to identify the hardware problem so a software workaround can be built. Engineers are also trying to repair the A-Side software so it can serve as the new backup system.

For several days now, Curiosity has been doing minimal activity while scientists work on its systems. According to Cook, the team is hoping to get it fully working again next week. "It depends on what we learn in the next couple of days," he said.

"It could be early next week but if the problem is something that causes us to have to go back and erase the memory from the A-Side and restore it from the ground, that could take a little more time. Then we're looking at maybe the end of next week," Cook added.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

Megaupload shutdown boosted movie sales, says study

The shutdown of Megaupload caused an increase in digital sales and rentals of movies, according to a study by two researchers, which is likely to give a boost to the movie industry which has typically blamed online cyberlockers and file-sharing websites for fueling piracy.

The closure of Megaupload led to a 7 to 10 percent increase in digital sales and a 4 to 7 percent increase in digital rentals by units, 18 weeks after the shutdown, for the two studios in its sample, thestudy reported.

"Thus our findings show that the closing of a major online piracy site can increase digital media sales, and by extension we provide evidence that Internet movie piracy displaces digital film sales," wrote researchers Brett Danaher, assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College, and Michael D. Smith, professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and colleagues, and two companies including Megaupload, were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012 and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement and money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. They were charged with running a criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites.

Digital movie revenues for the two studios were 6 to 10 percent higher over the 18 weeks following the shutdown across the 12 countries surveyed, than if there had not been a shutdown, the researchers said. The gains in sales and rentals after the closure were higher in countries that had a higher penetration of Megaupload's services. "Much of the positive correlation between the post-shutdown sales change and the pre-shutdown Megaupload penetration is driven by France, Spain, Belgium and Mexico," the researchers wrote.

The researchers cautioned that the boost in legal sales as a result of the shutdown may not have been directly linked to the unavailability of Megaupload, but to measures taken by other cyberlockers in the wake of the shutdown and the publicity it generated.

The research focused on Megaupload's closure to analyze empirically whether policy interventions are an effective way to reverse the negative impact of piracy on media sales. It used sales data provided by the two studios, which included all digital purchases and rentals through their major digital channels aggregated at a weekly level from Sept. 2, 2011 to May 31, 2012.

A recent study by NPD Group, however, suggests that illegal music file sharing declined significantly last year primarily because of the increased use of free, legal music streaming services.

The number of consumers using peer-to-peer services to download music was down 17 percent in 2012 from a year earlier, according to the NPD Group. The reduced sharing activity also saw the volumes of illegal downloads of music files from P2P services also drop, it added.

Activist launches campaign to change the DMCA

The author of a successful White House petition calling on government officials to legalize the unlocking of mobile phones has turned his attention to broader reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Sina Khanifar, the phone-unlocking entrepreneur behind the recent petition, launched FixTheDMCA.orgWednesday in an effort to push the U.S. Congress into changing the DMCA.

The new effort has the support of Mozilla, Reddit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more than 30 tech companies, Khanifar said in an email.

Khanifar became involved in the issue after the Library of Congress allowed an exception to DMCA prosecution for unlocking mobile phones to expire in late January. Users typically unlock phones to switch carriers. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration voiced support for phone unlocking after Khanifar's petition received more than 114,000 signatures.

The new site helps visitors contact their lawmakers about the DMCA. "Since there's a lot of talk in D.C. about bills that would fix the unlocking issue, we want to move the conversation towards discussing and taking action on the source of the problems, and not simply address one of the symptoms," Khanifar said.

On Tuesday, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, introduced legislation to legalize the unlocking of mobile phones. Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, said she plans to introduce similar legislation.

A forum letter targeted at lawmakers on the FixTheDMCA site focuses on the section of the law, section 1201, that allows exceptions to DMCA prosecutions for circumventing copyright protections. The Library of Congress periodically reviews the exceptions and decides whether to remove or add exceptions for copyright technology circumvention activities.

The section "was originally written to protect copyright owners from privacy by outlawing 'circumvention of technological protection measures,'" the letter says. "But the broad language in the anti-circumvention provisions means that technologies such as carrier unlocking cell phones, 'jailbreaking' phones, tablets and games consoles, as well as creating non-infringing personal backups of DVDs are all in a legal grey area."

The letter asks lawmakers to support a rewrite of section 1201 of the DMCA that provides more protections for consumers and tech businesses.

Khanifar and his colleagues built the FixTheDMCA site in 72 hours on a Startup Bus trip from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, he said.

Facebook's new News Feed wish list includes mobile and highlighted friends

Facebook is set to unveil an updated News Feed on Thursday and analysts have a wish list of changes that users might welcome.

Facebook on Friday sent out press invitations for a March 7 event at the company's offices in Menlo Park, Calif. "Come see a new look for News Feed," the invite reads.

The company didn't give any details about how the new page might look.

Industry analysts, though, have their own ideas, which include adapting the News Feed to work better on a mobile platform and allowing users to highlight the friends and information they're most interested in.

"I want to be able to tag certain users, like my wife, as important so her news is at the top of my feed," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research. "All news in my feed is not of equal value. So let me determine what is important to me and how much I want to see."

Kerravala said it would be smart for Facebook to tweak the News Feed for mobile so it works more smoothly on smartphones and tablets.

"Searching and sorting would make news much easier to digest when you're mobile," he said. "With mobile, you're really looking only at two news events per page. Here's where something like, say, "express news" would be better where I just get one line of what the news is... You'd get more headlines and then you could choose to see more detail."

Mobile has been a major challenge for Facebook and every other Internet company.

Users are quickly moving from desktops and laptops to accessing Facebook on their smartphones and tablets. That has forced Facebook to streamline their mobile interfaces and functionality, while also rethinking how they can generate revenue off the mobile platform.

The company has made big gains in that area.

About eight months ago, Facebook noted in a pre-IPO amended filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that mobile computing was one of the biggest risks to its potential success.

However, during the company's fourth-quarter and year-end earnings call in January, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "Today, there is no argument. Facebook is a mobile company."

Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner Inc., said whatever changes Facebook makes are bound to affect the social network's mobile platform, since the News Feed is the prominent feature on the Facebook app.

EBay develops 'miles per gallon' metric for data centers

There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.

The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric -- in eBay's case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.

The result is a set of data that provides the equivalent of a "miles per gallon" metric for data centers, which organizations can use as a baseline to improve on over time, said Dean Nelson, head of eBay's Global Foundation Services, which manages its data centers worldwide.

"EBay is a single system, it's the sum of a million parts, and we needed a way to measure and convey the efficiency of this system," he said Tuesday at the Green Grid Forum, a data center efficiency conference in Santa Clara, California.

EBay has published the methodology in the hope that other companies will adopt it too, much as the industry rallied around Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, as a general metric for data center efficiency.

EBay's system, which it calls the Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) dashboard, goes further than PUE, measuring its IT infrastructure and relating it to the four metrics its top executives care about most -- revenue, performance, environmental impact and cost.

In the process of sharing its method, eBay took the unusual step of releasing a wealth of data about its own data centers. It operated 52,075 physical servers at the end of last year, and generated 740 metric tons of carbon per million users, or 1.6 tons per server.

It set itself a target of reducing its cost per transaction and carbon emissions per transaction by 10 percent this year, and of increasing its transactions per kilowatt hour by the same amount, Nelson said. It shared those figures too -- apart from the costs in dollar terms, which it views as competitive data.

"We're not going to show our detailed profit and loss numbers to everyone; we're devising a metric to show how much we're improving efficiency each year," said Rohini Jain, finance lead for eBay's technology infrastructure.

Still, it's more data than most other companies provide. For instance, Google doesn't disclose how many servers it operates or how much power its data centers consume, though it does publishefficiency data.

It may not be easy for other companies to replicate eBay's methodology. EBay has a straightforward metric against which to measure performance -- the number of transactions its customers make, which it measures in URLs -- while many other firms have more complex business models.

It also helps that it is a technology-driven company willing to invest in energy-saving ideas. It brought its first solar farm online in December, generating 650 kilowatts of power, and it plans to install Bloom fuel cells later this year that will provide up to 6 megawatts of power.