Posted via web from the urban core

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

MSNBC anchor Carlos Watson noticed during the presidential campaigns and election of President Obama last year that a new generation of media consumers had emerged. The “Change Generation,” Watson calls it (wonder where he got that name from), is educated, edgy and curious about the world and news, and in contrast to the yuppies from 20 years ago, doesn’t find news solely in the New York Times or on CNN. This generation cares about pop culture, social activism, fresh opinions and of course, change. So Watson has created a news and opinion site, called The Stimulist, which launched last week, that caters to the this generation, and found a high-profile lead investor to boot, Elevation Partner’s Roger McNamee. Yup, the same McNamee who recently stepped down from Forbes Media’s board.

The Stimulist breaks slightly from the format of most news sites and blogs by limiting its content to only six features per day. Taking inspiration from the news briefing that President Obama gets each morning from his staff, Watson’s site features “The Daily Six: Six Things You Should Know Today.”

These include: News We Like, a roundup of hot topics in the news; Kind of a Big Deal, a daily profile of a rising star (for instance, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was profiled); Idea To Consider; a thought-provoking piece intended to start conversations (Yesterday’s was “Resolved: Marijuana Will Be Legalized”); Good Sh*t, a recommendation of a fresh, “cool” place to go or something to do; Flashback, a historical anecdote that will shine extra light on a current event (“The Five Most Shocking Justice Appointments” was featured earlier this week); and The C Note, Watson’s place to share his original opinions and thoughts.

Watson says all content is original but the stories link to other news sources. He maintains that though there are a limited amount of daily articles on the site, the Stimulist will be alluring to readers because it is simple, easy to read and people won’t get lost on the site. The Stimulist is being positioned as an ideal read for a coffee or lunch break from work. A tremendous amount of thought went into the design and aesthetics of the site, Watson says, with the idea that the “change” generation would appreciate a streamlined site that isn’t overwhelming.

The Stimulist’s competitors are the Huffington Post and Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, which is a daily mashup of cultural and general news. Both, however, are aggregators of news from elsewhere and thus have much more daily content than The Stimulist. But Watson says sometimes less is more. The site itself is lean, but the startup already has six staff members (which seems like a lot to produce only six posts a day).

Watson is careful to make the distinction that this site is geared towards the change generation, which he estimates in the twenty-something to forty-something age demographic. But last week, an 80-year-old gentlemen wrote Watson, saying that he’s as much a part of this generation as a 25-year-old. So maybe it is more of a state of mind. But do you have to be an Obama supporter to qualify?

Although Watson hopes to become the “first and favorite” source of news for this generation (regardless of age), I think that The Stimulist is more similar to a daily digital magazine catered to a web audience with short-attention spans. It’s a great place for readers to stop off and take a quick read of current perspectives and leave feeling a little bit more educated for the day. But can it become a daily habit for enough readers to make it last? The rule of thumb in online news is that traffic rises with the number of stories posted per day because not everyone is interested in each story. The more stories there are to choose from, the more readers who show up. Watson thinks he can buck this trend.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Shared by Trey

Great set of suggestions for spreadsheets.

If you’re like me, and spend a lot of time building spreadsheets to model or budget or crunch a set of numbers, you have probably had the following experience.

One day, you have a bright idea. You fire up Excel and begin working to express it. After hours and hours of constructing and tweaking and changing and modifying your spreadsheet, you find yourself sitting at your desk, brow sweaty, with a goofy look of happiness on your face - “Aha!” you think. “That’s it! I’ve done it!“

You then save your work, quit Excel, and head off for a much-deserved snack.

Three months later, you remember your genius spreadsheet and want to update it. You locate the file on the drive, double-click, and … find yourself staring at gobbledygook. The spreadsheet is, well, unreadable - you can’t tell which cells do which, what math is being used where, and quickly find yourself starring in an episode of CSI: Excel, relying on clues, fingerprints and guesswork to determine what the heck is actually going on in your workbook.

This “unintelligible workbook” situation is not uncommon - and not even that surprising, if you think about it. Unlike the art of writing, where there are defined conventions (sentence structure, paragraph structure, document structure, story structure), spreadsheets are as varied as the minds that create them. On one hand, this is great - spreadsheets are fantastically flexible tools - but on the other it can lead to confusion, error, and misunderstanding. Without standards for what a spreadsheet “should” look like, the reader of a spreadsheet is often left scratching their head, wondering just what it is they’re staring at.

(This by the way, is doubly true in large organizations, where some long-departed employee once built some hairball of a spreadsheet back at the dawn of the last Ice Age, and now your boss wants you to “update it a little bit”. I’ve been there, and, well, good luck with that.)

Enter the concept of spreadsheet “best practices”.

As spreadsheets become more integral to our work (and, consequently, more complex in their design and function), a clear need has emerged to have a set of principles around which spreadsheets are designed and developed. There are a number of distinct methodologies and approaches, such as FAST ("Flexible, Accurate, Structured, Transparent"), but in my view the important thing is to find a few guidelines that make sense for you (and the people you work with), and then … just follow 'em. 

My first personal experience with best practices came when I was in business school. My Quantitative Methods coursework was done entirely in Excel, and my professor, Dr. Hillier, insisted that people follow some guidelines when laying out their spreadsheets so he could understand what the students were doing. His guidelines were simple, straightforward, and made a lot of sense; years later, I find myself still using them and saving my sanity. (Dr. Hillier, incidentally, credits Duke University professor Dr. Robert Nau for inspiring him.)

Of the tips I’ve seen for sane spreadsheet design, the most valuable have been:

    
• Each cell does one thing, and one thing only. Any given cell on the spreadsheet should be responsible for doing exactly one thing, whether it holds data, calculates something, or merely provides visual space between other cells.

    

• Use intermediate steps. If a cell is doing one thing and one thing only, then you’ll need to use intermediate steps to complete more elaborate calculations. That’s OK - subtotals are your friend.

    

• Separate data from formulas. Formulas should always reference other cells on the worksheet for their input; they should never have hard numbers embedded in the formula itself.

    

• Use labels. Never let a number sit on a spreadsheet without a text label next to it that explains what it is or what it does. These labels will boost the “readability” of your spreadsheet, and help you spot errors.

    

• Use color. Use splashes of color to color-code certain cells on the spreadsheet. There’s no hard-and-fast rule, here; I personally use blue for cells that contain facts that affect my model (think: tax rates, discounts or fees), yellow for cells that are considered inputs to my model, and orange for just one cell - the ultimate conclusion, or “answer” cell.

    

• Remember the “rule of thumb”. As a rule, no formula should exceed about a thumb’s worth of horizontal space on the spreadsheet. If it takes more, break it up. This will act as a forcing function to ensure you’re using intermediate steps properly.

    

• Flow from top to bottom. Spreadsheets should read like the page of a book - start at the top and let the eye trace down the page to get more detail. The conclusion - the ending to the book - should be at the very bottom of the page. Your “reader” will know where to find it, and, if you’ve observed the other rules correctly, the build-up to your conclusion should be obvious and logical.

Now that we’re armed with all these rules, I’ll give a simple example of how we might use them.

Say your boss wants to throw a pizza party for the office and asks you to figure out what it will cost beforehand. There are 30 people in the building, so you fire up Excel and quickly build a model. It might look something like this:

Figure 1 - Pizza For 30 … But How?
 

The numbers look good, but there’s one glaring problem with this spreadsheet: nobody knows how you got your total. Yes, there’s 30 people listed … but why does that come to $215.10?

Let’s go ahead and expand these cells to reveal their internal formulas (Excel has a nifty keyboard shortcut for doing this: hold down the CONTROL key and then tap the “tilde” key (~)).

Doing so will yield something like this:

Figure 2 - Pizza For 30 … The Mystery Revealed
 

Wow, that’s some crazy formula there in B4, huh? Let’s see, I’m seeing the CEILING function, some addition and division and multiplication, a few numbers I don’t know the origin of … spaghetti, basically. There’s a nearly 0% chance that anyone who didn’t create this spreadsheet - create it recently - would be able to figure out what any of this means.

Let’s try this same example, but following some of the tips from above. We might wind up with something that looks more like Figure 3 (Figure 4 shows the underlying math):

Figure 3 - Pizza for 30, Take 2
 

Figure 4 - Pizza For 30, Expanded View
 

Going back to our tips, a few things jump out:

    
• Each cell is doing one thing only. Some cells, like “Number of Attendees” (C4), contain just the number of attendees. Others, like “Sales tax” (C10) contain just one math function. Everything is nice and simple.

    

• We are using intermediate steps. We have a “pizza subtotal” at C9, and a full-blown total at C12. Both help us to see what steps we’re taking as we proceed through the model.

    

• Data is separated from formulas. Every variable we’re using - sales tax, the amount to tip, the number of people attending, the number of slices of pizza we think they’ll eat, and so on - has its own cell. The formula cells crunch those numbers, but they rely on the visible information on the spreadsheet to do their work.

    

• Labels are present. Virtually every number on the spreadsheet has a label next to it that explains what it is. This dramatically improves the readability of the spreadsheet.

    

• Color is being used. As expected, we are using blue, yellow and orange. Blue cells are things that are assumed to be true about the model - the pizza place charges $15 per pizza, for example, or we get 8 slices per pizza (we are ordering mediums). Yellow affects those things that are under our control - like how much we tip, or how many people are coming. And orange is used for the grand total.

    

• We’re following the “rule of thumb”. The longest formula on the sheet (on cell C7) is no wider than my thumb, which means it’s much easier for someone who’s never heard of the CEILING function to understand what that cell is doing. (Incidentally, CEILING rounds up for us; on its own, the math says we’d need 11.25 pizzas. Since we can’t order a quarter-pizza, we instead round up to the next whole pie.)

    

• We flow from top to bottom. We start with our assumptions up top, and then flow down through the spreadsheet until we hit our conclusion. 

So that’s it - some simple suggestions for saner spreadsheets. This might seem like a lot of work at first - it did to me, for sure - but, as a loyal and regular practitioner of these techniques for the past few years, I can only attest to my own happiness and productivity after having adopted them. Your mileage may vary, but the next time you open a spreadsheet and go, “What was I thinking?” you might do well to adopt a few of these habits.

If you’re interested, my spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

The Mapple Store bears an uncanny resemblance to the 5th Avenue Apple Store, with the exception of being in Springfield’s Mall and not New York City. Lisa is amazed at the MyPods, MyPhones, and the Braniac Bar, where smug customer service representatives deal with Comic Book Guy’s complaints about the latest Mapple OS. Homer is intrigued by the dream-fueled, imagination-powered MyCube, whose function isn’t entirely clear, and which glows to show you that it’s not on.
(more…)

Gary Guthrie, father of alumna Taylor Guthrie (N.Y.C. ‘05), has spearheaded the creation of a tribute album to great singer-songwriters with all proceeds to benefit Teach For America. Twenty-six contemporary singer-songwriters contributed recordings to Before the Goldrush, including Neko Case, The Swell Season (from the motion picture Once), and Okkervil River. Contributions include songs written by James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, and others. All proceeds go directly to support Teach For America.

Download the Album from Amazon today!

Contrary to popular belief, most people are at the very least coutreous, regardless of their political views, but their reaction is often less than excited. We’re interupting their day-to-day life and, unlike me and many of my closest friends, politics isn’t something in which they’re particularly interested.

But then you run across people like Mattie, a 56-year-old woman who couldn’t wait to tell me that she was heading down the next morning to early vote for Barack Obama. “I’ve never voted before in my life,” she beamed. “But this year I couldn’t imagine not.”

And you have the chance to stop by community events, like the Sharks football team, which was selling delicious BBQ rib sandwiches out of a smoker at a major intersection. “We’re raising money to take our kids to the state championship,” their coach said, while agreeing to pass out early voting reminder flyers to any of the team’s customers.

The handful of Matties and the full belly of Sharks barbeque you run into over the course of a canvassing shift easily make up for the cold fingers and sore feet that are inevitable in such an affair.

John Kerry lost Ohio by about 9,000 votes — just nine votes per precinct. Our ground game is awesome and we’re going to shift the electoral landscape here in Dayton, across Ohio and then throughout the country. Change is coming.

One week to go.

Having not spent a ton of time in the midwest, I came to Ohio expecting a post-industrial wasteland. Dayton has been home to a number of manufacturing plants over the past 20 years: GM and Delphi to name a couple, all of which are now defunct. Much of the city reflects this: a quiet downtown, shuttered businesses and homes with foreclosure signs offering themselves up for sale for the lowest cash price.

At the same time, the people I spoke with during my first four-hour, 70+ home canvass are some of the nicest peolpe I’ve ever run into — excited, pretty upbeat about the situation and hopeful that a change in administration will begin to turn the economy around. We have a huge canvass this weekend, so I’m eager to see if this small sample of Daytonians is representative of the larger whole.

Equally surprising, though maybe it shouldn’t be, is how split Dayton is as a city: rich vs. poor, white vs. black, east side vs. west side, Obama vs. McCain. Yard signs serve as windows to passions of homeowners and quietly whisper the true challenge facing the next president: uniting the country and bringing together people who have fundamentally different belifs to find solutions acceptable to everyone.

And change is coming. The longer I am involved in the Obama campaign, the more clear it becomes to me that we have both the excitement and the ground game to knock this election out of the park. It’s the bottom of the ninth and we’re running for home here in Ohio.

11 Days to go.