Spyware Lawyers: License to Kill?
July 10, 2006 | Filed Under Technology, In the News
Does your bar card have the numbers “007” on it?
MSNBC reports from BusinessWeek the details of the seamy underbelly of spyware company Direct Revenue. According to various press reports (and charges from NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer), Direct Revenue develops products (which it innocently refers to as “adware”) that stealthily install programs on your computer that serve up pop-up ads. A lot of pop-up ads. In 2004, Direct Revenue may have had more than 20 million computers under its spell, generating revenue of $39 million. Here’s the company’s response to Spitzer’s claims.
Around this time, the company was allegedly feeling the heat from users and regulators. What to do under these circumstances? Call the lawyers! Change the boilerplate!
… Direct Revenue management in early 2004 procured from its lawyers a modified user agreement that would supposedly be shown to PC owners. Within the densely written seven-page document was a declaration that Direct Revenue “could remove, disable, or render inoperative other adware programs resident on your computer, which, in turn, may…have other adverse impacts on your computer.”
Abram [Direct Revenue CEO] presented the new agreement to his troops with an impudence befitting the Dark Arts crew. “It’s a lawyer-approved license to kill,” the CEO said in a February, 2004, e-mail.
Sounds like a client to die for.
If you’ve never had such “software” installed on one of your computers, consider yourself lucky. It is beyond obnoxious. We had one particularly onerous spyware install a few years ago come from a link in an AOL instant message a certain younger member of the family clicked on. It took a phone call (to a number I located from a domain registration) and an “I am a lawyer and I know state regulators” comment to get the uninstall program emailed to me. How many consumers can do this, let alone understand the multiple-page EULA?
And for the parents of teen users of MySpace, there’s another spyware title out there called Zango that may be infecting your home computer as we speak…
Time for the Wireless GC?
April 19, 2006 | Filed Under Technology, Managing
To swing 180 degrees from the Moto Q, today a brief examination of ADT.
No, not this ADT. It’s ADT as in “attention deficit trait.”
CNET has a recent interview with psychiatrist Dr. Edwin Hallowell, who explains ADT thusly:
It’s sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you’re doing so much or trying to do so much, it’s as if you’re juggling one more ball than you possibly can.
Sound familiar?
The good doctor throws cold water on the concept of multi-tasking, and provides a refrain to which many in this always-on, interconnected age will nod “amen”:
What you pay attention to and for how long really makes a difference. If you’re just paying attention to trivial e-mails for the majority of your time, you’re wasting time and mental energy. It’s the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you’re not. You’re just treading water.
Dr. Hallowell mentions how Warren Buffett sits in an isolated office and spends a lot of time thinking. Buffett pal Bill Gates doesn’t seem to do this as much. According to Business Week, Mr. Gates has 3 flat-panel monitors on his desk and next month will go off for a week and read 100 papers from Microsoft employees on the future of the company.
Of course, Mr. Gates is rather well compensated for his efforts and had China’s President Hu over for dinner last night.
Did Ms. Gates whip up something like this, that was swimming just hours earlier in Lake Washington?
Moto Q as Lawyer’s BlackBerry Killer?
April 18, 2006 | Filed Under Technology, In the News
While RIM was settling its BlackBerry patent litigation with NTP, Motorola has been hard at work on its new Q smartphone running the Windows Mobile operating system.
Recent reports say Motorola will ship the new Q smartphone sometime in April.
On a road trip to Chicago, your correspondent has observed at least two samples of the Moto Q in the wild, going through heavy friendly user testing.
Company sources tell The Wired GC that the Moto Q will likely be available “in a month.” It’s not clear which month, but I’m guessing May is more likely than April at this point. Verizon has the exclusive for some period of time.
I’ll do a more detailed review later. Suffice it to say that the Moto Q is awesome–light in the hand, thin but solid, with a screen to die for. The integration with Verizon’s EV-DO mobile broadband service is excellent. Fast and fun. And the fact that most law firms and companies use Microsoft Exchange Server could make the total cost of deployment and operation very attractive for bottom-line oriented IT managers.
Some mobile industry commenters have taken Motorola to task for taking too long to release the Q. I think this is a “measure twice, cut once” thing. For the corporate markets that Motorola and Verizon are targeting, it just has to work out of the box, with no excuses. RIM has a serious toehold in the legal market.
But with Motorola, Microsoft and Verizon on the case, I bet there’s a Q in the future of many lawyers.
The F Bomb
March 28, 2006 | Filed Under Privacy, Technology, In the News
No, not that one.
It’s the sort of bomb that Fidelity dropped on Hewlett-Packard when it disclosed that a company laptop containing personal information on 196,000 HP employees was recently stolen.
The laptop contained “… data including the participants’ names, addresses, birthdates and social security numbers.” It was reportedly being used for an offsite meeting. Fidelity is doing big-time damage control:
Fidelity, which provides financial services for about 21 million people, says it hasn’t detected any misuse of the information and that safeguards in place may prevent misuse. The application with the data had a temporary license that has expired, so the data would be difficult to interpret and “generally unusable,” a spokeswoman says. And the company is requiring additional authentication to access the affected HP accounts.
So if I’m an HP employee, I’m hopping mad. If I’m one of the other 20 million or so customers of Fidelity, I’m thinking the word “Vanguard” sounds rather inviting right about now, Paul McCartney ads notwithstanding (turn your speakers down).
In an age of growing concerns about customer privacy, I find it staggering that personal data is moving around on the laptops of a company as sophisticated as Fidelity. Particularly when it includes the Rosetta Stone: apparently unencrypted SS numbers. Do you think this is the only time this has ever happened at Fidelity? The only time it has happened in the financial services industry? What about the healthcare industry?
The politicians are still arguing about this stuff.
Despite all the privacy protections instituted by many companies, if laptops or sync-able PDAs can copy and take offsite deeply personal customer information, legislation or regulation will soon follow. Thus the innocent are punished by the sins of the guilty.
It’s another reason why “privacy” is going to be a key word for GCs and their corporate compliance programs in the future.
Like tomorrow.
Fidelity employee stuck in traffic?
Hold on to Your Business Card
March 23, 2006 | Filed Under Privacy, Law 2.0, Technology
And watch out who you send an Outlook vCard to.
According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, web company Jigsaw wants your contact information. So badly it seems, that it will pay others for it.
Recovering attorney Mr. Arrington explains Jigsaw thusly:
Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people. See the demo (and note the other demos on that page as well). Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information.
If innovative ways to use and grow Internet applications for business are Web 2.0, Jigsaw may be Law 9.11.
I think the business card of the future will have your name on it (first and last, no middle initial), company name, and an email address that doesn’t resolve to your company domain. This is your public contact/email persona. No phone numbers, no fax numbers (can you say “Nigerian scam fax” three times quickly?), no address, and for heaven’s sake no cell phone number.
Then if the person hits your email (like lawman2681@gmail.com) and you want to continue the contact, you can, over time, work them into your truly personal business contact information.
With Google Maps and telephone number reverse lookups, we now know what Sun’s Scott McNealy meant when he said we have no privacy, get over it.
No word on whether Mr. McNealy’s contact info is available through Jigsaw.
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