roundtable

Reporters' Roundtable: Anonymous, LulzSec, and hacktivism

Today we are talking about what I believe is a fundamental social shift occurring right now in the hacker culture and in media. Online activists--or vandals, or terrorists, or just "those darn kids," depending on your point of view--are disrupting major corporate and government Web sites, stealing and leaking sensitive data, and changing how people look at the Internet.

I want to get into the effects that Anonymous and LulzSec are having on our culture, where they came from, and who or what is going to follow in their footsteps. And I've got two great, smart people to talk about this with.

First, from CNET News, Elinor Mills, our security reporter. She's been covering these developments for us from the beginning.

And from the Internet-focused law firm of ZwillGen, Jennifer Granick. Jennifer until recently was civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and before that worked at Stanford Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic. She also had written for Wired.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Do cell phones cause cancer?

Last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), said it now lists mobile phone use in the same category as lead, gasoline engine exhaust, and chloroform--as a "carcinogenic hazard."

Previously, the WHO's IARC had said that there were no adverse health effects from the use of cell phones. The wireless industry, including the CTIA lobbying group, and the Federal Communications Commission and U.S. Food and Drug Administration have also long maintained that cell phones are safe.

So which is it? Are we doomed to bounce back and forth between the beliefs that mobile phones are safe and that they're not? Or is the tide turning towards a widespread understanding of their dangers? And if so, is the mobile phone industry in the future going to end up looking like the tobacco industry, maintaining a position that scientific research has shown to be wrong?

That's what we're discussing today, with two great guests:

In the studio, we have Kent German, section editor on the mobile phone beat here at CNET.

Via Skype, Dr Devra Davis, Author of "Disconnect: The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide it and How to Protect Your Family." An epidemiologist and environmental health researcher, Davis is a founding director of the toxicology and environmental studies board of the National Academy of Sciences and president of the Environmental Health Trust.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Why are license agreements so convoluted?

In March, NPR's Planet Money podcast had a great episode, Why Are Credit Card Agreements So Long? But from my perspective, credit card agreements are simple compared to what we deal with in tech every day: Terms of Service Agreements, End-User License Agreements, Acceptable Use Policies, and so on.

So I'm stealing the Planet Money idea (I never signed an agreement saying I couldn't) and doing a Reporters' Roundtable on EULAs. My guest for this great discussion is Gabriel Ramsey, a writer of EULAs and a partner at the San Francisco and Silicon Valley law firm Orrick.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Windows 8 and the future of Microsoft

Microsoft Windows boss Steven Sinofsky was at the D9 conference this week, where he showed off, for the first time, a demo of the Windows 8 user interface running on tablet computers. It was an important demo, as Microsoft has clearly lost the lead in two new hot computing platforms: smartphones and tablets. Can Windows 8 help Microsoft gets its groove back? How will it fare against Apple and Google? That's what we're discussing today. Our guests are two experienced Windows watchers: CNET senior writer Jay Greene, who covers Microsoft, and Ed Bott, author of Ed Bott's Microsoft Report on ZDNet.

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This Day in Tech: Obama appoints Twitter CEO, plus Google foes

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Friday, May 27.

Obama appointing Twitter CEO to advisory group Twitter chief Dick Costolo will join the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. Microsoft's Scott Charney and McAfee's David DeWalt will be appointed too. More

Microsoft to showcase new tablet OS next week? Software giant reportedly plans to take the wraps off a new operating system next week, perhaps running on hardware using Nvidia's ARM-based Tegra processor. More

Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting New features may initially give … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: The bubble episode

Are we in another tech bubble? Is money in technology flying around the same way it was back in 1999, making people rich beyond their dreams--and beyond what they deserve? The LinkedIn IPO underlined the question. The company, founded in 2003, finally went public last week, raising $352 million at its offering. The stock quickly shot up, igniting talk that we are, indeed, in a tech bubble. We're also expecting a very frothy IPO for Zynga, and eventually for Facebook.

Bubbles are about more than the public stock market, though. Tech companies start with private money from investors previously made rich when their companies were acquired or went public, and from venture funds investing money from pensions, college endowments, and the like. And now there are also private exchanges for start-up shares, the very existence of which is, to some, another indication of froth in the market. And a bubble.

So that's what we're discussing today: Are we in a technology bubble? If so, is it good or bad? And what have we learned from the last tech bubble, which was only about 10 years ago, that we can use to be smarter this time around?

I have two great guests to discuss this topic, both of whom are survivors from Bubble 1.0, as am I. In the studio with us, visiting from our Boston bureau, is CNET News Executive Editor Jim Kerstetter. And joining us via Skype is Eric Hellweg, the editor of the Harvard Business Review's Web site, HBR.org.

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Reporters' Roundtable: The hackers always win

Online security is in the news today, in a big way. Of course, the Sony PlayStation Network hack was terrifying -- personal information from millions of accounts was exposed from what was supposed to be a secure database. And then, just as the network was coming back online, it was hacked again. We're also learning that a new attack is targeting Mac users who visit bad Web sites.

How bad is the security on the Internet? Will the hackers always win? Will consumers always lose? We're discussing this today with a very special guest, Kevin Mitnick.

Mitnick is a hacker. He used to be a criminal hacker. In fact, it's fair to say he was once the most wanted hacker ever. Mitnick landed in prison, in the 1990s, and his most notorious hack was getting to the cell phone companies and getting copies of handset source code. To some, Mitnick was a symbol of the dangers hackers posed to our safety, and needed to be locked up to keep us safe. To others, he was a scapegoat for the lousy computer security practices in corporate America.

Released and, arguably, rehabilitated, Mitnick now runs a security company of his own, in which he probes clients' networks for security flaws and then helps them patch those flaws. Mitnick has a new book coming out, "Ghost in the Wires," which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Inside the mind of the Maker Faire

The Maker Faire is a county fair for geeks. At the upcoming (Saturday and Sunday) Bay Area Faire, instead of jam competitions, there will be radio-controlled battleship shoot-outs. Instead of rows of people hawking snake-oil cleaning products, there are workshops teaching you and your kids how to make model rockets. If you're a nerd, Maker Faires are the events you wish you had when you were a kid.

The Maker Faire is put on by the technical publisher O'Reilly Media, and is in large part the brainchild of Dale Dougherty, who's our guest on this Roundtable. Dougherty is also the editor and publisher of Make Magazine, the magazine of projects you really should find the time to do.

This interview took place at the O'Reilly labs, where the team was preparing for Maker Faire and working on projects for Make Magazine. We talk about more than just these two projects, of course. There's an emerging technology do-it-yourself culture, a growing understanding that buyers of technology do not have to be slaves to it. Furthermore, the tough economy is pushing more people to do hands-on projects. People are learning about, inventing, and re-using technology in ways they never have before, and that's the topic of our discussion with Dougherty.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Drones, UAVs, and the unmanned war on terror

Technology helped U.S. SEAL commandos get to Osama bin Laden's compound, but the outcome of the raid depended on old-fashioned soldiering skills. This from a military force that has made history through robotics in pursuit of its goals. Unmanned aerial vehicles have been used for surveillance, and more recently for attacks, on targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere. No other military, as far as we know, has put such stock in unmanned, autonomous, or remote vehicles.

Slideshow: First flight of the Phantom Ray

Today we're going to discuss the use of aerial drones, UAVs, and UCAVs with Spencer Ackerman, the main writer of Wired's great Danger Room blog.

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Reporters' Roundtable: The location-tracking dilemma

Today we are talking about the fallout from the research reported on April 20 at the Where 2.0 conference that Apple iPhones and iPads keep detailed logs of their locations, and that this information is potentially viewable by Apple, the police, or hackers.

Roundup: Geotracking controversy homes in on iPhone

Since that story broke, it's been revealed that Google Android and Microsoft Windows 7 phones also log user location as well. In a related development, GPS maker TomTom was revealed to be sending location and speed data to police departments to enable them to install red-light cameras where they'll be most effective. That wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if TomTom didn't also sell its users GPS map updates that included the locations of those cameras.

So location recording is in the news, and that's what we're talking about today. What's recording your data, why devices need this information, who's getting it, why you might care, and what you can do about it if you do.

Our guests are:

Declan McCullagh, who's been reporting on this issue for CNET News. Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless. Ted's company is in the very business of determining location data on mobile devices, and his technology has been used by many manufacturers.

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