SeanReadsTheNews

BusinessWeek - What It Takes to Take Down a SpamBot Network

Christopher Stewart of Bloomberg BusinessWeek on June 16 had a fascinating story about what it takes to bust a cyber crime botnet ring - a great detective/technology/business story with twists, turns, compelling characters and portentious passages on the dangers of modern networking.

Now, Lanstein and FireEye were chasing their mightiest target to date, the Web's most sprawling and advanced spam machine, called Rustock—pusher of fake pills, online pharmacies, and Russian stocks, the inspiration for its name. Over the past five years, Rustock had quietly—and illicitly—taken control of over a million computers around the world, directing them to do its bidding. On some days, Rustock generated as many as 44 billion digital come-ons, about 47.5 percent of all the junk e-mails sent, according to Symantec (SYMC), the computer security giant based in Mountain View, Calif. Although those behind Rustock had yet to be identified, profits from it were thought to be in the millions. "The bad guys," is what Lanstein had taken to calling them.

That second paragraph of the story had more facts and color in it than most articles on computer security have in the entire article.  My beef with too many of these stories is that the consultants get quoted just for saying their is a problem without 1) proving anyone has been harmed by the alleged problem or 2) giving anything more than a surface quote on what to do about it.

This article is all of those "Panic in the Streets" features in reverse.  Stewart sits in on bringing down a global criminal enterprise, electronically, and it's a fascinating ride well worth reading, even a couple of weeks later.

Bloomberg on Europe's Troubled Asset Sale

Libertarian presidential candidates, including the late Harry Browne, used to say we could balance the budget and make victims of the Social Security ponzi scheme whole just by selling off state-owned assets - like the Grand Canyon.  It's one of the reason his two campaigns were so successful.

In any case, Greece and other trouble European nations have been talking about doing something like that for real - involving state owned companies - but according to Elisa Martinuzzi and Maria Petrakis of Bloomberg News, even these desperate moves may not be enough to stave off default.  The problem is that all the potential buyers know a desperate seller when they see one.

The European sales face growing competition from similar assets elsewhere, according to Daniel Wong, head of European infrastructure and utilities at Macquarie Capital in London.

“There are definitely more assets in the energy and infrastructure space on the market than there were two years ago,” Wong said. “This means, where the assets are not performing well or are structurally complicated, they tend to fall off the buyers’ lists relatively quickly.”

The article is an excellent summary off the fruits of socialism - all the state-owned companies that politicians used to keep their relatives employed in good times - gone sour.  

“At this stage, debt-ridden European countries have no other options but to sell assets,” said Carles Vergara, a finance professor at IESE Business School in Madrid. “It’s the only way left to obtain extraordinary income quickly without further cutting spending or increasing taxes. State-owned assets are there for governments to be able to raise cash in moments of crisis, and this is a crisis if ever there was one.”

Wired: Taking a Stand Against Duke Nukem - And Really Short-sighted PR Responses

After having spent this morning blogging a Wall Street Journal article that was a critical piece disguised as a rave, this afternoon I find that Ben Kuchera of Wired has called out a video game PR firm for threatening to withhold review copies from journalists who slam the recently introduced Duke Nukem update.

 The press and PR relationship may sometimes be strained, but it’s rarely adversarial.
 That is, until the Redner Group’s official Twitter account posted something you almost never see: an open threat stating that outlets who reviewed Duke Nukem Forever poorly may not receive review copies of games in the future. Anyone who has done this job for any amount of time has suffered through a dry spell after giving a publisher a bad review, but this is the first time the threat of a blacklist has been made public.

I've blogged often about how the new age of transparency extends to PR pitches and practices.  Activity that used to take place behind the scenes and wasn't considered news, now it is.  It wouldn't be uncommon for a journalist to publicly display a blacklist notice received privately.

But for Redner Group to put out a tweet threatening reviewers?  What will that do their credibility as news sources?  That's suicidal, and it seems like the owner is already walking back from it.

It's bad enough to be wrong - but journalists are now willing to make you famous for being so.  In the industry, we have to be careful because mistakes we made 5-10 years ago that would go unmentioned are food for the media beast in 2011.

WSJ Nordinc Walking Coverage: Perfect Feature Story Parody

I didn't read the Personal Journal section of yesterday's Wall Street Journal until the way home, so I almost missed this gem on Nordic Walking by "Aches & Claims" columnist Laura Johannes.

This is what happens when a good journalist reads too many feature pitches - she flips and writes a loving paean to the subject but at every opportunity slips in subtle jabs at its source.  The result is a meta-take on the journalism-publicist relationship and perhaps the most sly parody of the genre I've ever seen in a serious newspaper.

While similar to hiking poles used for balance and stability on difficult trails, walking poles are mainly for use on easy trails or neighborhood streets, say the companies that sell the poles.

Kenneth Cooper, the 80-year-old founder of Cooper Aerobics Center Corp., a Dallas health-and-wellness company, says the poles are ideal for seniors with balance or stability issues.

The study, published in 2002 and funded by Finnish pole maker ESB Sports Oy, found some individuals had a calorie burn as much as 63% higher than they did walking at the same speed without poles—but that is the "extreme" only, says study author Timothy S. Church, now director of preventative medicine research at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.

Exerstrider's Mr. Rutlin says the company's claim is based on the company's own unpublished research.

She takes us out of the moment a bit at the end by challenging some of the claims against her own experience and finding outside sources to dispute industry claims - but that's in paragrah 16 of a 17-paragraph story.

The story made me laugh out loud on the bus on the way home last night and is a welcome corrective to stories of this type.

Wired on Using Twitter

This blog's focus on business news tends to isolate it from political scandals but thanks to Stephen Levy of Wired's essay on Twitter etiquette and the Anthony Weiner meltdown, we are able to blog it and stay true to our founding mission.

Levy's article is a detail examination of how Twitter's founders decided to make communication as open as possible while also, somewhat reluctantly, providing the direct message platform for users who wished to have a private conversation using the service.  That's what did in the soon-to-be-former Congressman.

Twitter’s regimen of rules tanked Anthony Weiner in several ways. First of all, it provided a public record of the initial contacts that Weiner made with the women. Here was the apparent pattern of Weiner’s inappropriate communications: a woman would tweet an encouraging public message to the legislator — which would be public, the only way she could communicate to him. (By and large, since the women were political supporters and not thinking of themselves as material for his sexual fantasies, this wasn’t a problem for them.) Then Weiner would respond to them — but his responses were constrained by the knowledge that his replies were public.

The story is great background for developing a social media program for a public figure, as it allows you to back out of what happened to the Congressman what you don't want to happen for your executive.

It also gives a thoughtful look at what the tool is best used for and how to keep a program on the right track.

WSJ on Unmanned Mining Trucks in Australia

Long-time readers will notice I have a soft spot for weird transportation technology stories, such as the Chinese bus that straddles the highway so other cars can drive under it.  Robb M. Stewart of The Wall Street Journal has a similar story today about an Australian mine that is fighting a labor shortage by using trucks that don't require drivers at all.

Traveling precise routes around Yandicoogina mine and operating 24 hours a day, the trucks will be under the supervision of a single worker in a portable office at the mine, backed up by a control center in Perth that oversees all of the company's 14 mines, as well as its rail lines and ports, in the distant Pilbara region of Australia's northwest.

Rio Tinto, which last year said it didn't have enough truck drivers, drillers or locomotive drivers, is alone among the major iron-ore producers in the Pilbara to adopt the experimental technology. But the Anglo-Australian company says it is confident the autonomous trucks, trains and drill rigs it is testing are creating efficiencies and helping it meet aggressive output targets.

This announcement comes on the heels of last year's revelation that Google has been test-driving automatic driving cars - you just get the feeling you're going to wake up in the morning and The Jetsons will be real.

Stewart's story is noteworthy in particular because it balances the need to explain the gee-whiz technology alongside the mining and employment news that runs parallel to it.  The mine is throwing $15 billion at expanding the mine, with the auto-driving trucks, automatic drill rigs that blast holes and analyze rock samples and automated trains.

Reading the story, you get the feeling that out in the outback, the future is happening.

BW on the end of the Post Office

David Leonard of BusinessWeek writes an unexpectedly fascinating story on the bureaucrat assigned to audit the post office as part of a government efficiency movement.  

Congress gave him until the end of 2011 to report on the USPS's woes. But [Auditor Phillip] Herr and his team concluded that the postal service's business model was so badly broken that collapse was imminent. Abandoning a long tradition of overdue reports, they felt they had to deliver theirs 18 months early in April 2010 to the various House and Senate committees and subcommittees that watch over the USPS. A year later, the situation is even grimmer. With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service's survival plan isn't reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma—only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving.

The USPS is the second largest single employer in the United States, behind only Wal-Mart.  Unlike other businesses that shrink in response to shrinking need, the USPS just hits up the taxpayers whenever they get into trouble.  

Leonard treats his subject as he would any other.  He talks to its investors (Congress, including supporting board members - Democrats - and activist investors - Republicans), interviews the CEO (Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe) and picks apart his "what me worry?" responses and focuses on the audit by breaking down the numbers.

The result is a remarkable piece of journalism.  In five years when we are signing off on $1 trillion liabilities to "save" the Postal Service, don't let anyone say we weren't warned.

NYT: Clinical Trials Funnel Money to Doctors

Barry Meier of The New York Times yesterday had the most-high impact business story, reporting on how drug companies use potentially unnecessary clinical trials as a legal means to funnel money to doctors that they are barred from giving directly.  He opens with the hammer.

The message from cardiologists was loud and clear, according to a top executive at a heart device company. The doctors wanted implant makers to produce more clinical trials of devices to help them generate income from research fees.

The Justice Department is investigating Biotronik's sales practices.

To compete, “we must be able to ‘answer the bell,’ ” wrote Thomas V. Brown, an executive vice president at the American subsidiary of Biotronik, a small German firm that makes pacemakers and defibrillators.

This is further evidence that from a crisis management perspective, once the government has your e-mail, you're dead, because there really isn't much else here that is all that damning without that context.

Meier does an excellent job of building brick by circumstantial brick a story on the marketing effectiveness that comes off this practice - documenting rising influence of doctors who received trial money from Biotronic, sales proximate to those doctors and so on.  All of it can be denied by a "medical judgement" excuse that is impossible to challenge absolutely - unless you've already seen documentation that the doctors demanded trials to play ball.

There is probably a deeper moral here about the utility of trying to stop medical device companies from influencing doctors with money in the first place - but this is a business article that could potential change fundamental business practices in medical device marketing, so it isn't the day to focus on that.

Leonhardt on Primary Voting

I didn't get around to posting on this David Leonhardt New York Times column on primary voting and why Iowa and New Hampshire get to go first every year yesterday, which is good because I usually don't cover stories that are not about business except on Fridays.

Leonhardt's piece is another great column, and an example of why he will eventually follow Joe Nocera to the editorial page from Business, because he seems to like writing about political policy more.

It’s undemocratic, in fact. It is unfair to voters in the other 48 states. And it distorts economic policy in several damaging ways.

Most obviously, the federal government has lavished subsidies on ethanol, even though those subsidies drive upfood prices and do little to solve the climate problem, partly because candidates pander to the Iowa corn industry. (Mr. Pawlenty, who now says the subsidies must end, is an admirable exception.) Beyond ethanol, a recent peer-reviewed study found that early-voting states received more federal dollars after a competitive election — so long as they supported the winning candidate.

All people of good will can probably agree that this is a small problem relative to a lot of problems with our government right now - but Leonhardt is right to highlight it.  It's so easy to fix the failure to do so strongly suggests the big problems will never get solved.

Fortune on How Canadian Shippers Plan to Exploit Global Warming

Shelley DuBois of Fortune finds a novel story on the not-speculative side of increasing global temperatures - shifts in North America - Asia shipping lanes through the antarctic and what the Canadians are doing to get ready.

This is a great story about business opportunities and public-private partnerships to develop them but of course this being Canada, the talking points are all about how to do so in a racially aware and environmentally sustainable way.

Plan Nord targets an area of about 450 thousand square miles north of the 49^th parallel. Over the next 25 years, the government wants to build the infrastructure to mine metals, construct energy facilities, boost tourism and establish sustainable logging. In addition, the government wants to do so with the blessing of leading members of the four aboriginal nations that inhabit Northern Québec -- roughly 33,000 aboriginals live there, accounting for about a third of the area's population.

DuBois goes into detail about how hard that is going to be at the same time points out many inherent contradictions of environmental policy.  They want renewable energy and there is a lot of hyrdo power up there - but that means disrupting rivers.  There is no "sustainable" way to mine copper - but mine they will.

She also notes the litigation risk from disrupting the First Nation's envirornment, which for the first time (it seems) is being factored into Canada's plans to move North with the warmer climate.

The article raises more questions than it answers - which is a good sign that no one is pretending the contradictions aren't there.