Attacks on 6 Banks Frustrate Customers

Six major American banks were hit in a wave of computer attacks last week, by a group claiming Middle Eastern ties, that caused Internet blackouts and delays in online banking.

Frustrated customers of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC, who could not get access to their accounts or pay bills online, were upset because the banks had not explained clearly what was going on.

“It was probably the least impressive corporate presentation of bad news I've ever seen,” said Paul Downs, a small-business owner in Bridgeport, Pa. “This is extremely disconcerting.”

The banks suffered denial of service attacks, in which hackers barrage a Web site with traffic until it is overwhelmed and shuts down. Such attacks, while a nuisance, are not technically sophisticated and do not affect a company's computer network - or, in this case, funds or customer bank accounts. But they are enough to upset customers.

A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters - a reference to Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim holy man who fought against European forces and Jewish settlers in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s - took credit for the attacks in online posts.

The group said it had attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocks the Prophet Muhammad. It also pledged to continue to attack American credit and financial institutions daily, and possibly institutions in France, Israel and Britain, until the video is taken offline. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were also targeted.

On Friday, PNC became the latest bank to experience delays and fall offline. Customers said they had been unable to get access to PNC's online banking site, and those that visited the bank's physical locations were told it was because PNC, and many others, had been hacked.

Fred Solomon, a PNC spokesman, said Friday afternoon that the bank's Web site was back online, but that it was still working to restore online bill payment. Asked why the bank was not better able to withstand such an attack, he said that while PNC had systems in place to prevent delays and disruption from hacker attacks, in this case “the volume of traffic was unprecedented.”

Representatives for other banks also confirmed that they had experienced slow Internet performance and intermittent downtime because of an unusually high volume of traffic.

Security researchers said the attack methods were too basic to have taken so many American bank sites offline. The hackers appeared to be enlisting volunteers for the attacks with messages on various sites. On one blog, they called on people to visit two Web addresses that would cause their computers to flood banks with hundreds of data requests a second. They asked volunteers to attack banks according to a timetable: Wells Fargo on Tuesday, U.S. Bancorp on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday.

But experts said it seemed implausible that this method would create an attack of this scale. “The number of users you need to break those targets is very high,” said Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault who has been investigating the attacks. “They must have had help from other sources.”

Those sources, Mr. Blasco said, would have to be a group with money, like a nation, or botnets - networks of infected computers that do the bidding of criminals. Botnets can be rented through black market schemes that are common in the Internet underground, or lent out by criminals or governments.

Last week, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview on C-Span that he believed Iran's government had sponsored the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions. The hacker group rejected that claim. In an online post, it said the attacks had not been sponsored by a country and that its members “strongly reject the American officials' insidious attempts to deceive public opinion.”

The hackers maintained that they were retaliating for the online video. “Insult to the prophet is not acceptable, especially when it is the last Prophet Muhammad,” they wrote.

It is very difficult to trace such attacks back to a particular country, security experts say, because they can be routed through different Internet addresses to mask their true origin.

But experts said they had seen an increase in such activity from Iran and in the number of so-called hacktivists, hackers who attack for political purposes rather than for profit, based in Iran.

“We absolutely have seen more activity from the Middle East, and in particular Iran has been increasingly active as they build up their cyber capabilities,” said George Kurtz, the president of CrowdStrike, a computer security company, and former chief technology officer at McAfee. “There is also a strong activist movement underfoot, which should be concerning to many large companies. The threat is real, and what we are seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg.”

James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that in this case, the attack methods used were “pretty basic” to have been state-sponsored. But he added that even if the attacks were not the work of Iran's government, the state would be aware of them because Iran monitors its networks extensively.

For Mr. Downs, the small-business owner in Pennsylvania, such half explanations were of little consolation.

“A major bank has a problem and gives no indication of what's happening, when it started or when it will stop,” he said. “That's pretty freaky if it's your own business's money and you need to do things with it.”

In Europe, Speed Cameras Meet Their Technological Match

BERLIN - When Marc Guerin, a software salesman, drives the 38 kilometers from his home west of Paris to Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport, he seeks out the fastest route for his crossover and powers up his Coyote, a radar warning and traffic service that alerts him to the locations of 's 3,000 speed cameras.

When Mr. Guerin comes within four kilometers, or two and a half miles, of a speed camera, his Coyote screen warns that he has entered a “risk” zone, and he closely monitors his speed.

Since he began using Coyote three years ago, Mr. Guerin said, he has not received a speeding ticket. He said he used to average three or four tickets a year which cost him about "400, or about $515.

“For one thing, I no longer get caught by the speed cameras, which are all over France,” Mr. Guerin said. “For another, it advises me constantly of the legal speed limits and traffic conditions, so I am better informed and much more relaxed when driving.”

Smartphone applications have been developed to monitor sleeping babies, open garage doors and analyze the nutritional content of a restaurant meal. Now in Europe, where the police in many countries use stationary and mobile radar cameras to catch speeders, the smartphone is being honed into a highly effective - and controversial - mobile radar detector.

“This type of technology is going to soon be standard in most vehicles,” said Serge Bussat, the vice president of sales at Coyote, a company based in Paris whose driving applications are being used by 1.7 million people in Europe, a third of them in France.

Mr. Bussat said that 6 percent of all French drivers now use radar driving apps.

Tolerated in many European countries, the use of radar-detection services like Coyote's, which also monitors a driver's speed against posted limits and advises of traffic jams, was applauded last year by the French government as a useful driver education tool, which helped legitimize the service.

While a law prohibiting radar-detection technology remains on the books in , it is rarely enforced and may be amended to permit some driver alerts.

Only in , where border guards are trained to spot and seize radar detection consoles, is the ban still strictly enforced. In the United States, where speed cameras are not as widely used, services like Coyote's, which costs $63 a year or $185 when purchased by the month, are harder to justify. Also, receivers that can detect the Doppler radar waves emitted by police speed guns - like the original Fuzzbusters - are legal in the United States.

But in Europe, Doppler receivers tend to be outlawed and hidden, and permanent cameras are prevalent, so the market for app-based speed camera detection is growing. The two biggest makers of auto navigation devices, Garmin and TomTom, both bundle speed camera alert services with most of their latest products. A string of specialty services has also sprung up, including Coyote in France, Blitzer.de in Germany and Radardroid in .

Most of these companies rely on their users to scout and report the locations of speed cameras, which are then forwarded to others using the same application. Drivers passing the same points are asked to confirm or amend the sightings.

Across Europe, at least 25,000 speed cameras are in use, said Arpad Nemeth, the owner of Poiplaza, a firm in Budapest that manages a database of 4.7 million points of interest logged by their precise geographic coordinates. Mr. Nemeth, a retired television news editor, said the locations of mobile and fixed speed cameras in his database had been compiled by the 80,000 people who had downloaded and used his free application.

Governments in many European countries, Mr. Nemeth said, voluntarily publish the locations of permanent speed cameras, which tend to be installed at sites of frequent accidents. Like Coyote and Radardroid, Mr. Nemeth's Web site warns users that the use of radar detection databases is illegal in Germany and Switzerland. But enforcement, especially of apps on smartphones, is difficult if not impossible, he and others said.

Coyote, while warning of the legal ban in Germany, still provides data on German fixed and mobile cameras to users of its European service. So does Radardroid, a "6 application sold through Google's app store that is made by Ventero Telecom of Madrid.

“Our app is being used in Germany right now,” said Felix Ventero, the software engineer who created Radardroid, which is used by a million people, mostly in Europe. “The reality is, people are using these services because the technology makes it possible.”

Regardless of how prevalent they are, radar detection applications remain controversial and services like Radardroid, which report the exact locations of mobile speed cameras, may have to change to satisfy the concerns of the law enforcement authorities, who view the services as enabling speeding and increasing the risk of injury and death.

Winner Uses Contest Site and Loses Grand Prize

After working as a lawyer for 22 years, Theodore A. Scott wanted a break. So he entered a contest sponsored by Gold Peak Tea, a Coca-Cola tea brand, offering the ultimate respite for weary workers: a year off work and a $100,000 prize.

Mr. Scott, 60, made it to the second round for which he created a video that was voted on by Gold Peak Tea fans on Facebook. To his surprise, he won the grand prize. He and his family were elated.

“Everybody is shouting and laughing and crying and so happy,” Mr. Scott said. “It's just like we won the or won the lottery.”

But the feeling was short-lived. Days later, Mr. Scott was informed that he had violated the terms and conditions of the contest and was disqualified. The reason given was that he had used an online contest forum, a Web site where people who enter crowdsourced digital sweepstakes post links to those contests and ask members to vote for them.

But Mr. Scott did not go away quietly, and Gold Peak Tea finds that it is just the latest company to try to create excitement for its brand on social media only to find that sentiment can quickly turn.

The contest, called “Take the Year Off,” was one of several this year sponsored by marketers like McDonald's and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority aimed at downtrodden workers looking for respite in a tough economy.

An image on Gold Peak Tea's Facebook page promoting the contest that showed a woman kneeling against a file cabinet appearing to scream caught Mr. Scott's attention. “I get it. I see where she is. I understand her,” he said in an interview last week. In his contest entry, Mr. Scott described how his job had taken him away from his family. “I had a family. I had a home,” Mr. Scott's letter began. “But I let my career defer them. I let my debts outweigh them. I let deadlines sideline them. I let an office, computer, phone, and e-mails crush them.”

Mr. Scott pledged to spend the year off enjoying time with his family - he has four sons, four grandsons, and has been married for more than 35 years. “I'll enjoy simplicity. Listen to music. Read. Write. Relax. And sip a glass of iced tea - at home,” he wrote in the essay.

In his follow-up video, Mr. Scott is seen at his desk, answering calls, books stacked on his desk, shuffling from office to office.

To increase his chances, Mr. Scott became a member of an online contest forum on About.com and made his pitch to the voters there. Susan Stribling, a representative for Coca-Cola, said the company declined to comment but pointed a reporter to a statement that had been posted on the company's Facebook page. According to the statement, Mr. Scott had been disqualified for trying “to inappropriately induce members of the public to vote for his submission, a violation of Official Contest Rules.”

In an e-mail to Mr. Scott, Sarah Tabb, an associate brand manager for Gold Peak Tea, cited Section 6B of the contest rules which states that finalists were prohibited from obtaining votes by “offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, vote farming, or any other activity that artificially inflates such finalists votes as determined by sponsor in its sole discretion.”

Sandra Grauschopf a sweepstakes consultant for brands and the writer of the contests and sweepstakes guide on About.com, said the issues with voter forums were complicated for companies. Brands are caught between wanting to drive traffic to their Facebook pages by encouraging consumer voting and managing how those votes are obtained, Ms. Grauschopf said.

“It's a tough situation for them to be in,” she said of the companies hosting the sweepstakes. “On the other hand, they don't want to have their image tarnished by other people saying that there is cheating going on.”

In a statement, ePrize, the company the administered the contest on behalf of Coca-Cola, said brands were seeing “success with promotional campaigns online, particularly in social and mobile channels.”

“But along with that, there will be more technologies developed and attempts to abuse the system,” the statement continued. “Of course, there are other instances in which people don't intend to break the rules but simply do not follow them correctly.”

Mr. Scott, defended his use of the forum saying he saw nothing in the rules that prohibited someone from asking for votes. “These were real people,” he said. “Not robotics or the creation of fake Facebook accounts.”

Ms. Grauschopf agreed. “In my opinion, that's not cheating if those are real people who aren't being induced.”

Coca-Cola declined to say who tipped the company off to Mr. Scott's methods.

Ms. Grauschopf said, “It sounds to me like they are saying, we don't want the public relations problems.”

One such public relations disaster happened with another online voting contest involving American Apparel, the clothing company known for its risqué ads. In 2011, The company held a contest that asked readers to vote on who should be its plus-size model.

Nancy Upton, an entrant, submitted photos of herself in daring poses, including one where she was almost naked from the waist down and another where she was bathing in a tub of salad dressing.

In the end, Ms. Upton was voted the winner, much to the chagrin of American Apparel. After some back and forth, the company decided to select another candidate as the winning model.

In Mr. Scott's case, Gold Peak Tea chose another entrant's submission as the winner, despite a number of posts on the company's Facebook page calling for Mr. Scott to be reinstated as the winner. (Gold Peak Tea has removed some of the posts related to Mr. Scott's case citing its decency rules for the Facebook page.)

Mr. Scott has since posted a rebuttal on the Gold Peak Tea Facebook page, and has created a Twitter account to support his cause, @GoTeamTheodore. He said he is deeply embarrassed.

Linda A. Goldstein, a partner and chair of the advertising, marketing and media division at the law firm at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips said there was “a very strong” legal precedent in the courts for upholding contest rules.

“There's a broad discretion for the sponsor to disqualify an entrant,” said Ms. Goldstein, who has worked with Coca-Cola in the past. “The precedent in the courts for upholding the rules in the sponsor's favor is quite strong.”

In a New Spin, Spider-Man Relocates to Brooklyn

Offbeat September 30, 2012, 11:00 am

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

Stuart Moore and his hero, Spider-Man, were both born in 1962.

“I guess you could say I grew up with him,” said Mr. Moore, a 50-year-old freelance writer and editor of comic books who lives in Brooklyn. “I always loved reading about superheroes, especially about the transformation of Peter Parker, who turned into Spider-Man. He was this wiseguy kid from Queens who had adult enemies like Dr. Octopus and Kingpin, and yet he always got the best of them.”

Mr. Moore had a colorful transformation of his own in the early 1990s, leaving his job as an editor at St. Martin's Press to become an editor at DC Comics. He later too k a freelance editing job at Marvel Comics, which first introduced Spider-Man in the 1962 comic book “Amazing Fantasy.”

“It was very exciting to be able to work with all of these characters I had read about growing up, including Spider-Man,” said Mr. Moore, who has continued to freelance in the industry, writing more than 100 comic books for Marvel and DC - including two Spider-Man comic books - as well as independent publishers. “When you're dealing with all of these characters whose stories have been told for years,” he said, “you're always on the lookout for a new angle.”

About a year ago, Mr. Moore's spider sense began tingling.

“That's when I started thinking about bringing Spider-Man to Brooklyn,” he said. “I've lived in Brooklyn my whole adult life and I love the place.''

Mr. Moore sold his latest Spider-Man idea to Marvel, which is celebrating the wall-crawler's 50th anniversary. In an effort to spin a colorful tale that relates to the everyday lives of everyday New Yorkers, Marvel teamed Mr. Moore with Damion Scott, an illustrator and artist from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

“The people at Marvel knew that I was also from Brooklyn so they thought I was perfect for it,” said Mr. Scott, 35. “Having grown up on comics, I know that Spider-Man was a kid who grew up in Queens, so it was a real thrill to be able to help bring such an iconic character to the place where I live.”

In their two-part saga published earlier this month as a part of the “Web of Spider-Man” series, the web-slinger swings into action as a member of the Brooklyn Avengers, a band of misfit crime-fighters living in a Brooklyn brownstone. (In the comic book world, Spider-Man famously turned down a chance to become a real Avenger early in his career, but in more recent years he has joined forces with them, though not in the movie versions.)

“Both comic books have gotten wonderful feedback, especially from people here in Brooklyn,” Mr. Scott said. “Spider-Man is famous worldwide, and people within the community, including myself, are proud to be associated with him.”

Having fought crime briefly with the Brooklyn Avengers during a more awkward and embarrassing stage earlier in his career, Spider-Man reluctantly decides to rejoin forces with the likes of Psi and Fi, brothers who share telepathic and telekinetic powers; the Hypst'r, who possesses hypnotic and mesmeric powers, and Mints, who can transform candy into deadly weapons. A woman named Boilermaker, who can fix any mechanical device, is their super.

While the Brooklyn Avengers could never be confused with the real Avengers, they deal with the kind of issues shared by their fellow Brooklynites - bedbugs, air pollution and eviction due to eminent domain - that would keep even Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and the Incredible Hulk awake nights in their Manhattan headquarters.

“Look, it all got ou t of hand, but you gotta understand how much money was at stake,” the Brooklyn Avengers' landlord tells Spider-Man in explaining why he wants to toss his super tenants into the street. “They're gonna turn this block into a giant strip mall. Maybe even a sports arena, if the zoning goes through.”

As the story goes, it was their landlord who accidentally gave the Brooklyn Avengers their super powers after reading about a bedbug infestation plaguing New York City.

“He panicked, decided to have the place fumigated,” Spider-Man tells readers. “Only two problems. One, he forget to tell his tenants first. And two, he used radioactive bug spray.”

Mr. Moore and Mr. Scott, who collaborated for five months on their Spider-Man story, met in Brooklyn one recent evening to discuss new ideas. They chose to do so at the foot of the tiny Carroll Street Bridge - a short walk from Mr. Moore's home - which looks over the Gowanus Canal. It is the setting for a key meeting between Spider-Man and some members of the Brooklyn Avengers, and the very place that the Hypst'r could be making reference to when doing battle with the villain Red Hook:

“You know what I wanted? The only thing I really wanted?” the Hypst'r asks. “To sit in that chair and drink tea with my friends. With the trucks honkin' in the background and that cool fishy chemical smell blowing off the canal.”

Mr. Moore, who admitted that he relocated Spider-Man from Queens to Brooklyn “because I am from Brooklyn and wanted it to be a story about Brooklyn,” said that in the end, his story is really a love letter to his hometown.

“I know it's an unusual way to pen a love letter,” he said, “but I've lived in Brooklyn for 30 years and have seen a collection of very different people and neighborhoods during my time here. Even though Brooklyn has become a very trendy place to live, it is still fraught with everyday problems like rent increases, e victions and pollution, and those are some of the same problems that the Brooklyn Avengers have to deal with.”

How Meg Whitman Intends to Retool H.P.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Hewlett-Packard needs four more years “to have confidence in itself,” says Meg Whitman, the company's chief executive.

IT'S not as easy being as Meg Whitman might have expected.

At 56, Ms. Whitman, the billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

Here it is:

Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesn't quite get it - doesn't quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will re-energize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation.

“I believe in creative destruction,” Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.

Even, it seems, when the stakes include her company and reputation. In all likelihood, this is Ms. Whitman's last great public performance. She became rich by building eBay, then spent more money than any candidate for public office in the nation's history trying to become California's governor. She was sometimes portrayed in that race as an aloof 1 percenter - as someone who pushed around subordinates, once literally, and who was unkind to her housekeeper, an illegal immigrant. “I left a little bruised,” Ms. Whitman, a Republican, says of the 2010 race she lost to Jerry Brown. “It was hard, it was personally very hard.”

So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries.

Ms. Whitman has plenty of impressive-sounding stats at her fingertips. H.P., she says, employs thousands of people in Costa Rica, Houston and Boise, Idaho. “In India, we have 60,000 people,” she says. A new program for selling printer ink is in exactly 87 countries. Every 15 seconds, the company turns out 60 new printers, 30 personal computers and one powerful computer server. Still, she yearns for even more data, something closer to the command of the day-to-day process she had at eBay.

THE fact is, H.P. isn't what it used to be. Next to Apple or Google, it looks like a bit of a loser. In the most recent quarter, as Apple soared to new heights, H.P.'s revenue fell 5 percent and its operating margins dwindled. Profit margins at I.B.M. and Apple are several times that of H.P. And H.P.'s share price, at just over $17 on Friday, is about where it was in 1995.

“It's staggering,” says A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “This is now the cheapest big stock in the last 25 years. That reflects an industry belief that the company is going to decline.”

Ms. Whitman is impatient to move H.P. closer to a global computing explosion that is transforming the industry. Smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google and others are now flying into consumers' hands worldwide. Those computers are tied via the Internet to cloud computing data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of multinational companies. Information from all the consumer devices, in addition to data from billions of sensors and Web-crawling robots, is crunched in these supercomputing clouds, creating a Big Data revolution full of business opportunities and dangers.

From Ms. Whitman's high vantage, the trends of mobile, cloud and Big Data resolve into a single phenomenon: the creation and exploitation of Information Everywhere. H.P. makes consumer devices, in addition to servers for the cloud, sensor networks, and analysis software. Instead of standing at the confluence of the phenomenon, though, H.P. is on the sidelines, with most of the parts but none of the integration to make it a leader.

The Internet is Apple\'s Achilles Heel

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Scott Forstall showing the Maps app at the iPhone 5 debut.

IPhone users grew more annoyed all week. When they used 's new mobile maps, they found nonsensical routes and misplaced landmarks. Bloggers and talk-show hosts mocked the sometimes bizarre errors.

Nine days after the maps' release, the Washington Monument was still on the wrong side of the street. But something else changed.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, released an apologetic letter to customers on Friday, making the remarkable suggestion that they try alternative map services from rivals like Microsoft and Google while Apple improves its own maps. “We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers, and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better,” Mr. Cook wrote.

The map problems were an embarrassing misstep for a company that strives for perfection in its products and, in the eyes of consumers, often gets pretty close to the mark. Its track record in delivering quality is one reason Apple is now the most valuable public company in the world.

Apple executives have tried to explain their move into maps by saying that the company could no longer afford to rely on Google, its former map provider and growing rival, for such a crucial function. Many analysts and technology executives agree that this was the right move for the long term. But Apple appears to have rushed its map service out prematurely, even though it could have continued to rely on Google until next year.

The outcry shows how map services, which Apple treated as an afterthought when it built the first , have become critical tools for millions of people. And the company's stumble fits in with its pattern of bungling services that rely heavily on the Internet.

Apple has a reputation for obsessive attention to detail in its hardware and software products, down to the beveled edges of the iPhone 5 and the shade of the icons on its screen. But it has stubbed its toe again and again when it comes to releasing reliable, well-designed Internet services. Its less proud moments include Ping, a social network for music that never took off; MobileMe, an error-plagued service for synchronizing data between devices; and, more recently, Siri, the voice-activated virtual assistant that is often hard of hearing.

The company's weakness in this area could become a bigger problem over time as smartphones become more intimately tied to information and software on the Internet - a field where Google, which makes the competing phone software, has the home-turf advantage.

“I always felt if you had to name an Achilles' heel at Apple, it's Internet services,” said Andrew Borovsky, a former Apple product designer who worked on MobileMe and now runs his own design firm in New York. “It's clearly an issue.”

An Apple spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris, declined to comment.

Some have sought to pin the blame for the maps debacle on a relaxing of standards under Mr. Cook, who was elevated from the No. 2 position at Apple just over a year ago. He took over shortly before the death of Steven P. Jobs, a notorious perfectionist known to shelve products that did not pass muster.

But numerous interviews with former Apple employees in the wake of the maps controversy made it clear that Mr. Jobs and other executives rarely paid as much attention to Internet services as they did to the devices for which Apple is best known. Nor did they show the kind of consistent foresight in this area that has served the company so well in designing hardware and software.

Including a maps app on the first iPhone was not even part of the company's original plan as the phone's unveiling approached in January 2007. Just weeks before the event, Mr. Jobs ordered a mapping app to show off the capabilities of the touch-screen device.

Two engineers put together a maps app for the presentation in three weeks, said a former Apple engineer who worked on iPhone software, and who declined to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about his previous employer. The company hastily cut a deal with Google to use its map data.

At the time, relying on Google, which had introduced its map service a couple of years earlier, made sense. Apple and Google had generally friendly relations, and Google's chief executive at the time, Eric E. Schmidt, served on Apple's board.

Australian Scientists Move Closer to Quantum Computer

Competing teams of Australian scientists have given that country a significant lead in an increasingly intense international competition to build a working quantum computer.

In an article that appeared on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry.

Quantum computing will potentially lead to a new generation of supercomputers that are not intended to replace today's machines but will instead open new computing vistas, from drug and material design to code breaking, by offering speed to address a new class of problems.

“We are used to designing cars and airplanes with computers,” said Andrew Dzurak, a physicist who is director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility and lead researcher on the latest advance. “Imagine if you could start building your molecule or your material on a computer and then completely simulate its behavior.”

The basic building blocks of quantum computers are quantum bits, or “qubits.” Unlike today's digital computers, which process information in a binary fashion based on logic states of “on” and “off,” a qubit can for brief periods represent multiple states simultaneously. Potentially, this means it is possible to tackle vast new problems by performing parallel computations using a relatively small set of qubits - perhaps as few as several hundred. The advance by Dr. Dzurak's team involves placing a single electron - embedded in a silicon chip - in a “quantum state,” and then repeatedly measuring the state.

In February, a second group based at the University of New South Wales published an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology reporting their advance: the construction of a single-atom transistor using a different but related design approach.

In both cases, the research teams are international. There is an increasing awareness, however, that Australian scientists have made significant advances this year toward this long-promised new type of computing.

While there is a growing consensus among scientists that working quantum computers will emerge during this decade, there is also a growing belief that they will not replace the conventional computers that are now carried in the pockets of more than half the world's population. For one thing, most of the quantum computing approaches only worked when temperatures were cooled to near absolute zero.

Though there are only a handful of workable algorithms designed to run on quantum computers, scientists say their application may prove vastly more useful than today's technology in simulating a wide variety of biological, chemical and physical systems. That means they could become the standard tool for a wide range of new industries, like drug and material design.

The achievements of the two teams is a payoff from an investment the Australian government began making in the 1990s.

“Both groups are highly competitive and leading in the world in what they do,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, who has collaborated with both groups and was a co-author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper.

Dr. Dzurak's group's work contrasts with a research team led by Michelle Simmons, director of the ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. That group has taken an approach based on placing individual atoms using a scanning tunneling microscope, allowing great precision in building devices on an atomic scale.

The team led by Dr. Dzurak uses conventional semiconductor techniques to implant a phosphorus atom just 10 to 15 nanometers below the surface of a silicon chip. That approach has the twin advantages of using industry standards and potentially extending the individual electron's duration in a quantum state.

The United States has federally financed, corporate and university research efforts under way to design usable quantum computers. I.B.M., for example, recently expanded its research at its Almaden laboratory in California.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist who is a quantum researcher at I.B.M., pointed out that neither Australian group had shown the ability to interconnect multiple qubits. That capability is necessary for a quantum computer.

Dr. Dzurak said he believed that capability could be achieved as soon as a year from now.

Hit-and-Run Driver Kills Manhattan Man

September 29, 2012, 5:47 pm

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

A 75-year-old Manhattan man was struck and killed as he was walking near Columbia University by a driver who fled the scene, the police said on Saturday.

The police said that the man, Arthur Slater, was struck minutes before midnight Friday night near the intersection of Broadway and West 114th Street. An investigation determined that Mr. Slater, who lived at 171 Thompson Street, had been walking west on 114th Street when a black Honda Civic traveling north on Broadway ran into him.

The car fled before the arrival of police officers Mr. Slater was brought to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The police said that an investigation was continuing.

Week in Pictures for Sept. 28

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Even Health Dept. Isn\'t Safe From Bedbugs

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

A single bedbug led to the temporary evacuation and fumigation of one floor of the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, on Friday.

The episode occurred on the 19th floor of the 21-story glass-and steel Gotham Center at the corner of Queens Plaza South and 28th Street.

The agency acknowledged the presence of the bedbug, but sought to play down its significance.

“We found a single bedbug,” the agency said a statement. “There was no evidence of an infestation. We used standard procedures, including steam cleaning and vacuuming in the area, and alerted the staff.”

Health department employees moved into the $316 million building just after it was completed last year.

“It can happen to anyone,” said Jeff Eisenberg, the author of the “Bedbug Survival Guide” and owner of Pest Away Exterminating in New Yor k City, who said the bugs can be picked up in infested homes and even taxis, then swept along onto pant legs and skirt hems. “You can't defend against the front door of your office,” he said.

The health department is the city's top resource for people seeking to deal with their own bedbug infestations, in both their homes and their offices. A section of the department's Web site is about bedbugs. It includes a page that the department itself might find useful, to “help building managers or owners of commercial buildings prevent bedbug infestations, and safely control them if they do occur.”

While the Web site notes that the bugs bite but have not been known to spread disease, they can breed anxiety. In fact, department employees who work on the 19th floor are now “pariahs” in the Gotham Center, according to an e-mail from an employee who did not want to be identified.

Mr. Eisenberg said social exclusion after a bedbug infestation or singular si ghting, as the case may be, is common. “When someone has bedbugs, it doesn't make you very socially popular,” he said. “It doesn't make you a bad person, but nobody exactly wants to be around you.

Big Ticket | Sold for $17.5 Million

By ROBIN FINN

Apparently bulletproof when it comes to investing in antique West Village real estate in need of renovation, Kiefer Sutherland, a k a the infamous Jack Bauer of and presently starring in on Fox television, has sold his five-story brick town house at 763 Greenwich Street for $17.5 million, in the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.

Mr. Sutherland, a practiced dabbler in the art of buying, enhancing and divesting himself of properties, bought the 1838 Greek Revival-style town house for $8.25 million in 2008. He promptly secured the design services of Steven Gambrel, who transformed nearly 5,000 square feet of raw space - the building had done duty as a six-unit apartment house in a previous life - into a five-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath residence of rugged elegance.

As a result, Mr. Sutherland received his full asking price even as the town house was in the process of being formally listed by Meris and Kenny Blumstein of the Corcoran Group.

The initial bid held up, with the anonymous buyer of this distinctive residence protected by a limited-liability company with a relatively unimaginative name, 763 Greenwich. Then again, the entire real estate blogosphere seems hip to the fact that the Beverly Hills-based Dave T. Doglas Trust is a pseudonym for Mr. Sutherland, who is said to have been advised early on by his father, the actor Donald Sutherland, to invest the fruits of his Tinseltown labors in real estate rather than less tangible assets. Obviously the son has an eye for feathering special nests: he previously scored a nice profit when he sold his two-bedroom condominium at 134 West 10th Street.

The town house is rife with character. It has multiple old-fashioned wood-burning fireplaces, as well as a roof deck with a summer kitchen and an outdoor shower, a basement sauna, and a patio surrounding a fire pit (modern touches, but rustic). An internal elevator makes floor-to-floor ascension a snap. There are four bedrooms, each with an en-suite bath; in addition, the master suite takes up an entire floor and, naturally, offers his-and-hers baths, for the ultimate in privacy.

Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

Artist\'s Foundation Seeks Return of \'Sphere\' to World Trade Center Site

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

“The chorus voicing a pledge for the return of the ‘Sphere' to its original place at the W.T.C. has reached as far as Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Germany,” the letter begins. That's a consequential destination because it is the home of Fritz Koenig, the sculptor of the World Trade Center “Sphere,” and of his museum and foundation.

The letter [pdf], sent Tuesday, states that the Fritz and Maria Koenig Foundation is “officially joining the growing number of people and personalities who want to help to bring the ‘Sphere' back to its rightful place, the W.T.C. site.”

This puts Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Patricia A. Harris, who have prided themselves in their commitment to public art, in the potentially awkward position of appearing to turn deaf ears to a request relayed on behalf of an internationally celebrated, 88-year-old artist.

Mr. Koenig's 25-foot-high “Sphere for a Plaza Fount ain” was commissioned in 1968 for the World Trade Center. It stood for three decades as the centerpiece of the vast plaza, framed by the twin towers. Though badly damaged on Sept. 11, 2001, it survived in recognizable form and has been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors to Battery Park, where it has stood since March 2002.

It is understood that Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Harris oppose returning the “Sphere” to the trade center site, an opposition that carries extra weight since the mayor is the chairman of the foundation for the 9/11 Memorial now there and Ms. Harris serves on the foundation's board. They have not publicly explained their position, though Mr. Bloomberg volunteered in May that the “Sphere” looked beautiful in Battery Park.

The park is scheduled to undergo a renovation that will displace the sculpture, at least temporarily. But no city or state agency has taken responsibility for deciding where the “Sphe re” will go, now or in the long run. This month, a group of guerrilla volunteers felt compelled to clean the sculpture of bird droppings and a dead pigeon before the annual Sept. 11 observance.

Reinhard Sax, the general manager of the Koenig foundation, said in his letter (co-signed by the mayor of Landshut) that the “Sphere” belonged at the site for which it was designed:

We strongly feel the need for the victims' families and friends to be able to not to loose sight of the only witness that represents the workplace of their loved ones. It needs to be present, as a touchstone, as a direct visible link to their personal history and the history of New York and the world.

We think that this sculpture, in its brutally transformed shape and state, needs to be exposed to the touch of people. It holds the power of a witness, of a victim and ultimately of a survivor.

Although top officials will say nothing publicly about the †œSphere,” back-channel communiqués suggest some movement. The chief curator for the 9/11 Memorial, Jan Seidler Ramirez, told Mr. Sax in response to his letter that “there are a number of ideas in serious discussion regarding the relocation” of the sculpture and that “some of the most viable of these options” were described in a City Room post on Aug. 17 that raised the possibility of relocating the “Sphere” to a small plaza alongside 1 World Trade Center, within view but outside the grounds of the memorial proper.

The Morning Sky Hinted at Misery, and Then, It Delivered

Weather September 28, 2012, 2:25 pm

By JAMES BARRON

It was a day that defined gloom. There was the color scheme: An ominous palette of grays and blacks when your too-early alarm clock had you hoping for a primary-color sunrise.

There was the view: Low-riding clouds blurred the construction cranes that have been lifting the Midtown skyline higher and higher.

It was, as Josh Goldfein, a Legal Aid lawyer, described it on his Facebook page, an unpleasant-looking start to a “grade-A grey day.”

After that, the deluge. It got your attention with the splatter sound against the windows. People huddled under awnings in front of apartment buildings and in the lobbies of hotels, watchin g the rain pound the streets, the sidewalks, the flowers in the planters by the curb, the alternate-side parkers trapped in their driver's seats long after the clock on the dashboard said it was safe to get out and walk away.

The storm swept uptown like a curtain that descended fast - a menacingly gray curtain, of course, though as it moved along it lightened until, from a high-up apartment building window, it was as white as what you see out the window when your airplane is circling in fog and the pilot is on the intercom, apologizing.

On the ground, it was wet - very wet. The National Weather Service reported Central Park was inundated with 1.71 inches between 8 and 11 a.m. That was slightly more than twice the 0.83 inch the Weather Service recorded at La Guardia Airport and not quite eight times the 0.22 inch it measured at Kennedy International Airport. The Weather Service said isolated showers and thunderstorms would continue through the day.

So for a while - in Manhattan, anyway - there was a wet scramble to stay on schedule. Those who rushed off as they do every morning felt drowned, but were only drenched. “All my scores, my bag and my clothes,” said Jingyi Zhang after her 10-minute walk to the Juilliard School, where she is a piano student.

It was, she said, just a coincidence that the piece she had practiced for a lesson was Beethoven's “Tempest” sonata. “It's describing the storms,” she said. “It's perfect for this.”

There were those who saw the storm closing in, and waited it out. “I took it as a sign to work from home,” said Sara Romanoski, the managing director of the East Village Community Coalition. “I looked out and said, no way, I can do stuff from my computer at home.”

Dolphin Stranded on Shore of Queens

September 28, 2012, 12:16 pm

By ANDY NEWMAN

A dolphin washed up on the shore of Far Rockaway, Queens, Friday morning, rescuers said. As of 11:55 a.m., it was still alive, and rescuers from the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation were en route, said Rob DiGiovanni, the executive director and senior biologist of the Long Island-based organization.

The police said that the dolphin was spotted around 9:30 a.m. on the beach near the end of Beach 19th Street. Mr. DiGiovanni said that the dolphin was between four and six feet long and appeared to be either a common or bottlenose dolphin.

As dolphins are mammals and breathe air, they can survive for some time out of the water.

Dolphin Stranded on Shore of Queens

September 28, 2012, 12:16 pm

By ANDY NEWMAN

A dolphin washed up on the shore of Far Rockaway, Queens, Friday morning, rescuers said. As of 11:55 a.m., it was still alive, and rescuers from the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation were en route, said Rob DiGiovanni, the executive director and senior biologist of the Long Island-based organization.

The police said that the dolphin was spotted around 9:30 a.m. on the beach near the end of Beach 19th Street. Mr. DiGiovanni said that the dolphin was between four and six feet long and appeared to be either a common or bottlenose dolphin.

As dolphins are mammals and breathe air, they can survive for some time out of the water.

New York\'s Debate Over Sugary Drinks Reaches Pawnee, Ind.

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

A pragmatic city politician wants to reduce the size of sodas. The soft-drink industry fights back, saying the plan will hurt businesses and infringe on consumers' rights.

It happened in New York City - and, on Thursday night, in the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee, setting of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

In what is surely the first dramatic adaptation of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's ban on large sugary drinks, the sitcom's protagonist, City Councilwoman Leslie Knope, proposes a local tax on sodas that quickly becomes controversial.

The episode (also available on NBC's Web site) is sure to extend the debate over sugary drinks and obesity, once the purview of academics and think tanks, into millions of Americans' living rooms.

“Parks and Recreation,” set in a fictional city hall, is a witty and warm workplace comedy that wears its progressive politics on its sleeve. Its bureaucrats bumble and flounder but ultimately do good, even in the face of an ungrateful citizenry, a dopey media and libertarian opposition.

But while the episode, titled “Soda Tax,” ultimately sympathizes with the sort of public health initiative epitomized by Mr. Bloomberg's ban, it also offered a fair hearing to critics who warn of overreach and economic troubles.

Leslie, played by Amy Poehler, wants to cut down on the amount of sugar consumed by children who drink local beverages like the 64-ounce “Sweetums Sugar Splash,” or a 128-ounce option offered by a local fast-food chain, Paunch Burger.

But Leslie's plan is opposed by the Pawnee Restaurant Association, a stand-in for the real-life soft-drink industry that has aggressively fought taxes on sodas around the country. Kathryn Pinewood, the group's perky, corporate-style lobbyist, tells Leslie that big sodas are “great for the consumer, more bang for the buck.”

“A re we putting bargains on trial here?” Kathryn asks with a steely smile.

Leslie, a true believer in government's potential for betterment, sees nothing wrong with her proposal (even as she indulges a mean sweet tooth). She confronts the restaurant lobbyist with a gargantuan 512-ounce soda cup, which has been labeled, curiously, as a “child size.”

“How is this a child-size soda?” Leslie asks.

“Well, it's roughly the size of a 2-year-old child, if the child were liquefied,” comes the calm response.

“Why would anybody need this much soda?”

“It's not my place to speak for the consumer,” Kathryn says, before turning to the camera and adding: “But everyone should buy it.”

In New York City, the soft-drink industry has spent more than $1 million to fight Mr. Bloomberg's plan, including advertisements on subways, delivery trucks and in movie theaters that read: “Don't let bureaucrats tell you what size beverage to buy.† The campaign's logo is a Statue of Liberty-like figure holding aloft a soda cup.

That undercurrent of patriotism - the idea that choosing one's drink is a matter of freedom - also turned up on “Parks and Recreation,” in the burly form of Leslie's old boss, Ron Swanson, a government worker who happens to be a staunch libertarian.

Ron tells Leslie that he bought himself a greasy fast-food lunch, “in honor of your never-ending quest to personally baby-sit each and every American citizen.” He produces a 64-ounce soda and takes a sip, adding, “Damn it, I love this country so much.”

Ultimately, despite threats of layoffs by the restaurant group and divided opinion in Pawnee, Leslie votes in favor of the soda tax, which passes the local city council by a slim margin.

That Leslie's tax is approved may be the most unrealistic element of the episode: in the non-sitcom world, the soft-drink industry has successfully defeated dozens of local and sta te proposals to adopt a tax on sugary drinks, often by spending millions of dollars in campaign donations and rallying local businesses.

Gay Center to Make Its Village Home More Open and Less Noisy

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

The love that now dares speak its name can still sometimes be hard to hear.

Lerner Auditorium, the third-floor assembly hall in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village, is the setting of many events and meetings. It is large and luminous. It's also an acoustical nightmare. The rattletrap air-conditioning system gives users a choice in warm weather.

“You can either be hot and hear what's going on, or cool and not hear what's going on,” Glennda Testone said. No mere idle critic, she is the executive director of the center.

Ms. Testone can afford to be candid about some failings in the three principal public areas of the center - Lerner Auditorium, the Paul A. Kaplan Assembly Hall and the front lobby - because they're going to be fixed. A 14-month renovation is expected to begin by the end of the year. The $7.5 million project is being financed with $3.7 million from Ne w York City and $2 million from New York State. A fund-raising effort will seek private donors for the remaining $1.8 million.

Brian Ripel of RSVP Architecture Studio in Brooklyn and Nicola Mongelli of N-Plus Architecture + Design in Brooklyn are the architects. The center is now receiving bids from general contractors.

Perhaps the first thing noticed by visitors to the renovated center will be what's not in the lobby any longer: a high, forbidding central reception desk that conveys, unintentionally, the message that one must stop and announce one's business, which couldn't be further from the case. Visitors are free to come and go.

Its removal will allow one to walk directly to the elliptical central staircase, designed a decade ago by Françoise Bollack Architects to unify the three-story building, a former schoolhouse from the mid-19th century. “We wanted to remove barriers,” Ms. Testone said.

By removing interior walls on the east and west ends of the lobby, the center will create spaces for its computer center, now on the second floor, and for a cafe, which it has never had. The cafe will seat about 30 people and connect to an adjacent garden. The community center is now searching for prospective cafe operators with a request for proposals.

Just beyond the lobby, the Kaplan Assembly Hall is to be made considerably less claustrophobic by the removal of a false ceiling in the center of the room that contains air-handling ductwork. One of three rows of slender columns that chop up the space has been found to be structurally redundant and will be removed. Hidden windows on the south end of the room will be unblocked.

Aesthetically, the toughest decision about the assembly hall was how to preserve mural remnants from an ambitious art exhibition held in 1989, during the first decade of the AIDS crisis. They include works by Kenny Scharf, Leon Golub, Barbara Sandler and George Whitman. The architects plan to insert new walls in front of the old walls. Openings will be cut into the new walls, framed by LEDs, to highlight large segments of the surviving artwork. (The most renowned work from the 1989 show, Keith Haring's priapic mural in a second-floor men's room, has recently been conserved.)

Upstairs, the acoustically challenged Lerner Auditorium will lose its tin-can ductwork. New insulated ducts will be run through the ceiling trusses. Insulated windows will help keep noise within the auditorium and not within earshot of next-door neighbors. The old floor, which rolls like a calm sea, will be replaced by a smooth new floor on sound-deadening joists.

Acknowledging the inherent eccentricities of the building, Robert A. Woodworth, the director of capital projects at the center, said nothing could be done to eliminate the slope of the auditorium floor entirely. “It'll never be horizontal,” he said, “but we want it to be a plane.”

At the U.N., Agitation, Outrage and Business as Usual

The Day September 28, 2012, 9:16 am

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Here in the “capital of the world,” which is New York's characteristically modest description of itself, people seem to have survived their annual immersion in foreign affairs with but the faintest disruption to their lives. We knew all along that they could do it, despite the overblown forecasts of impending disaster, including the menace they were instructed by television to dread most of all: traffic jams.

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

What tends to be forgotten by many New Yorkers - including, and perhaps especially, their politicians - is that the only reason their city dares call itself the “capital of the world” without being laughed out of the room is the presence of the United Nations.

The United Nations adds a few billion dollars a year to the local economy, while its noxious aspects are eminently ignorable most of the time. Despite that reality, New Yorkers love few things more than to hate the United Nations.

They really love to hate it in a week like the one that is drawing to a close, when world leaders appeared by the barrelful for their autumnal gabfest, generally referred to in polite circles as the convening of the General Assembly.

They really and truly and deeply love to hate it when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the bile-spewing president of Iran with one of the creepiest smiles this side of the Joker, shows up, as he does each September, to take his turn at the lectern.

Another reality is that there is no way for the United States to deny entry to Mr. Ahmadinejad - A-jad to some - without causing more of a diplomatic tempest than he is probably worth. Part of the price of having the United Nations headquarters here is an obligation to open the gates even to loathed leaders wishing to attend these sessions.

So the week played out pretty much according to a dog-eared script. Street protesters and tabloid crafters of hyperthyroidic headlines denounced A-jad in the strongest language possible, and could thus feel good about themselves. He, no doubt caring not a fig what his critics said, got to give his speech (described by some who heard it as not so much vile as incoherent). New York police officers got to put in for welcome overtime. And nothing changed as a result of all this to make the Middle East a better, or at least a less volatile, region.

In short, everything went as usual.

In some quarters, there was extra hyperventilating this year because A-jad was assigned a speaking slot on Wednesday, which happened to be Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day. Given the man's threats against Israel and his denial of the Holocaust, this bit of scheduling struck some as unbearably outrageous.

Never mind that it wasn't Yom Kippur at the United Nations. Never mind that 26 countries besides Iran were assigned speaking slots that day, including several with deplorable histories in regard to Jews, among them Yemen, Egypt, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and Romania. Never mind, too, that Israel has suffered, and survived, a good deal worse on Yom Kippur than a rotten speech - like the start of an Arab war against it in 1973.

Some of those with Yom Kippur shpilkes, a splendid Yiddish word for a state of agitation, were similarly bent out of shape because President Obama did not meet with the visiting Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Back to the never minds. Never mind that the president had another pressing matter on his agenda, an imminent elect ion, and had no time for extensive conversations with any of the visiting leaders.

That notwithstanding, lamentations arose from some whose worldview boils down to a belief that the president of the United States should nod his agreement with whatever the Israeli prime minister says. He is “throwing Israel under the bus,” they cried. This is a damnation often hurled at Mr. Obama, oddly so. His administration is no different from its predecessors in not only riding the same bus as Israel but also in providing a good deal of fuel for it, in the form of billions of dollars a year in economic and military aid.

Anyway, Mr. Netanyahu, after giving his own speech at the United Nations on Thursday, got to meet with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion. Surely that was reward enough for anyone.

Homeless, With Dignity

By LISA PALAZZO

Dear Diary:

Spotted a homeless woman in the doorway of Asprey, on Madison Avenue and 71st Street, a few Saturday mornings ago while waiting for the express bus to the Bronx. The store is being renovated, and a crew of workmen got out and she had to move from her cozy spot. She struck me as having dignity despite her circumstances.

In the doorway,
Lying atop broken-down boxes,
Insulated by shopping bags,
She sleeps …

The workmen come and rouse her.
She neatly folds the boxes,
Places them by the corner trash,
Hoists her backpack,
Smooths down her hair, collects her bags, and moves on …

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

West 72nd Street, 7:22 A.M.

Weather September 28, 2012, 8:30 am

By DIEGO RIBADENEIRA

Popcorn in Hand, Mayor Rides Ferry to Staten Island

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg famously travels by helicopter and private jet, with an occasional foray into the subway. Most of the time, he is chauffeured around town behind the tinted windows of his city-issued S.U.V.

So it came as a bit of a surprise on Thursday when the mayor, heading to a news conference on Staten Island, hopped aboard the borough's famous ferry for the half-hour ride across New York's harbor. The rumpled City Hall press corps, startled by the impromptu appearance, was invited to come along.

Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire, appeared comfortable on the big orange boat, whose shabby booths and fried-food concessions are patronized by thousands of commuters and tourists each day. He purchased a $2 jumbo bag of popcorn from the onboard kiosk shortly after boarding, paying in cash.

Asked if he'd like a soda to go with the snack, Mr. Bloomberg, who has introduced regulations on sugary drinks, said it would have to be “a diet one, so I don't have to worry about size.”

The mayor, a leather-bound iPad under his arm, settled in for the ride by the windows near the boat's prow. He rarely entertains casual questions from the news media, and he kept his answers brief.

How was his Yom Kippur fast? “I survived.”

What accounts for the rise in city tourism? “A great mayor.”

Only one semi-gaffe occurred, when the conversation turned to the subway system, which Mr. Bloomberg occasionally rides.

“The only time it's really crowded is when you go to a Yankees game,” the mayor said, of the subway. “The trick is, you got to leave early.”

Several reporters pointed out that, during rush hour on weekdays, the trains can get a bit packed.

“Amazing, it's crowded when everybody wants to use it,” Mr. Bloomberg replied, with a hint of sarcasm.

As the ferry glided across the harbor, a Police Department escort boat in its w ake, the mayor reminisced a bit about his bachelor days, when the ferry was one of his preferred spots for a date.

“You'd get a six-pack of beer, a pizza, and you'd sit outside; it was really romantic,” Mr. Bloomberg recalled, noting that he used to pay a nickel for the ride, which is now free. “If you stayed on the ferry, you could go back on the same fare.”

The ride also offered a chance for the mayor to rub his Paul Stuart-clad shoulders with the public, although, surrounded as he was by bodyguards and reporters, only one private citizen had the courage to approach.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bloomberg, could you do something about freezing the subway fare?” asked Gerveline Dorléant, 51, of Staten Island, a few minutes after the mayor settled in.

Mr. Bloomberg shook his head. “It's a state agency,” he explained, referring to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway. He pointed at the reporters who were hastily tran scribing his words: “But these people would be happy to help you.”

Later, Ms. Dorléant, who said she is unemployed at the moment, said she was not quite satisfied with the mayor's reply, although, she added, Mr. Bloomberg “was nice” about the whole thing. A longtime Staten Island resident, she said she was surprised to see the mayor among the ferry-going hoi polloi.

“I didn't recognize him at first, because he looked so dapper and fresh!” she said.

World\'s Tallest Ferris Wheel Planned for Staten Island

By JAMES BARRON

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Thursday that the world's tallest Ferris wheel would rise above the Staten Island waterfront. The 625-foot-tall ride will displace the Singapore Flyer, at 541 feet the record-holder of the moment.

And what about the High Roller wheel planned for Las Vegas? The New York wheel will reach 75 feet farther into the sky. It will dwarf the 13-year-old London Eye by 182 feet and the original Ferris wheel, built for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, by 361 feet.

As if those statistics were not enough, here are more: The Staten Island wheel will be almost three times the height of the largest Ferris wheel in the United States, the 212-foot machine at the Texas State Fair. As it happens, the Texas wheel is the same size as the Riesenrad in Vienna, which figured in movies like “The Third Man” (1949) and “Scorpio” (1973).

Locally, the new wheel will be mo re than 10 times the height of the 60-foot one at the Toys “R” Us store in Times Square. Never mind that that wheel is indoors.

The Staten Island wheel - on which construction is expected to begin in two years, with an opening goal of 2015 - will be big in other ways. It will carry 1,440 people at once, 10 times as many as the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island (which, for the record, was originally called the Dip-the-Dip). The Singapore Flyer can accommodate only 840 at a time, the London Eye 800 (the passenger load of 11 double-decker buses, according to the London Eye's Web site).

Still, the race is on. Norman D. Anderson, the author of “Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History” (Popular Press, 1992), wondered how long the new New York wheel would reign as No. 1. “Everybody has to have something a little bigger,” he said. “It's just a matter of time before we go to 1,000 feet.”

One Dead in Meningitis Outbreak Involving Men Who Have Sex With Men

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

One man has died of meningitis and three others have fallen ill, one critically, over the last month in an outbreak of the infection among gay men and other men who have sex with men, the New York City health department said on Thursday.

The health department said in a written statement that it was investigating “a cluster of invasive meningococcal disease,” commonly known as meningitis, a severe bacterial infection with a high fatality rate.

All four cases involve H.I.V.-infected men, who are at a higher risk of getting the infection and of dying from it than is the general population, the department said. The men's ages were reported as 31 to 42 and the cases were in several boroughs.

The disease is spread by close contact with discharges from the nose or throat of an infected person, which can happen from living in the same household or sexual contact, including kissing, the department said.

Symptoms, including high fever, headache, a stiff neck and a rash, can show up 2 to 10 days after exposure and develop rapidly within two days, the department said. The statement urged people who believed they were infected to seek immediate medical care.

An outbreak of meningitis in 2011 sickened six people in the city, three of them women. Three of the patients died.

The 47 Percent Here? Far Fewer Escape City\'s Income Tax

By SAM ROBERTS and PATRICK MCGEEHAN

In New York City, the “47 percent” is only 35 percent.

That's the share of city tax filers who, according to an analysis by the city's Independent Budget Office released Thursday, paid no city income tax in 2010 - as opposed to the 47 percent of Americans that Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said depend on government handouts, pay no federal income taxes and will vote for President Obama.

Most of the 1.3 million New York households that filed returns but paid no tax - 67 percent of them - reported income below the threshold for owing city income tax. Another 28 percent of them would have owed taxes if they had not received tax credits. The remaining 5 percent reported negative income as a result of investment or business losses (their income, before losses, averaged $43,100).

Over all, the 35 percent of filers who did not pay city income tax reported an average income of $9,108.

Filers who owed taxes reported average income of about $100,000 (and paid an average of $2,925 in city tax).

Among those who did not pay, fully half said they had earned wages from full or part-time jobs, but not enough to make them liable for income tax.

“A significant share of these people are in the labor force and working, but they are not paying taxes because even though they are working, they didn't have a lot of income,” said George Sweeting, deputy director of the Independent Budget Office.

The New Arena Is a Whale. Or Is It a Tire? Perhaps a Turtle?

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Last week's deceptively simple question “What does the brand-new Barclays Center look like?” unleashed a tsunami of tragicomic visions from the depths of the City Room readership's collective unconscious.

Comparisons to foodstuffs, mollusks and toilets abounded, along with creatures with protruding tongues and, of course, rusty something-or-others. Here, to celebrate the arena's opening on Friday, are some of our favorites from the more than 200 submissions.

A lopsided bedpan. - Annette, NYC

A beached humpback whale. - Clayton G, Park Slope

Comb over. - Chris, NYC

A huge mountain of rusting automobile crankcases. - Gerry, New York City

Mega burger, medium well, pickle on the side. - Robert Wilkanowski, NYC

Wooden waffle iron. - Joan, California

A dirty scab over a nasty wound. - NK, Brooklyn

The handle of a saw. - Holly, Georgia

Looks like a lonely bun yearning for its burger. - Susan Isaacs, Sands Point, NY

The Tonsure of Saint Peter? - Luke, Brooklyn

An easy road win for the Milwaukee Bucks. - Mark L., Milwaukee, WI

An underslung platypus? - AoTyana, Tennessee

Chris Christie's old lumpy mattress. - troublemaker, New York, NY

A deflated basketball…perhaps too appropriate. - A.A. Scharf, Pelham, NY

Corrupt corporate design trying desperately to look hip. - Raul Rothblatt, Brooklyn

Squished automobile tire. - jason

Looks like a huge George Foreman Grill! - murali, New York

A cow-pie. - Ken Levy, Saratoga Springs, NY

A spoiled child sticking out its tongue at the neighborhood. - Lynn, New York

A hell of a lot better than a ditch full of LIRR trains. - Robert C Guenveur, Brooklyn

A soggy Oreo. - katie212, New York

An old Motorola Startac cell phone. Rusted shut. - FJH, NYC

An old-fashioned typewriter car ry case that was run over by a bus. - asher, Brooklyn

A rotting turtle. - Annie, Brooklyn

Melted Roomba. - pauldonyc, Manhattan

One of those pretentious, amoeba-like glass tables. - Skippy, NYC

A portrait of V. I. Lenin as done by Salvador Dali. - Steve Schoenwiesner, Montclair, NJ

Really? I think it looks like a portrait of Salvador Dali done by a very drunk Lenin. - Dan Stackhouse, New York City

It looks like two slabs of liver trying to say, “Developers are people too, my friend.” - Nostranditmas, Brooklyn

A hand held stapler. - RB, Queens

A wicker laundry basket with a hole in it. - Max Cornise, New York

Boba Fett. - Billy Tafadali, Tanzania

A rusty alligator skull with a pronounced underbite. - John G., Brooklyn

A pangolin. - S, New York, NY

In fifty years, if it is still standing, it will be called “Iconic”. - richard kopperdahl, New York City

An airport 100 years afte r the apes have taken control of the earth. - Dan A., Jersey City

Burping clam. - jd, Brooklyn

A Whoopie Pie. - Ellen, New York, NY

A potty training seat. - mikem, Nashua, N.H.

A swimming pool being sucked up by a tornado. - Jan P, Rochester, NY

Castanets. - BC, Ulster County, NY

A cake that was dropped on the floor. - VW, Portland

A misuse of the power of eminent domain. - George Jones, Waldoboro, Maine

Smushed cockroach … guts glittering, abdomen stuck up in the air. - Jeremy Davis, Brooklyn

It looks like a toad sticking out its tongue. - Maritza, Richmond, VA

Urban blight! - Carolyn, Park Slope

The burned bagel that will choke Brooklyn. - Barry H. Mann, NYC

Richard Serra meets McDonald's. - whatawasteofspace, Brooklyn

A bust of Geordi La Forge, the engineer from Star Trek played by LeVar Burton. - JustZ, New York, NY

A grilled cheese sandwich. - Technic Ally, Toronto

An angry clam. An angry, angry clam. - Jeff Bowersox, Hattiesburg, MS

It really looks like one of those Pillsbury flaky biscuits. - Katie Taylor, NYC

It looks like the center of a Barclay. - BC, Hoboken, NJ

Bryant Park, 10:24 A.M.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

M.T.A. Chief Challenges Board Member to \'Be a Man\'

September 27, 2012, 12:32 pm

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

The chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority provoked an unusually heated exchange with a member of his board on Thursday, accusing the member of lying and challenging him twice to “be a man.”

The board was discussing a proposal to reduce the number of full-board meetings to 8 from 11, and add two meetings specifically for the public to address the chairman and agency presidents. The other board meetings include public comment periods.

The board member, Charles G. Moerdler, expressed his opposition to the plan, saying, “At this time, we need to increase, not decrease, timely disclosure.”

When he finished speaking, the chairman, Joseph J. Lhota, said he wished Mr. Mo erdler would reconsider his position, “since your flawed thinking and the erroneous things that you've just said are actually scurrilous.”

He noted that authority information would be available more frequently under the proposal.

“The blubbering that you're talking about is just a waste of time and a waste of effort,” Mr. Lhota said.

He then appeared to allude to a newspaper article in which Mr. Moerdler was accused of using a police-issued placard to park illegally in front of the Cornell Club in the spring.

“To make statements in public like this, similar to the statement that you made when you only parked in that parking spot for a few minutes when it was documented by camera that it was over four hours â€" enough of lying to this board,” Mr. Lhota said, at turns pounding his finger on the table.

Mr. Moerdler appeared taken aback. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “character assassination does not do you credit.”

But he said he “will not challenge” Mr. Lhota, to which the chairman responded, “I wish you would.”

“Be a man,” he said. “Be a man.”

“Oh, I'd be happy to do it,” Mr. Moerdler said. “In your words, I will bring it on.”

“Let's go,” said Mr. Lhota, known as a feisty deputy mayor under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Mr. Moerdler said he stood by his opposition to the plan.“With respect, and I say with respect, I find your comments disturbing,” he said. “I will leave it at that.”

“Respect is not mutual,” Mr. Lhota said.

Other members then spoke, mostly in praise of the proposed changes to the meeting schedule. The measure passed, with one board member opposed.

New York Lags Behind Other Cities in College Graduation Rate

By PATRICK MCGEEHAN

College graduation rates in New York City are so low that more of the city's residents who have college degrees were born abroad than in New York, a report released on Thursday shows.

The report, published by the city comptroller's office, found that despite the city's reputation as a magnet for college graduates, only 42 percent of its residents have degrees from two-year or four-year colleges. That share placed New York sixth among the 10 biggest cities in America, the report found.

Comptroller John C. Liu, who is expected to run for mayor next year, had his staff conduct the study as part of “Beyond High School NYC,” which he said would be an initiative to find ways to increase the share of city residents with college degrees to 60 percent by 2025. Doing so would put the city on par with the level of education in Washington and Seattle, the report shows.

First, Mr. Liu said, the city would need to raise the graduation rate for its secondary students. Only 21 percent of New York City students obtain a college degree within 12 years of entering high school, according to the report.

Of the 1.9 million city residents with college degrees, almost 40 percent were born in other countries. And, contrary to the popular notion that the city is flooded with new college graduates every spring, only about 1 of every 60 college graduates in the city came from a neighboring state and only an additional 5 of those 60 came from elsewhere in the country.

By comparison, the five big cities with higher concentrations of college graduates â€" Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle â€" drew about one-fourth of their college graduates from beyond their neighboring states.

“If New York City were to approximate the educational attainment of the five most-educated cities, 
it would need to have more than 630,000 additio nal college degree-holders among its resident population,” says the report, which was written by Frank Braconi, the comptroller's chief economist.

Improving high-school graduation rates would be an important step toward that goal, the report states, though it does not lay out any suggestions for how that would be accomplished or how much it would cost.

New York Lags Behind Other Cities in College Graduation Rate

By PATRICK MCGEEHAN

College graduation rates in New York City are so low that more of the city's residents who have college degrees were born abroad than in New York, a report released on Thursday shows.

The report, published by the city comptroller's office, found that despite the city's reputation as a magnet for college graduates, only 42 percent of its residents have degrees from two-year or four-year colleges. That share placed New York sixth among the 10 biggest cities in America, the report found.

Comptroller John C. Liu, who is expected to run for mayor next year, had his staff conduct the study as part of “Beyond High School NYC,” which he said would be an initiative to find ways to increase the share of city residents with college degrees to 60 percent by 2025. Doing so would put the city on par with the level of education in Washington and Seattle, the report shows.

First, Mr. Liu said, the city would need to raise the graduation rate for its secondary students. Only 21 percent of New York City students obtain a college degree within 12 years of entering high school, according to the report.

Of the 1.9 million city residents with college degrees, almost 40 percent were born in other countries. And, contrary to the popular notion that the city is flooded with new college graduates every spring, only about 1 of every 60 college graduates in the city came from a neighboring state and only an additional 5 of those 60 came from elsewhere in the country.

By comparison, the five big cities with higher concentrations of college graduates â€" Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle â€" drew about one-fourth of their college graduates from beyond their neighboring states.

“If New York City were to approximate the educational attainment of the five most-educated cities, 
it would need to have more than 630,000 additio nal college degree-holders among its resident population,” says the report, which was written by Frank Braconi, the comptroller's chief economist.

Improving high-school graduation rates would be an important step toward that goal, the report states, though it does not lay out any suggestions for how that would be accomplished or how much it would cost.

When Stahdahs Were Stahdahs

By DICK DULANY

Dear Diary:

I had just come to New York in the late 1960s and rented a roach-infested apartment for $75 a month on East 25th Street.

The fluorescent light in the bathroom refused to come on even after putting in a new bulb. I saw a miniature tin-can-shaped thingy that, with a twist, came out easily. I took it to my favorite and helpful hardware store on Third Avenue, Schneider's Hardware, run by Mrs. Schneider. She was an encyclopedia of helpful information for a new arrival in the city.

I told her the problem and asked her what the small, tin-colored cylinder in my hand was called. She said, “Those are stahdahs.”

“O.K., give me a stahdah,” I repeated back. She said O.K. and rang it up. I paid and left.

As I was walking back to my apartment, I dissembled the curious word stahdahs. Stahdahs, stahdahs … starters? Starter? It's a starter!

About the same time I heard a cabdriver say, “Toit y-toid and Toid.” Those accents have succumbed to the accentless voices on radio and television. Some of the nuance and color of New York is gone.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Gay Couple Sues Conservative Group, Saying It Stole Their Kiss

By ANDY NEWMAN

On a May afternoon in Brooklyn in 2010, Thomas Privitere and Brian Edwards of Montclair, N.J., clasped hands and kissed in a park overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. The moment was captured by a photographer they had hired, and the men liked the photo so much they used it to announce their engagement.

Last spring, a conservative group used the same photo in a political mailer in Colorado in a somewhat different context: to illustrate the evils of same-sex unions.

On Wednesday, the couple and their photographer, Kristina Hill, sued the conservative group, a nonprofit based in Virginia called Public Advocate of the United States, in federal court in Denver. They accuse Public Advocate of infringing on Ms. Hill's copyright and misappropriating the couple's likeness.

“We are heartbroken that our images may have been seen by gay and lesbian youth in Colorado and were left feeling ashamed o f their sexual orientation because of it,” Mr. Privitere, 37, said in a statement.

Public Advocate used the photo, which had been posted on the couple's blog, twice, the suit alleges. In the spring, it sent out a mailer against State Senator Jean White, a Republican who has supported civil unions for gay couples, with the couple's photo and the words “State Senator Jean White's Idea of ‘Family Values?'” written across it.

The original photo's backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline was cropped out in favor of a more Coloradan-looking setting of snow-dusted pine trees. The reverse side of the mailing identifies Public Advocate as the sender and lists its address, in Falls Church, Va., the suit says.

Ms. White was defeated in a primary on June 26, and Mr. Edwards learned of the photo the next day from a friend who had seen an article in The Daily News about her opponent that included the image from the mailing, the suit says.

â €œI'm in shock and I'm angry and I'm hurt and I'm flabbergasted and I'm livid,” Mr. Edwards, 32, blogged on June 27.

Public Advocate sent a similar mailing in opposition to Jeffrey Hare, a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives. For this mailing, the couple appeared to be performing their kiss in an open field against a cloud-dotted sky. “Jeffrey Hare's vision for Weld County?” read the copy. Mr. Hare, too, was defeated in the primary.

Mr. Edwards, a college administrator, and Mr. Privitere, a ticket broker, have lived together since 2002 and married in Connecticut in 2010.

The suit (see complaint below), filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates for gay rights, among other things, seeks unspecified damages. It says that Public Advocate never sought Ms. Hill's permission to use the picture. “The defendant used the photograph instead of licensing one from a stock photo house because it did not wish to pay the cust omary price,” the suit states.

Public Advocate's president, Eugene Delgaudio, did not respond to a phone message and an e-mail seeking comment.

Anti Gay Marriage Ad Lawsuit (PDF)

Anti Gay Marriage Ad Lawsuit (Text)

Pogue: Maps Most Embarrassing, Least Usable Apple Software

Last week, I used 's new Maps app on my to guide me to a speaking engagement.

The GPS navigation screen was clean, bold and distraction-free. The voice instructions spoke the actual street names. The prompts gave me just the right amount of time to prepare for each turn.

There was only one problem: When the app told me that I had arrived, I was sitting in a random suburban cul-de-sac. Children were playing in the front yard, the sky was a crisp blue, and I was late for my talk.

As almost everyone knows by now, that's not an unusual tale. Horror stories about Apple's maps - and ridicule - are flooding the Internet.

The iPhone's old mapping app was powered by . But in the new iOS 6 software for iPhones and iPads, Apple replaced Google's maps with its own, built from scratch.

Unfortunately, in this new app, the Washington Monument has been moved to a new spot across the street. The closest thing Maps can find for “Dulles Airport” is “Dulles Airport Taxi.” Search for Cleveland, Ga., and you'll wind up right smack in Cleveland, Tenn. Riverside Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., is in the right place but the wrong decade; it became a Publix supermarket 11 years ago.

And on, and on, and on. Entire lakes, train stations, bridges and tourist attractions have been moved, mislabeled or simply erased. Satellite photo views consist of stitched-together scenes from completely different seasons, weather conditions and even years. The point-of-interest data, in particular, seems to be incomplete or flaky, especially overseas (many snarky examples at theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com).

The most stunning new feature, Flyover, offers interactive, photorealistic 3-D models of major cities - but some scenes have gone horribly wrong. The Brooklyn Bridge has melted into the river, the road to the Hoover Dam plunges straight down into a canyon and Auckland's main train station is in the middle of the sea.

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.

Yes, it adds spoken turn-by-turn directions, auto-rerouting and a 3-D view of your route, all of which the old app lacked. Its design is elegant, smart and attractive. Flyover is neat. And Maps works beautifully with Siri; setting a destination is as easy as saying, “Give me directions to the White House,” and off you go. The spoken instructions continue even if you turn off the screen.

But Maps is missing Street View, which lets you see street-level photos of any address (it has taken Google's photo cars five million miles of driving through 3,000 cities in 40 countries to build it). It's also missing public transportation guidance; where Google's maps could show you what buses or subways to take, the new app just hands you off to a list of independent bus and train schedule apps.

And while you're navigating, you can't zoom out from that spare, elegant routing screen to look ahead at your itinerary - to pick a better route on your own, for example. You can tap an Overview button for that kind of map, but now you're flipping between two displays.

As the magnitude of Mapplegate (as one of my readers calls it) became clearer, I had three questions.

First, why did Apple jettison Google's map service, which is polished and mature? Second, how did Apple and its squad of perfectionists misfire so badly? Third, what exactly is the underlying problem, and how long will it take to fix?

After poking around, here's what I've learned.

First, why Apple dropped the old version: Google, it says, was saving all the best features for phones that run its software. For example, the iPhone app never got spoken directions or vector maps (smooth lines, not tiles of pixels), long after those features had come to rival phones.

The even greater issue may be data. Every time you use Google's maps, you're sending data from your phone to Google. That information - how you're using maps, where you're going, which roads actually exist - is extremely valuable; it can be used to improve both the maps and Google's ability to deliver location-based offers and advertising.

Apple, of late, has been disentangling itself from Google. (It also eliminated the YouTube app from iOS 6, although Google quickly released a free downloadable app.) So when it came time to renew its contract, Apple declined. It was no longer interested in supplying so much valuable user data to its rival.

To build its replacement, Apple licensed data from other companies.

It bought map data from TomTom, which also supplies maps for BlackBerry, HTC and Samsung phones, and even parts of Google Maps.

Apple got restaurant and store listings from Yelp, traffic data from Waze and so on - more than two dozen sources in all, Apple says.

The resulting ocean of information is many petabytes of data (one petabyte is a million gigabytes, if you're scoring at home). Well over 99 percent of it, Apple says, is accurate.