Storm Aftermath: Live Updates

Tracking the storm that has disrupted power and transportation for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, leaving behind the daunting task of cleaning up.

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Uber Struggles to Get Cars Onto New York\'s Streets

In New York post-Sandy, the lack of subways can be just as troubling as the lack of electricity. New Yorkers, who typically live in cramped apartments, rely on the subway system to jump between their homes and offices, and to connect with friends and family elsewhere.

So how do you get around? I live in Brooklyn and spent about 90 minutes on Wednesday trying to request a car over and over through Uber, the car-service-summoning smartphone app, with no luck. I eventually got through to a local car service on the phone, and it took a bit less than an hour to get across the bridge into Midtown Manhattan.

Plenty of other people in New York are turning to car services this week. But Uber, a San Francisco-based start-up with operations in most major cities in the United States, said it was struggling to get enough cars on the road to meet demand. On Wednesday morning, it imposed a special “surge” fee - a rate of at least double the normal fare.

Several New Yorkers didn't take the price hike lightly. They complained on Twitter that Uber was using a natural disaster to price-gouge. In response, Uber turned off the surge fee after just 45 minutes.

Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive, said in an interview that the higher fee was necessary to give more drivers an incentive to get onto storm-ravaged roads and squeeze through traffic to pick up people for rides. He noted that many of these drivers were affected by the storm themselves, so getting them into their cars was a challenge.

“A lot of drivers, they have homes that are flooded,” Mr. Kalanick said. “They have to get their lives together as well. Everything New Yorkers are dealing with, generally drivers are also dealing with.”

As a temporary remedy for the situation, Uber is taking at least $100,000 out of its own pocket to pay the surge fees to the drivers and not passing them on to the riders, Mr. Kalanick said. He added that for the time being , Uber would also not be taking a cut of each ride in the storm-affected areas, so the full fare will go to the driver. However, he said this solution would not last long because it could cost the company too much money, and Uber may have to turn surge fees back on for passengers later.

“We're trying to maximize the number of cars on the road without breaking the bank,” he said.

T-Mobile and AT&T Will Share Networks in Storm-Damaged Areas

6:08 p.m. | Updated

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, much of lower Manhattan has completely lost electricity and cell reception. T-Mobile USA and AT&T said on Wednesday that in the affected areas of New York and New Jersey, their customers would be able to use the networks of both companies, decreasing the likelihood of failed calls.

In a statement, T-Mobile USA said that when customers of both AT&T and T-Mobile place calls, the calls would be carried by whichever network is available in the area. Both networks use similar technologies, so switching between them will be seamless, and there will not be an additional charge, the company said.

One quarter of the transmission sites in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy were knocked out, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday. Verizon Wireless said 6 percent of its cell sites were down in the storm-damaged areas, T-Mobile said roughly 20 percent of its net work was down in New York City and 10 percent in Washington, and Sprint and AT&T said some of their sites had failed in badly hit areas as well.

“Our assumption is that communication outages could get worse before they get better,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday afternoon. “I want to emphasize that the storm is not over.”

Neville Ray, chief technology officer of T-Mobile USA, said that AT&T and T-Mobile had made a similar network-sharing agreement in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But he said that Hurricane Sandy was the biggest natural disaster he had ever dealt with, and that service failures were inevitable. The loss of power in storm-ravaged areas has caused cell sites to go down, and backup battery systems have drained, he said.

“There's an amount of preparation you can do, but depending on the size and scale and impact on the storm, it's tough to anticipate every circumstance,” he said in an interview. “No degree of preparation can prevent some of those outages from happening.”

In anticipation of the storm, carriers prepared trucks containing cell towers, called C.O.W.'s for cell on wheels, to provide service in areas where there are failures. But there are still wide areas of lower Manhattan with little or no cell coverage. Mr. Ray said that carriers have to assess when it is safe for employees to move these emergency vehicles onto the road and turn on the services. He said the company was looking at key areas in Manhattan to deploy the trucks.

 

At 65, Do You Have the Right to a Subway Seat?

Dear Diary:

A month or so ago, I was on the No. 1 train heading south. I was reading my Kindle book using the iPhone app, and feeling fairly contemporary and wired in.

I was standing in front of two 20-somethings. One offered me his seat. I thanked him, but refused the offer, my self-concept somewhat bruised and, frankly, just a bit annoyed by his gracious offer.

Last weekend, I was on the No. 1 train again, this time heading north with my wife and several friends. I was seated next to a friend, engaged in a conversation. A young man exiting the train said to me, “By your age, you should have learned some manners.”

I asked my friend whether he heard this comment, and he had, but neither of us had any idea what he was talking about. When we got off the train and reunited with our group, I told them what had happened. One of them related that an older woman had been standing in front of me trying to make eye contact and coveting my seat. Neither m y friend nor I had noticed her.

I guess, as I turn 65 this month, that when it comes to the right to a seat on a New York City subway I am just at an awkward stage!

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.

Apple Delays Latest iTunes Upgrade

On Tuesday, a day after a management shake-up and a month after the botched release of its Maps app drew a rare public apology from its chief executive, Apple quietly delayed the release of its latest upgrade to iTunes, saying it needed more time to “get it right.”

The new version of iTunes was announced last month with no more specific timing than “coming in October”; on Tuesday, with two days left on the month, Apple revised that timing with an orange tab on its Web site that now says “coming in November.”

The company issued no formal announcement about the change, but in a comment to the technology news site All Things Digital, a spokesman said: “The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right. We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.”

The new version is supposed to have a streamlined look and better integration with iCloud, its service for synching music and video collections. It is said to be the most significant upgrade to iTunes in the 11-year life of the program, which has grown from a simple music player to the most powerful retailer in the music business - and a force in the movie, television and e-books businesses - and, on Apple's PCs, the portal to its app store.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

How Sandy Slapped the Snark Out of Twitter

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters People congregate on Tuesday in front of a building in Manhattan that still has wireless Internet access.

Twitter is often a caldron of snark, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can morph during large events - users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a real-time service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens.

As a media reporter, my Twitter feed has a strong Manhattan bias, serving as a sandbox for media and technology types that I follow. Under norma l circumstances, we show up on Twitter to preen, self-promote and crack wise about the latest celebrity meltdown. If that New York cohort has a soul - insert your own joke here - you could see into it on Twitter.

And then along came Hurricane Sandy. For most of Monday, people on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious.

It is hard to data-mine the torrent â€" some estimates suggested there were three and a half million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy - but my feed quickly moved from the prankish to the practical in a matter of hours as landfall approached. I asked Simon Dumenco, who writes the Media Guy column for Advertising Age and is well versed in the dark arts of Twitter analytics, about the tonal shift via e-mail.

“I kept a close eye on the Top 10 Trends chart as Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, and there was no shortage of gravitas on Twitter,” he wrote. “The last time I checked before losing power in my Manhattan apartment, seven of the 10 trends were Sandy-related - New Jersey, ConEd, Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, FEMA, Queens and #SandyRI. Clicking on each of them yielded plenty of information.”

At my home in suburban New Jersey, a 30-foot limb dropped down at 4 p.m., so the illusion that this was an event happening to someone else quickly dissipated. And at 8 p.m., just when we hunkered down in front of the big screen, the house went dark. This very large event would not be televised. We built a fire and sat around a hand-cranked radio, but I was diverted over and over by the little campfire of Tweets on my smartphone.

It was hard to resist. Twitter not only keeps you in the data stream, but because you can contribute and re-Tweet, you feel as if you are adding something even though Mother Nature clearly has the upper hand. The activity of it, the sharing aspect, the feeling that everyone is in the boat and rowing, is far different than consuming mass media.

Because my Internet connection was poor, so much of the rich media - amazing videos and pictures documenting the devastation - was lost to me. In true media throwback fashion, Hurricane Sandy was something I experienced as a text event, but I don't feel as if I missed much. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel inundation, the swamping of the Lower East Side, the huge problems at New York hospitals, the stranding of the holdouts in Atlantic City, all became apparent on Twitter in vivid detail.

At the same time, much of the seen-it-all and isn't-it-dumb seemed to leak out of my Twitter stream. (The message that earnestness was nascent and irony was on the run seemed widespread - the servers of Gawker, the hilarious and ill-mannered Manhattan snark machine, were drowned and the site went down. Still is, as a matter of fact.)

Many local television stations did an amazing job and the big cable-news outlets played large, but the template of the rain-and-wind-lashed correspondent shouting to a blow-dried anchor back in the studio has its limits. The local radio stations were nimble and careful, including WCBS, WNYC and WINS, but they were part of the story on occasion, with transformers going down and hurricane-induced glitches along the way.

Manhattan is the epicenter of a number of big blogs, including Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, but each had to pivot to Twitter, among other platforms, as their servers succumbed to encroaching waters. (At a conference last year, Andrew Fitzgerald of Twitter wondered about the utility of the platform if the end of the world arrived in the form of an alien attack. The people participating in the discussion pointed out that the lightweight infrastructure of Twitter and its durabilit y would probably make it very practical should end times draw nigh.)

In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. There were abundant news Tweets from @antderosa of Reuters, @acarvin of NPR and @brianstelter of The New York Times, among many others, but there were also Tweets from plain old folks retailing very important information about their blocks, their neighborhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as D.C. and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, wrote in a note: “To me the most basic act of journalism there can be is: ‘I'm there, you're not, let me t ell you about it.' Or: ‘I heard it, you didn't, let me tell you what Bloomberg said.' And the fact is Twitter is rife with such. That is why it is basic in a sprawling emergency.”

Twitter is a global platform, but it can be relentlessly and remarkably local should the occasion - or crisis - arise, as Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl, pointed out.

“Twitter was phenomenally useful microscopically - I was literally finding out information about how much flooding the Zone A block next to me was having, hour by hour - and macroscopically, too - I didn't even have to turn on the TV once the whole storm,” he wrote. He pointed out, as have many others, that there was abundant misinformation rendered in 140 characters as well, which reminded @kbalfe of another rapid-fire medium, actually. “Was a lot like cable news: indispensable … yet full of errors.”

In fact, some people used the friction-free, democratic nature of the medium to intentionally sti r panic. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed outed - “doxed” in the nomenclature of the Web - a person they said they said was the guy behind @comfortablysmug, an account that suggested that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had been trapped by rising waters, that Con Edison was shutting down all of Manhattan and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded.

BuzzFeed identified the person behind those tweets as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year's Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th Congressional District. (Mr. Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign.) Because his Twitter feed was followed by a number of New York-based reporters, the misinformation spread quickly, although John Herrman, also writing in BuzzFeed, suggested that “Twitter is a Truth Machine,” writing that “during Sandy, the Internet spread - then crushed - rumors at breakneck speed.”

Margaret Sulliv an, the public editor of The New York Times, said in a message on Twitter that whatever the quality of the feed at any given moment, it was riveting: “Impossible to tear one's eyes from, with occasional nuggets of helpfulness amid constant stream of flotsam and jetsam.”

The day after the storm, Twitter shook off much of the earnestness and reverted back to its snarky self, although the storm's death toll and the quest for resources made it a more serious village common than usual. In an e-mail, Peter Kafka of AllThings D, considered the value of Twitter in a big news event by running it through the way-back machine.

“Would it have been better during 9/11 if we had Twitter?” he wrote. “Plenty of bad and good info spread that day, by mouth, web and TV. My hunch is Twitter would do the same. The difference? Twitter allows my friends/like-minded people/people I like to feel a bit more connected. And that's a lot better than less connected.”

Calling it a “pop-up town square” for the affected area, @editorialiste said in a message on Twitter, it was “a great place to laugh, cry, argue, sympathize together.”

Kurt Andersen, radio host and writer, said that the combination of utility and sociability made Twitter a remarkable informative shelter during the storm.

“I've never liked or used the word ‘community' about people communicating online, but the Sandy conversations seemed worthy of the word, actually communal,” he wrote. “And given the circumstances, it really could've only happened online.”

Storm Aftermath: Live Updates

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Water Everywhere, and the Damage Is Just as Ubiquitous

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

A tree pushed over by high winds took power lines with it on Newtown Lane.

The blue skies over East Hampton on Tuesday were clear of any trace of a hurricane. Only the balmy breeze, heady with the scent of fir, elm and maple sap hinted at the storm's destruction; it came from scores of toppled trees and hundreds of snapped branches. Many limbs yanked down telephone and electrical wires as they fell; some crashed into houses.

On Cooper Lane in East Hampton, crews with chain saws tackled felled trees, including one, more than 40 feet tall, that toppled when the wind kicked up the day before. Underneath it was 33 Cooper Lane, its roof smashed. “I felt a shudder in the house, and it came down,” said Taylor Smith, who lives a few doors down.

As of Monday afternoon, more than 40,000 people from Southampton to Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island, were without power, according to the Long Island Power Authority.

On Georgica Beach, a passer-by made a grisly discovery on Tuesday morning: the body of a woman, washed up on the beach. The woman has not been identified.

West Lake Drive, on the edge of Long Island Sound in Montauk, was unrecognizable. The road, buckled in parts, could not be seen; it was completely covered in thick sand and rubble. Boats in Montauk Harbor, which had floated to the top of the pilings as the water rose several feet overnight, straining their moorings, had settled back down with the tide.

Two police cars guarded the foot of Gerard Drive, a spindly 1.5-mile-long cape bounded by Gardiners Bay on one side and Accabonac Harbor on the other. Every few minutes, residents drove up, anxious about the fate of their homes. Every house still stood, the police said, but it was not safe to return: the peninsula had been breached, and parts of the road were washed out.

“You come down here and you just don't know if there is going to be a house,” said Mary Trabona, after the police had confirmed that her childhood home was still standing, “or if the bay will have reclaimed it.”

Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Concetta Zagami was rescued from her home in Dongon Hills by the Police Department's Emergency Service Unit.

Pedro Correa, 36, and Robert Gavars, 35, stood on the edge of a sodden field in the Oakwood section of Staten Island and assessed their luck.

The area before them was littered with parts of houses, including Mr. Correa's.

When the storm struck on Monday, his home had been about 500 yards farther east. So had the two men.

Earlier Monday, Mr. Correa, who has lived in the neighborhood for six years, had evacuated his family to Brooklyn.

But he and Mr. Gavars, a close friend, returned to Mr. Correa's house to set up a generator. When they tried to leave about 7 p.m., their car stalled in high water. So they decided to ride out the storm at the house, a two-story building.

But the surge began to swallow it.

They scrambled to the top floor, but within 15 minutes the water level went from ankle-high to chin-high.

They broke the legs off a dining room table and tried to use the tabletop to float, but that did not work.

A neighbor's house had been knocked off its foundation and began floating by, so they leapt to its roof from Mr. Correa's house.

It was pitch black and they had no idea where they were, but they sensed they were heading inland.

After perhaps 45 minutes, they dropped from the roof and used boards to push themselves through debris and 15-foot-deep water to higher land.

“Somebody opened up a door in a house and we sat there for a while,” said Mr. Correa, a correction officer at Sing Sing prison and an Army veteran.

“I made it through Iraq, I made it through the World Trade Center,” he said, “but I didn't think I'd make it through this.”

Facebook Stock Continues Fall as Employees Sell

Facebook employees were supposed to be millionaires and billionaires. Instead, they will be half that.

The company's stock fell on Wednesday as many employees got their first chance to sell 234 million shares that had been locked up after Facebook's initial public offering.

The lockup was supposed to expire on Monday, but shareholders could not sell until Wednesday because Wall Street was closed for two days as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Shortly after the markets opened on Wednesday, Facebook stock fell about 4 percent, to $21.04 - nearly 50 percent lower than its original offering price of $38 in May - before recovering a bit. On Friday, the last day of trading for Facebook, the stock closed at $21.94.

The drop suggests that Facebook employees may not patiently wait for the stock to rise and instead were looking for an opportunity to pare back their holdings.

Companies that go public typically compel insiders to hold their stock options for a pe riod of time to prevent the market from being swamped with too many shares. The end of the lockup period, as it is known, can weigh on a stock's value.

In August, 271 million Facebook shares were eligible to be sold. They were held largely by early investors, including Accel Partners and Goldman Sachs. In August, Peter Thiel, a former PayPal co-founder and an early Facebook investor, sold a majority of his Facebook stock, which helped push the stock to a record low.

The next big test for Facebook's stock price will be on Nov. 14, when 777 million more shares held by employees can be sold. Additional lockups expire in mid-December and May 2013.

Today\'s Scuttlebot: Wireless Light Bulbs and Windows 8 Hardware

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. Monday's selection includes a hardware challenge as laptop makers prepare for Windows 8 and light bulbs for the home that can becontrolled via an app.

I.B.M.\'s Watson Goes to Medical School

Next up for Watson, I.B.M.'s clever question-answering computer? A stint as a medical student at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.

The collaboration, announced on Tuesday, includes a bit of controlled crowdsourcing, with the Cleveland clinicians and medical school students answering Watson's questions and correcting its mistakes.

“Hopefully, we can contribute to the training of this technology,” said Dr. James K. Stoller, chairman of the Education Institute at Cleveland Clinic. The goal, he added, was for Watson to become a “very smart assistant.”

Part of Watson's training will be to feed it test questions from the United States Medical Licensing Exam, which every human student must pass to become a practicing physician. The benefit for Watson should be to have a difficult but measurable set of questions on which to measure the progress of its machine-learning technology.

Yet Watson, it seems , is not an answer to the nation's looming shortage of physicians. “We're not going to roll Watson in and certify it as a doctor,” said Dr. David Ferrucci, the I.B.M. scientist who is the principal investigator for the Watson project.

Once trained, Watson ought to be able to help physicians cope better with the rapid pace of incoming new research. Dr. Stoller estimates that the “half-life of existing knowledge” in medicine is probably down to four to eight years on most topics. After that, it's obsolete, or partly so.

“What we learned in medical school loses accuracy over time, and is doing so at an accelerating rate,” Dr. Stoller observed.

For Watson, medical knowledge offers a complex knowledge terrain with deep and rich information, and a multitude of interrelationships between possible causes of a patient's symptom. Highly probable answers exist, even correct ones, but there are many possibilities and paths to a decision. The human body is n ot a standardized, multiple-choice test.

The goal for Watson's artificial intelligence technology, said Dr. Ferrucci, is to move beyond simply presenting Watson with questions, and getting answers back - which it did so impressively in defeating human Jeopardy champions last year.

In medicine, he said, you have a problem with many variables. For example, a 69-year-old female with certain symptoms, vital signs, family history, medications taken, genetic makeup, diet and exercise regimens.

Someday, Dr. Ferrucci said, Watson should be able to collect and assess all that patient data, and then construct “inference paths” toward a probable diagnosis â€" digesting information, missing nothing and winnowing choices for a human doctor.

“That's where we want to go with Watson,” Dr. Ferrucci said.

Google Introduces New Emergency Resources in Response to Sandy

Google has scrambled to post online resources for people who want information about the deadly storm Sandy, including maps showing evacuation routes and shelters and a new service that sends emergency alerts to Google users.

On Monday night, the company introduced the new service, public alerts, to show warnings about natural disasters and emergencies based on information from government agencies like Ready.gov and the National Weather Service. Google said it had planned to introduce the service later, but sped up the process in response to Sandy. In the future, it will add alerts from other services, like Nixle, which publishes messages from the local police.

The alerts show up in response to searches on Google.com and Google Maps, and appear unprompted on the cellphones of people with the latest version of Android, through Google Now.

“This is part of our continuing mission to bring emergency information to people when and where it is relevant,” N igel Snoad, a product manager for Google Crisis Response, wrote in a company blog post.

Using Google Maps, the company has created a map of the storm area. Markers show where power is out; the location of evacuation shelters and routes; traffic conditions; and where surges, floods and high winds are expected. There are also public alerts. People can choose different views, including the addition of cloud imagery or location-based Webcams and YouTube videos to the map.

Google has also published a New York City map with shelters, Webcams, evacuation routes and other information from NYC Open Data, the city's Web site for sharing data with software developers.

The public alerts and maps are products of Google Crisis Response, part of Google.org, the company's nonprofit arm, whose focus is to use Google products and engineers to help solve problems. It was started in 2005 in response to Hurricane Katrina and has published online resources for disasters like hur ricanes and oil spills since then, including the person finder feature that was used after the Japan earthquake.

For the Sandy maps, Google has drawn information from the Red Cross, the National Hurricane Center, Weather.gov, Storyful and the United States Naval Research Laboratory, among others.

A search on Tuesday for “New Haven flooding” showed a public alert about coastal flooding. A search for “hurricane Sandy” showed, above the usual search results, links to government Web sites with storm updates and to Google's crisis map.

“We hope that you get the information you need to make preparations and stay safe if you are in the area,” Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer at Google Crisis Response, wrote in a company blog post.

Google Introduces New Emergency Resources in Response to Sandy

Google has scrambled to post online resources for people who want information about the deadly storm Sandy, including maps showing evacuation routes and shelters and a new service that sends emergency alerts to Google users.

On Monday night, the company introduced the new service, public alerts, to show warnings about natural disasters and emergencies based on information from government agencies like Ready.gov and the National Weather Service. Google said it had planned to introduce the service later, but sped up the process in response to Sandy. In the future, it will add alerts from other services, like Nixle, which publishes messages from the local police.

The alerts show up in response to searches on Google.com and Google Maps, and appear unprompted on the cellphones of people with the latest version of Android, through Google Now.

“This is part of our continuing mission to bring emergency information to people when and where it is relevant,” N igel Snoad, a product manager for Google Crisis Response, wrote in a company blog post.

Using Google Maps, the company has created a map of the storm area. Markers show where power is out; the location of evacuation shelters and routes; traffic conditions; and where surges, floods and high winds are expected. There are also public alerts. People can choose different views, including the addition of cloud imagery or location-based Webcams and YouTube videos to the map.

Google has also published a New York City map with shelters, Webcams, evacuation routes and other information from NYC Open Data, the city's Web site for sharing data with software developers.

The public alerts and maps are products of Google Crisis Response, part of Google.org, the company's nonprofit arm, whose focus is to use Google products and engineers to help solve problems. It was started in 2005 in response to Hurricane Katrina and has published online resources for disasters like hur ricanes and oil spills since then, including the person finder feature that was used after the Japan earthquake.

For the Sandy maps, Google has drawn information from the Red Cross, the National Hurricane Center, Weather.gov, Storyful and the United States Naval Research Laboratory, among others.

A search on Tuesday for “New Haven flooding” showed a public alert about coastal flooding. A search for “hurricane Sandy” showed, above the usual search results, links to government Web sites with storm updates and to Google's crisis map.

“We hope that you get the information you need to make preparations and stay safe if you are in the area,” Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer at Google Crisis Response, wrote in a company blog post.

EMC Acquires Silver Tail Systems

The data storage giant EMC said Tuesday that it had acquired Silver Tail Systems, an antifraud start-up.

EMC did not disclose the price for Silver Tail, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif. But it has acquired a number of security start-ups in the past few years as it expands beyond its core business of data storage. Its largest acquisition was the 2006 takeover of RSA Security for $2.1 billion. Last year, it acquired NetWitness, another security start-up. That price was never disclosed, but people close to the acquisition talks said NetWitness sold for $400 million, more than 10 times its 12-month trailing revenue.

EMC is not the only tech giant chasing security start-ups. Earlier this year, Apple, which typically avoids triple-digit million-dollar acquisitions, acquired AuthenTec, a security start-up, for $356 million, its second-largest acquisition to date. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are pouring millions into security start-ups: They collectively invest ed $935 million in computer security start-ups last year, almost double the $495 million they invested in 2010, according to a Moneytree report.

Before founding Silver Tail four years ago, Mike Eynon and Laura Mather worked for three years on the antifraud teams at eBay and PayPal, two of the most targeted sites on the Web. From they learned they started Silver Tail, which searches for online fraud in real time. The company maps out what normal behavior is at a Web site and uses that intelligence to spot for anomalies, like a hacker breaking in, or large volumes of transactions coming from a single computer.

Mr. Eynon and Ms. Mather founded Silver Tail with an initial $2 million in backing from Leapfrog Ventures, Seraph Group and Startup Capital Ventures. Last year, the company received another $20 million from those investors as well as Andreessen Horowitz and Citi Ventures, the venture arm of Citigroup.

Scott Weiss, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led the investment, said that in the last year, Silver Tail had grown to nearly 100 employees, from 12, and that the product was being used by several top American banks. He added that the experience of the start-up's founders at eBay and PayPal has resonated with banks, e-commerce companies and government agencies.

Storm Aftermath: Live Updates

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State-by-State Guide

A look at the devastation caused in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy from North Carolina to New England.

Hurricane Sandy

Millions of people were without power across the region.

Where Do You Come From?

Dear Diary:

As a first-generation Asian American in Lower Manhattan, I've experienced all different kinds of comments, curiosities and remarks through the years regarding my race and appearance. Some of these remarks have been inspired by sincere curiosity, and others have come from a different and perhaps not so friendly place.

Regardless, most interactions have been harmless, and most of my conversations are with taxi drivers, who themselves are often from faraway places and love to know from where it is I hail (no pun intended).

One such interaction started as commonly as many others:

He: “Where are you from?”
Me: “Queens.”
He: “No, where are you really from? China? Japan?”
Me (sigh): “Neither.”
He: “Hmmm. I know! South Korea!”
Me: “Yes.”
He: “You know what's funny; I never meet anyone from North Korea.”
Me: “Yeah, probably not anytime soon, either.”

Read all recent entrie s 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.

When an Imprecise Forecast Could Hurt the Forecasters

One thing is for sure: No New Yorkers can say they weren't warned about the potentially devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy and the need to take precautions. Yet some bristled at the cascades of warnings that went on for days. This is New York, after all.

Those prone to bravado puffed out their chests and refused to leave areas threatened with flooding, no matter how often the president, the governor and the mayor told them that they were endangering not only themselves but also rescue workers prepared to sacrifice themselves in an emergency.

The daring - or, if you prefer, the foolish - could cite recent history: the experience with Hurricane Irene last year. The city was supposed to be hit hard then, and other parts of the state relatively spared. Instead, the city squeaked by with little damage while others were pounded. For those disinclined by nature to trust authority, it was evidence that the scientists don't know what they're talking about.

You could hear that reaction in some places as Hurricane Sandy approached. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, for one, had no patience for the notion that “Hurricane Irene was a bust.”

“No, it wasn't,” Mr. Cuomo said at one of his public appearances on Monday. Hurricane Irene, he said, inflicted “a tremendous amount of damage.”

“The projection on where the damage was going to be was off,” he said, “but that storm wreaked havoc in people's lives.”

Here's a question, then, for future storms. Hurricane Sandy was every bit as fierce as predicted. But when projections are off, can meteorologists be taken to court for needlessly disrupting some people's lives and for lulling others into a false sense of safety?

If Consolidated Edison can be deemed responsible when power is knocked out for long periods, and if the Army Corps of Engineers can be held liable in court (as it was) for its failings in Hurricane Katrina, might the weather people not reasonably take the fall when their forecasts are off?

We're in no way suggesting this would be desirable, but the idea is not as outlandish as you may think. There is a disturbing precedent, set only a week ago. It isn't local, but it ought not be ignored.

In Italy, a judge found seven earthquake experts guilty of manslaughter and sentenced them to six years in prison for having given inadequate warnings to L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region east of Rome, where 309 people were killed and thousands of others left homeless by an earthquake in April 2009. The defendants, most of them seismologists and geologists, were also ordered to pay damages of more than $10 million.

There had been frequent tremors in the months before the big one. Naturally, local people were nervous. The scientists, members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, met six days before the quake, and concluded that the smaller tremors did not signal grave danger.

Prosecutors argued to the judge's satisfaction that this reassuring assessment did not reflect the true risks and it rendered L'Aquila residents helpless to make informed decisions about whether to stay in their homes or leave.

Understandably, the ruling, which the defendants vow to appeal, sent scientist heads spinning everywhere. Are scientists to be imprisoned for not predicting the imponderable with precision? Nature, a science journal, despaired in an editorial that “the verdict is perverse and the sentence ludicrous.”

Luciano Maiani, president of the Italian risks commission, warned that the ruling would inhibit scientific experts from offering their professional opinions for fear of criminal repercussions. “This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world,” Mr. Maiani said.

That may not be quite accurate. Is there a more litigious people than Americans, especially in this city that has more lawyers per square inch than any spot on the planet?

Over the years, people have died and billions in property damage have been lost as a result of inaccurate weather forecasts - and bear in mind that meteorology is supposed to be a more precise science than seismology.

With a ruling like the one in L'Aquila as an international precedent, can we really be sure that the day won't come when a meteorologist here is put in the dock for the crime of failing to get it exactly right?

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com

An Update for the Corporate Help Desk

BMC Software, which makes products for managing corporate computers and employee help desks, is releasing a product that personalizes delivery of things like documents and corporate software to personal devices. People will be able to use it to order their own computers, automatically know if something urgent is going on in their businesses, or make appointments to talk to a help desk, instead of just waiting on the phone to describe a problem.

If someone is traveling, the system uses the personal device's geolocation service to help find a local office on Google Maps. A company can put its own floor plan into the map, so people can find meeting rooms or the location of a printer that has been set up to work with the device. Secure content, like sensitive corporate documents and internal phone numbers, can be stored online and retrieved through the service.

“Right now, compared to what consumers have, when you walk into an office and have to use the help desk , you go back in time,” said Robert Beauchamp, BMC's chief executive. “Context-aware content delivery will transform the experience of using corporate information technology.”

It should also cut down the cost of running a help desk, since it automates activities like telling people that an online expense reporting system isn't working, setting up voice mail or providing preapproved applications.

When there are calls to the help desk, they will most likely be prioritized, much the way credit card companies can tell when a high-value customer is calling in. “We have customers with aerospace engineers and truck drivers, and they all get treated the same by the information technology department,” Mr. Beauchamp said. “Now, who the user is will be known by the I.T. department.”

BMC is also hoping that the product, called MyIT, gives it a little more visibility. BMC sells products to more than 50,000 companies, and it is a critical part of the connec tion between corporate servers and the people who use them, but few people outside of I.T. know about it. MyIT will be branded on user devices, Mr. Beauchamp said, much the way Intel put “Intel Inside” stickers on personal computers.

BMC will also be capturing a lot of user data by running MyIT, which can be analyzed to learn more about how people use their tablets from the road, and how I.T. services should be changed. In the future, that could mean new businesses, or at least even more personal attention during office hours.

In Shake-Up, Apple\'s Mobile Software and Retail Chiefs to Depart

Scott Forstall, who has run software development for Apple's iPad and iPhone products, and John Browett, the head of the company's retail operations, are leaving Apple, in a rare management shake-up at the company.

The departure of Mr. Forstall, an Apple veteran, will shift his responsibilities to several other Apple executives. Most notably, Eddy Cue, the head of Apple's Internet services, will take over development of Siri and maps, two efforts Mr. Forstall oversaw that have been widely criticized for their reliability and accuracy.

Apple said in a news release that the management changes would “encourage even more collaboration” at the company. Mr. Forstall will leave Apple next year and serve as an advisor to Tim Cook, the chief executive, in the meantime.

Jony Ive, the head of Apple's industrial design, will take on more software responsibilities by providing more “leadership and direction for Human Interface,” Apple said. Craig Federighi, who was previously in charge of Apple's Mac software development, will also lead development of iOS, the software for iPads and iPhones.

The departure of Mr. Browett, who only joined Apple in April to lead its retail operations, followed a number of missteps by him. In August, Apple took the unusual step of apologizing for a plan to cut back on staffing at its stores. Apple said a search for a new head of retail is underway and that the retail team will report directly to Mr. Cook.

Killing the Computer to Save It

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Peter G. Neumann

MENLO PARK, Calif. - Many people cite Albert Einstein's aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast.

Peter G. Neumann on Cyber Security Close Video See More Videos '

CONCEPT: Peter G. Neumann, about 12 years ago, at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation's leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems' nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” - that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory.

“I've been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don't want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

An Early Voice for Security

Dr. Neumann, who left Bell Labs and moved to California as a single father with three young children in 1970, has occupied the same office at SRI for four decades. Until the building was recently modified to make it earthquake-resistant, the office had attained notoriety for the towering stacks of computer science literature that filled every cranny. Legend has it that colleagues who visited the office after the 1989 earthquake were stunned to discover that while other offices were in disarray from the 7.1-magnitude quake, nothing in Dr. Neumann's office appeared to have been disturbed.

A trim and agile man, with piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Dr. Neumann has practiced tai chi for decades. But his passion, besides computer security, is music. He plays a variety of instruments, including bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, and is active in a variety of musical groups. At computer security conferences it has become a tradition for Dr. Neumann to lead his colleagues in song, playing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer.

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry, though one of dubious competence, and safeguarding the nation's computerized critical infrastructure has taken on added urgency. President Obama cited it in the third debate of the presidential campaign, focusing on foreign policy, as something “we need to be thinking about” as part of the nation's military strategy.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Killing the Computer to Save It.

Killing the Computer to Save It

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Peter G. Neumann

MENLO PARK, Calif. - Many people cite Albert Einstein's aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast.

Peter G. Neumann on Cyber Security Close Video See More Videos '

CONCEPT: Peter G. Neumann, about 12 years ago, at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation's leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems' nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” - that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory.

“I've been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don't want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

An Early Voice for Security

Dr. Neumann, who left Bell Labs and moved to California as a single father with three young children in 1970, has occupied the same office at SRI for four decades. Until the building was recently modified to make it earthquake-resistant, the office had attained notoriety for the towering stacks of computer science literature that filled every cranny. Legend has it that colleagues who visited the office after the 1989 earthquake were stunned to discover that while other offices were in disarray from the 7.1-magnitude quake, nothing in Dr. Neumann's office appeared to have been disturbed.

A trim and agile man, with piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Dr. Neumann has practiced tai chi for decades. But his passion, besides computer security, is music. He plays a variety of instruments, including bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, and is active in a variety of musical groups. At computer security conferences it has become a tradition for Dr. Neumann to lead his colleagues in song, playing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer.

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry, though one of dubious competence, and safeguarding the nation's computerized critical infrastructure has taken on added urgency. President Obama cited it in the third debate of the presidential campaign, focusing on foreign policy, as something “we need to be thinking about” as part of the nation's military strategy.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Killing the Computer to Save It.

Google Signs Deal With Warner Music Group

Google got one of the key pieces of its digital music puzzle in place over the weekend when it finally signed a deal to bring the catalog of the Warner Music Group - with Green Day, Madonna, Neil Young, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and hundreds of other acts - to its Play store.

The news of the deal was tucked in a Google company blog post on Monday that was mostly about new models of its Nexus phones and tablets. But for Google's music service, which has struggled to gain traction against iTunes, Amazon and the myriad of other digital services, it is an important step. It means that Google's millions of Android users - whose devices do not have iTunes - will finally have an essentially complete catalog of MP3s to buy.

“We're now working with all of the major record labels globally, and all the major U.S. magazine publishers, as well as many independent labels, artists and publishers,” wrote Andy Rubin, the company's senior vice president for mobile and digita l content.

Google also announced in its blog post that its music store will open in Western Europe on Nov. 13.

In Europe, it will introduce “scan and match,” a crucial feature for cloud music. It matches songs on a customer's computer to a master database on Google's servers, allowing users to skip the laborious task of uploading every single song. (The feature will not be ready in the United States until “soon after” its introduction in Europe on Nov. 13, Mr. Rubin wrote.

Warner controls about 15 percent of the world's recorded music market, according to the trade publication Music & Copyright. But it was absent when Google announced its MP3 store last November; Warner was also the last of the big record labels to sign a deal with Spotify, the digital music service.

In March, Google consolidated its MP3 store, along with the Android app marketplace and stores for movies, television and magazines, under the Play umbrella. Its branding efforts included a truck that gave out free ice cream at the Celebrate Brooklyn concerts in New York this summer.

On Instagram, 10 Photos a Second of #sandy

As Hurricane Sandy churns its way through the Atlantic, those in its path are turning to their smartphones, and specifically Instagram, to document and share their experiences. Their output runs the gamut, from shocking to silly.

People are posting shots of deserted city centers, waterlogged streets, self-portraits in scuba gear and images borrowed from the apocalyptic film “The Day After Tomorrow.”

The easiest way to see many of the storm-related photos is through a site called Instacane that is pulling together all images that are tagged with terms like “Sandy” and “hurricane.”

The site, according to Instagram, was originally created by two developers named Peter Ng and Chris Ackermann. It was first set up last August as a way to collect images related to Hurricane Irene.

Last winter, people used Instagram to capture the blizzard that blanketed parts of the country, revealing a kaleidoscoped view of the storm, parsed into thousa nds of vantage points. But the service has grown tremendously over the last year, pushing past 100 million users and billions of photographs.

Kevin Systrom, the founder and chief executive of Instagram, said via e-mail that there were 10 pictures per second tagged with “sandy” flowing through the service. In total, more than 230,000 images are using that hashtag - but there could be more related to the storm.

“Most are images of people prepping for the storm and images of scenes outdoors,” Mr. Systrom said. “I think this demonstrates how Instagram is quickly becoming a useful tool to see the world as it happens â€" especially for important world events like this.”

Instagram has played a role in other news events lately. Last month, an Instagram user saw, and photographed, an attempted suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge. And during the shooting at the Empire State Building in August, some of the first photographs from the scene appeared on Insta gram. Although both instances prompted controversy online, Instagram and services like it feel especially valuable in an era when news is not always delivered first by the television but through social networks and the people on them.

Like Apple, Google\'s Android Devices Now Come in Three Sizes

With the addition of the iPad Mini, Apple now offers touchscreen devices in three different sizes. And now its competitor Google is doing the same, introducing a 10-inch tablet, an upgraded 7-inch tablet and a new smartphone.

Introduced Monday, the Nexus 10, which Google developed with LG, is the company's first tablet that competes directly with Apple's 9.7-inch iPad. Most significantly, it undercuts the iPad's price: A Nexus 10 with Wi-Fi and 16 gigabytes of storage costs $400, compared to $500 for an equivalent iPad. Google did not say whether a model with cellular data would be available.

Also developed with LG, Google's Nexus 4 smartphone has a 4.7-inch screen and wireless charging capability. Google highlighted its new camera software, called Photo Sphere, which allows you to snap a picture up and down in different directions and stitch them together into a 360-degree view. (For comparison, the iPhone 5 has a 4-inch screen and camera software that allow s you to create a panoramic photo by panning left or right.) The phone starts at $200 with a T-Mobile contract, or $300 unlocked without a contract.

Google also upgraded its Nexus 7 tablet, which was introduced earlier this year, to include a cellular data connection called HSPA+, which is the predecessor to the newest cell technology, 4G LTE. The model with HSPA+ and 32 GB of storage costs $300, and it's compatible with AT&T's network.

All the devices include Google's latest Android software, 4.2 Jelly Bean. Among its features, Jelly Bean includes Google Now, a personal assistant that keeps track of your searches to do things like display the score of your favorite sports team, or keep you up to date on the status of your flight.

Daily Report: Cracking the Code on Mobile Ads

As more of us have access to the Internet and apps through our cellphones and tablets, advertisers are looking for new ways to reach us there, Claire Cain Miller reports in Monday's New York Times.

Some mobile ads remain just miniature versions of ads on Web sites, an echo of the early days of the Internet, when advertisers essentially slapped print ads online. But increasingly, advertisers are tailoring ads to phones by taking advantage of elements like their ability to track location, make a call, show maps with directions and add calendar alerts.

The stakes are significant for an industry that is still finding its way in the mobile world. Advertisers will spend a relatively small amount of money on ads on phones and tablets this year - $2.6 billion, according to eMarketer, less than 2 percent of the amount they will spend over all. Yet that is more than triple what they spent in 2010.

“An ever-growing percentage of our ad buy is mobile because that's where the consumer is,” said Chris McCann, president of 1-800-Flowers.com, which has run mobile ads urging people to call or walk into a nearby store. “It's the future for us.”

Coming up with ads that exploit the smaller mobile screen requires inventiveness from many parties: advertisers; digital publishers like Google, Apple and Facebook that sell ad space; and mobile ad networks like Millennial Media.

“What we're trying to do is think about the on-the-go user,” said Jason Spero, leader of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, which dominates advertising online and is far and away the leader in mobile advertising. “What does that user want when she's sitting in a cafe or walking down the street?”

Refusing to Give Credit Where Credit Is, Perhaps, Due

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was a reassuring presence over the weekend, keeping New Yorkers informed about preparations for the approaching storm in his characteristically no-drama, we'll-get-through-this voice.

But any mayor would have done what he did in the crisis. So why give him credit?

Does that sound harsh? It does to our own ears. But we're simply applying the same standard that Mr. Bloomberg uses for other leaders. He has a way of finding them unworthy of praise for even their most critical decisions.

This tendency is reinforced by the publication of an interview with him in the new issue of The Atlantic magazine. In an eyebrow-arching exchange, the mayor was asked if President Obama deserved credit for ordering the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year.

No way, he replied.

“That's like giving Harry Truman credit for dropping the bomb: any president would've pushed that button, any president w ould've dropped the bomb,” Mr. Bloomberg said. He was referring, of course, to the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan to speed the end of World War II - first on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, then on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Japan announced its readiness to surrender on Aug. 15.

As cosmic decisions go, hitting your enemy with the most devastating weapon known to humankind would seem at the top of the list. (Whether one should get “credit” for it is an argument best left for another time.) But Mr. Bloomberg was more impressed by other actions taken by President Truman. Not every leader, he said, would have relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur of command during the Korean War or integrated the Army or approved the Marshall Plan to help rebuild a war-shattered Europe.

“But dropping the bomb, no,” he said, “and I don't think, in this case, Osama bin Laden.”

The evidence shows, though, that not every president would have surely ordered the Navy SEALs ra id that sent Bin Laden to wherever he is now. President George W. Bush had no such mission on his radar, and in 2007 Mitt Romney said, “It's not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” He did add, however, that he supported going after the entire “Islamic jihad movement.”

Even at the highest ranks of the Obama administration, some had doubts about the operation, including whether Bin Laden was in the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that was the target. This was hardly a gimme, said Mark Bowden, author of a new book called “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden” (Atlantic Monthly Press).

“It seems to me a lot of presidents might have been more inclined to take the less risky option of firing a missile or, in the case of Vice President Biden, waiting until they had more information to be certain the target was really Bin Laden,” Mr. Bowden told Azi Paybarah, a senior writer for the We b site Capital New York. “President Obama made the decision to take the riskiest course.”

He called Mr. Bloomberg's remarks “kind of small-minded,” adding that “any fair-minded person, it seems to me, would give Obama credit for having handled this well.”

As for whether anyone sitting in the White House would have dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, that is certainly questionable. (For that matter, so is the matter of whether the bombings alone hastened the end of combat. Some historians are inclined to credit the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan on Aug. 8, 1945.)

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman's successor as president, said he'd been informed about bomb preparations in July 1945, when he was supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that he had told the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, that he had “grave misgivings.” Among his reasons, he said, was “my belief that Japan was alre ady defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Even the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, on its Web site, says that while Truman chose the nuclear course, he had “many alternatives at his disposal to ending the war.” Clearly implied is that other leaders might have decided differently.

So as eager as we are to credit Mr. Bloomberg for his calm handling of preparations for Hurricane Sandy, it's hard to see how to do so and stay true to the test of leadership that he himself set.

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com

Steal a Penny, Steal a Wish?

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sept. 23. While resting on a bench in the newish Roman wing, I overheard a young, harried mom say to her three young daughters, “Do not take money out of the fountain.”

Guess she didn't want any wishes disappearing.

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.

They Know Where You\'re Throwing Those Birds

Data-Gathering via Apps Presents a Gray Legal Area

BERLIN - Angry Birds, the top-selling paid mobile app for the iPhone in the United States and Europe, has been downloaded more than a billion times by devoted game players around the world, who often spend hours slinging squawking fowl at groups of egg-stealing pigs.

While regular players are familiar with the particular destructive qualities of certain of these birds, many are unaware of one facet: The game possesses a ravenous ability to collect personal information on its users.

When Jason Hong, an associate professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, surveyed 40 users, all but two were unaware that the game was storing their locations so that they could later be the targets of ads.

“When I am giving a talk about this, some people will pull out their smartphones while I am still speaking and erase the game,” Mr. Hong, an expert in mobile application privacy, said during an interview. “Generally, most people are simply unaware of what is going on.”

What is going on, according to experts, is that applications like Angry Birds and even more innocuous-seeming software, like that which turns your phone into a flashlight, defines words or delivers Bible quotes, are also collecting personal information, usually the user's location and sex and the unique identification number of a smartphone. But in some cases, they cull information from contact lists and pictures from photo libraries.

As the Internet goes mobile, privacy issues surrounding phone apps have moved to the front lines of the debate over what information can be collected, when and by whom. Next year, more people around the world will gain access to the Internet through mobile phones or tablet computers than from desktop PCs, according to Gartner, the research group.

The shift has brought consumers into a gray legal area, where existing privacy protections have failed to keep up with technology. The move to mobile has set off a debate between privacy advocates and online businesses, which consider the accumulation of personal information the backbone of an ad-driven Internet.

In the United States, the data collection practices of app makers are loosely regulated, if at all; some do not even disclose what kind of data they are collecting and why. Last February, the California attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, reached an agreement with six leading operators of mobile application platforms that they would sell or distribute only mobile apps with privacy policies that consumers could review before downloading.

In announcing the voluntary pact with Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Research in Motion, whose distribution platforms make up the bulk of the American mobile app market, Ms. Harris noted that most mobile apps came without privacy policies.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” Ms. Harris said at the time.

But simple disclosure, in itself, is often insufficient.

The makers of Angry Birds, Rovio Entertainment of Finland, discloses its information collection practices in a 3,358-word policy posted on its Web site. But as with most application makers around the world, the terms of Rovio's warnings are more of a disclaimer than a choice.

The company advises consumers who do not want their data collected or ads directed at them to visit the Web site of its analytics firm, Flurry, and to list their details on two industry-sponsored Web sites. But Rovio notes that some companies do not honor the voluntary lists.

As a last resort, Rovio cautions those who want to avoid data collection or ads simply to move on: “If you want to be certain that no behaviorally targeted advertisements are not displayed to you, please do not use or access the services.”

Despite multiple requests by phone and Internet over five days, Rovio did not respond to questions.

Policy practices like Rovio's often do little to inform consumers. Most people simply click through privacy permissions without reading them, said Mr. Hong, the Carnegie Mellon professor. His institute is developing a software tool called App Scanner that aims to help consumers identify what types of information an application is collecting and for what likely purpose.

In Europe, lawmakers in Brussels are planning to bring Web businesses for the first time under stringent data protection rules and to give consumers new legal powers, the better to control the information that is being collected on them.

Proposed revisions to the European Union's General Data Protection regulation now before the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament would require Web businesses to get explicit consent from consumers to collect data. A proposal would also give consumers the ability to choose what information an app can store on them without losing the ability to use the software.

But the drafting of the revisions, which are not expected until late 2013 at the earliest, has set off a concerted lobbying battle by global technology companies, most of which are based in the United States, to weaken the consent requirements, which could undermine the advertising-
financed business models that drive many free applications.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 29, 2012, on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Data-Gathering via Apps Presents a Gray Legal Area.

Disruptions: You Know You Can\'t Live Without Apple\'s Latest Glass Rectangle

Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president for marketing, strode across the stage of the California Theater in San Jose last week trumpeting the virtues of new Apple products. As he caressed the side of the latest iMac personal computer, he noted how thin it was - five millimeters, 80 percent thinner than the last one. Then he said, with an air of surprise, as if he'd just thought of it: “Isn't it amazing how something new makes the previous thing instantly look old?”

Umm, yes, Mr. Schiller, you design your products that way. It's part of a plan that Apple has perfected. How else can the company beguile people into replacing their perfectly fine iPhone, iPad, iMac and iEverything else year after year?

In the past, electronics makers could convince consumers that the design was different, because it actually was. The first iMac, for example, was a blue bubble. Then it looked like a desk lamp, and now it's a rectangular sheet of glass with the electronics hid den behind it. The iPod designs changed, too, over time, before they became progressively smaller sheets of glass.

In the last few years, consumer electronics have started to share one characteristic, no matter who makes them: they're all rectangles. Now, companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google need to persuade consumers to buy new rectangles once a year.

“This phenomenon happened to the TV manufacturers a few years ago. They all started to look the same: flat panels on a wall,” said Donald A. Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things.” The consequences for manufacturers were disastrous. “Customers no longer had to buy the higher-end Sony model; instead, they could get the cheaper, Chinese one,” Mr. Norman said. “This is what today's companies are scared of. Turn off the screen on a smartphone or tablet and they look identical. They're just rectangles.”

Each year, Apple and other companies seem to put those rectangles in a vise, flatten them slightly, alter the exterior dimensions and showcase them as the next big, or little, thing.

This wasn't always the case. As a child I remember exploring my father's Minolta film camera - a camera from the mid-1950s that was given to him by his father. Although film cameras are now for the most part obsolete, you can bet that camera can still take 36 pictures without a hitch.

Yet can you imagine, 10 years from now, someone handing a child an iPad Mini, the latest Apple gadget? They would scoff, just as people do today when they see an older - two or three years old - version of the iPhone.

There is a term for all of this: “planned obsolescence,” which was popularized in the 1950s by Brooks Stevens, an industrial designer who specialized in making new cars. Briskly adopted by postwar consumer goods industries, the strategy coaxed Americans to sell their 1955 Cadillacs for the 1956 Cadillacs with their pronounced tail fins, and then the 1957s with even more exaggerated fins, and then '58s, '59s and so on.

Mr. Stevens's term was often misinterpreted as meaning things were designed to fall apart on a regular schedule. But he believed that true upgrades and design changes would make people want to buy the latest thing. That still holds true in this era, when consumers are supposedly wary of the hucksterism of manufacturers. If you don't upgrade to the latest iPhone or iPad, you fear you may look dated and clueless, even though the rational part of your brain says, “This is a perfectly fine, useful device.”

Consumer electronics companies, Mr. Norman noted, have adopted the same marketing techniques the automobile industry perfected decades ago. “This is an old-time trick - they're not inventing anything new,” he said. “Yet it's to the detriment of the consumer and the environment, but perhaps to the betterment of the stockholder.”

He added: “For Apple, you forgot the other trick : change the plugs!” While the rest of the electronics industry has adopted micro-USB ports, Apple just changed the proprietary ports and plugs on all of its latest devices - laptops, iPads and iPhones included.

Even so, my first iPod still plays music. My laptop from four years ago can still browse the Web. And my first e-readers can still display books.

It seems some consumers are starting to feel upgrade fatigue. There is no lift in PC sales, and people are owning them longer. A report by Recon Analytics, a market research firm, found that people around the globe were waiting longer to buy new mobile phones. In 2007, Americans upgraded their phones every 18.7 months on average; three years later, that number had stretched to 21.1 months. In Finland, people now wait 74.5 months to upgrade, compared with 41.8 months in 2007.

Maybe Mr. Schiller's comment about the iMac isn't how consumers see it anymore. Instead, people are starting to realize that these upgraded products are simply flatter rectangles that don't really offer much more than the last model. Just like the tail fins on the '56 Cadillac.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Transit Shutdown Under Way for Second Time in History

What was once without precedent will now happen for the second time in 14 months: New York City's transit system is going dark.

But while the shutdown before Tropical Storm Irene last year began at noon on a Saturday - and the restoration of subway service began before the Monday workday - the suspension of subway, bus, and railroad service this time could prove particularly disruptive.

Joseph J. Lhota, the authority's chairman, suggested that the city could be without most of its transit system for two full weekdays. By Wednesday, he hoped, some service might be restored.

The subways will begin suspending service at 7 p.m. on Sunday, but some buses could remain on the road until 9 p.m. It takes about eight hours to shut down the subway system, but the bus system requires only six hours to close.

Emergency preparations began at the transit agency well before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's announcement of the closings on Sunday morning.

The authority's hurricane plan calls for service to be suspended if sustained winds reach 39 miles per hour. Thousands of buses and subway cars have already been removed from service and moved to safe locations. Flood-prone subway yards and depots have been cleared, and stations in vulnerable areas, like Lower Manhattan, will be evacuated.

The authority said that “critical track-level components” were being removed from beneath the river tubes to protect the materials from the corrosive effects of salt water in the event of flooding.

On Metro-North Railroad, equipment was to be removed from low-lying areas like the east end of a New Haven yard in Connecticut and the Highbridge and Mott Haven yards in the Bronx. Some trucks, cranes, bulldozers and other equipment were being moved to higher ground. Plans included bringing trains into Grand Central Terminal for shelter.

Some wooden crossing gates were also removed and secured on both Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.

Riders were warned that a suspension of service did not imply that power would be cut to the third rail or overhead wires.

The authority's paratransit service, Access-A-Ride, suspended its outbound trips at noon on Sunday; return trips were expected to continue until 5 p.m.

The authority said the Staten Island Railway would continue operations for as long as the Staten Island Ferry was in service, if conditions permitted, so that no riders would be stranded at the ferry terminal.

The authority's bridges will close to all traffic if sustained winds reach 60 miles per hour. Required slowdowns are likely be put in place if winds exceed 39 m.p.h.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that PATH train service would be suspended beginning at 12:01 a.m. Monday until further notice.

Operations remained normal at local airports, the agency said, but travelers were encouraged to check with their airlines.

Though Mr. Lhot a expressed optimism about restoring service by Wednesday, a return to normal operations is likely to come in fits and starts.

A little over 24 hours after subway, bus, and rail service was suspended for Tropical Storm Irene, some limited bus service returned. About 14 hours after that, the subways began running. Commuter railroad service was restored on a line-by-line basis. Some of them required substantial cleanup of debris and mudslides, and others waited on power to be restored.

I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough

I.B.M. scientists are reporting progress in a chip making technology that is likely to ensure the shrinking of the size of the basic digital switch at the heart of modern microchips for more than another decade.

The advance, first described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, is based on carbon nanotubes, exotic molecules that have long held out promise as an alternative material to silicon from which to create the tiny logic gates that are now used by the billions to create microprocessors and memory chips. The I.B.M. researchers at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have been able to pattern an array of carbon nanotubes on the surface of a silicon wafer and use them to build chips that are hybrids of silicon and carbon nanotubes with more than 10,000 working transistors.

Against all expectations, the silicon chip has continued to improve in both speed and capacity for the last five decades. In recent decades, however, there has been growing uncertainty over whether the technology will continue to improve. The end of the microelectronics era would inevitably stall a growing array of industries that have fed off the falling cost and increasing performance of computer chips.

Chip makers have routinely doubled the number of transistors that can be etched on the surface of silicon wafers by routinely shrinking the size of the tiny switches that store and route the ones and zeroes that are processed by digital computers. They have long since shrunk the switches to less than a wavelength of light, and they are rapidly approaching dimensions that can be measured in terms of the widths of just handfuls of atoms.

The process has been characterized as Moore's Law, named after Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, who in 1965 noted that the industry was doubling the number of transistors it could build on a single chip at routine intervals of 12 to 18 months. To continue the process, semiconduct or engineers have had to consistently perfect an array of related manufacturing systems and materials that continue to perform at ever-more Lilliputian scale.

The I.B.M. advance is significant, scientists said, because the chip making industry has not yet found a way forward beyond the next two or three generations of silicon.

“This is terrific. I'm really excited about this,” said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor who specializes in carbon nanotube materials. The promise of the new material, he said is that not only will carbon nanotubes allow chip makers to build smaller transistors, but it is likely they will turn off and on more quickly as well.

In recent years, while chip makers have continued to double the number of transistors on microprocessors and memory chips, their performance, measured as “clock speed,” has largely stalled. This has forced the computer industry to change its design and begin building more parallel computers. Today, even smartphone microprocessors come with as many as four processors, or “cores,” which are used to break up tasks so they can be processed simultaneously.

I.B.M. scientists said they believed that once they have perfected the use of carbon nanotubes sometime after the end of this decade, it will be possible to dramatically raise the speed of future chips as well as dramatically increase the number of transistors.

This year, I.B.M. researchers published a separate paper describing the speedup made possible by the new material.

“These devices outperformed any other switches made from any other material, said Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at IBM Research. ”We had suspected this all along, and our device physicists had simulated this, and they showed that we would see a factor of five or more performance improvement over conventional silicon devices.”

Carbon nanotubes are one of three promising te chnologies that engineers hope will be perfected in time to keep the industry on its Moore's Law pace. Graphene is another promising material that is being explored, as well as a variant of the standard silicon transistor, which is known as a tunneling field effect transistor.

However, Dr. Guha said that carbon nanotube materials had more promising performance characteristics and that I.B.M. physicists and chemists had perfected a range of “tricks” to make the materials easier to make.

Carbon nanotubes are essentially single sheets of carbon rolled into nanoscale tubes. In the Nature Nanotechnology paper, the I.B.M. researchers described how they were able to place ultra-small rectangles of the material in regular arrays by placing them in a soapy mixture that makes them soluble in water. They used a process they described as “chemical self-assembly” to create the patterned array in which the nanotubes stick in some areas of the surface while other areas are left untouched.

Perfecting the process will require a more highly purified form of the carbon nanotube material. Less pure forms are metallic and are not good semiconductors, Dr. Guha said.

He said that Bell Labs scientists figured out ways to purify germanium, a metal in the carbon group, chemically similar to silicon, in the 1940s to make the first transistors, and he was confident that I.B.M. scientists would be able to make 99.99 percent pure carbon nanotubes in the future.