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Al Jazeera Wrests Back Its Web Sites From Pro-Assad Hackers

September 5, 2012, 4:35 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Hackers said to be supporters of the Syrian government temporarily took over Web sites of the satellite broadcaster Al Jazeera, which like many other news organizations has been transmitting reports of the fighting in Syria and its violent impact on civilians.

On Tuesday, users who tried to go to Al Jazeera's Arabic and English Web sites were instead directed to an image that said “Hack!!” and “Hacked by Al-Rashedon,” which is an Arabic reference that generally means “the rightly guided” ones, in bold letters across an image of the news organization's page. A Syrian flag waved in the background.

“In response to your stance against Syria (the people and the government), and support for only armed terrorist groups, and publication of news reports that are lies,” the Arabic statement said in part, “this is our response to you.”

On Wednesday, Al Jazeera reported that the cyber attack lasted several hours, by affecting a third-party service provider that distributes the station's online content worldwide in a security breach.

It said the authorities in the United States, where the content distributor is based, were investigating. AlJazeera.net is registered to Network Solutions, whose spokeswoman, Susan Datz Edelman, said she did not have an immediate “definitive” comment.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera, Osama Saeed, said in e-mailed statements: “Some visitors to our Web sites faced disruption after external DNS servers were compromised.”

“The company that operates them quickly resolved this, though some users may continue to experience issues for a couple of days,” he continued. “We th ank our online community for their patience and support.”

In another statement late on Wednesday, he said, “Just to give you a scale of the problem as it stands, we're only around 10 percent lower on our usual number of Web visitors.”

Other news organizations or human rights groups reporting on the conflict have been hacked in protest of their coverage. As The Lede reported last month, the international news agency Reuters temporarily suspended the operation of its blogging platform after its Web site was hacked and false reports of setbacks for Syrian rebels were posted online.

Amnesty International, the human rights organization, was also hacked.

Al Jazeera, based in Doha, Qatar, has aggressively covered the Syrian conflict and the other government upheaval going on in the Middle East for the past few years.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Saeed of Al Jazeera declined to discuss coverage or the possible motive of the hackers.

“We don't know anything about them, and what I understand, there is not much about them in the public domain,” he said.

He said the hacking also affected the organization's Balkans site.



Video of Quebec Gunman\'s Rant After Shooting at Separatist Rally

September 5, 2012, 12:10 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Ian Austen reports, the leader of Canada's separatist Parti Québécois was hustled off stage during a speech after her party's victory in a provincial election Tuesday night when a 62-year-old man opened fire outside the rally, leaving one man dead and another in critical condition.

A Montreal Gazette video report showed the interrupted address by party leader, Pauline Marois, who is in line to become Quebec's first female premier. Before she was forced off stage, the footage shows that Ms. Marois had switched from French to English to assure Quebec's Anglophone minority, “don't worry, your rights will be fully protected. We share the same history and I want us to shape together our c ommon future.”

Video of security guards hustling Pauline Marois, the leader of Canada's separatists Parti Québécois, off stage during a victory speech in Montreal on Tuesday night.

CBC News posted raw video online of the premier's speech being interrupted - just after she had said that the future of Quebec would be as “a sovereign nation” - and of the suspected gunman's arrest.

The footage showed the man, who wore a balaclava and bathrobe, shouting to onlookers and the media, in French, “The English are awakening!” as he was led away by police officers. Switching to English, the suspect warned in obscene terms that there would be “payback.” Before he was bundled into a police car, he added: “gonna make trouble!”

The man was described by the police as a resident of Quebec, but not from Montreal where the shooting took place, The Montreal Gazette rep orts.

Despite the suspected gunman's dark promise of sectarian rage at the election result, which left Ms. Marois's separatist Parti Québécois short of an absolute majority but in position to rule Quebec, there appears to be little prospect of independence for the province in the near future.

As Doug Saunders notes in an analysis of the result for Toronto's Globe and Mail, a poll published last week in Quebec showed that just “28 per cent of voters support full secession” from Canada. That, Mr. Saunders observed, puts Québécois nationalists in a very similar position to Catalans and Scots who are seeking more independence from federal governments but are unable to muster enough support to break away entirely. He writes:

In Catalonia, Scotland and now Quebec, power is held by separatist parties that have little chance of winning a sovereignty referendum in the foreseeable future, but are instead using their electoral mandates to demand i ncreasing devolution of power from the national government.

There's little coincidence in this: In the nine years since the Parti Québécois were last in power, the separatist movements in Canada, Britain and Spain have become increasingly interlinked and motivated by one another's tactics. Their leaders nowadays meet with one another on a regular basis, study one another's slogans and strategies, and celebrate their mutual victories.



Uber Is Coming to Taxis in New York, If Law Allows

New Yorkers have long adopted their own techniques in the fine art of hailing a taxicab, a theatrical, frustrating, competitive ritual of the city.

There is the high-pitched whistle, the two-handed gesticulation, the rapid snapping of fingers. Many favor the classic wave - an open palm raised high, stretching into coming traffic.

And now, a start-up company says it has developed a more efficient option.

Uber, a company based in San Francisco, is introducing a smartphone app to New York that allows available taxi drivers and cab-seeking riders to find one another. The company said the service would begin operating on Wednesday in 105 cabs - a bit less than 1 percent of the city's more than 13,000 yellow cabs. Uber added that it hoped to recruit 100 new drivers each week.

But the program may have a significant problem: Taxi officials say that Uber's service may not be legal since city rules do not allow for prearranged rides in yellow taxis. They also forbid cabbies from using electronic devices while driving and prohibit any unjustified refusal of fares. (Under Uber's policy, once a driver accepts a ride through the app, no other passenger can be picked up.)

Cabbies using the Uber app receive a smartphone loaded with its technology, which tries to predict areas where rides are in high demand. The driver nearest to a requested pickup location receives a notification and is given 15 seconds to respond.

Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive, rejected criticisms that the service violated city rules against prearranged yellow-taxi rides. “Prearrangement means it's basically on behalf of a base,” he said in an interview. “We're not working with a base.”

The city's , which met with Mr. Kalanick on Tuesday, said it had not yet determined whether Uber was in compliance with the guidelines.

In a statement, David S. Yassky, the chairman of the commission, said only that the city had “led the country in terms of putting new technology to work for riders” and noted that the commission was currently requesting proposals for a smartphone-based payment system.

At the meeting, officials raised concerns about a regulatory issue that would prevent Uber from processing credit cards for taxi rides, according to Mr. Kalanick.

Mr. Kalanick said he had agreed to make the app's services available for no charge for the next week, so that riders could “get a taste of the future,” while the two sides try to resolve the regulatory concerns.

Uber is one of several start-ups, like Taxi Magic and GetTaxi, trying to profit by connecting drivers and passengers more efficiently. Another company, Hailo, said it had already registered 2,500 drivers to use a similar service that it planned to unveil in the coming weeks.

“The bottom line is the genie is out of the bottle,” Mr. Kalanick said of the apps. “I think the T.L.C. knows that.”

The influx of apps appears to have created a moment of unity among yellow-taxi, livery and black-car operators, all of whom have raised concerns about the apps' legality. Some industry officials said the commission was not acting forcefully enough; the result, said Avik Kabessa, the chief executive of Carmel Car and Limousine Service and a member of the board of the Livery Roundtable, a group representing livery drivers, is a New York City version of “the Wild West.”

An analysis conducted by the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents yellow-taxi operators, identified what it deemed to be 11 potential violations of taxi guidelines in Uber's model. These included charging a tip automatically, not allowing for cash payments and turning away passengers while being on duty.

Mr. Kalanick has said that Uber can operate while following all relevant rules - noting, among other concerns, that drivers are instructed to use their phones to find passengers only while their cars are parked or legally standing.

Councilman James Vacca, the chairman of the City Council's transportation committee, said that the spread of taxi apps had the potential to create a “two-tiered taxi system” in the city: one for people “with fancy smartphones” who are asked to pay a premium, and one for everybody else.

“As a councilman from the Bronx,” he said, “a disparity like that does concern me.”

Mr. Kalanick said Uber employees had recruited drivers at airports and gas stations. He said the company interviewed each driver and performed background checks.

Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said most drivers she had spoken to were skeptical of the app, though she acknowledged it could prove useful for drivers during a slow night.

At least one driver agreed. Arefin Rashid, the driver who arrived when Mr. Kalanick demonstrated the app on Tuesday, said the service would be especially welcome after a trip outside Manhattan.

“It's going to be a good thing to get fares more quickly,” he said. “I don't have to worry about not having a next passenger.”



Green Party Ad Featuring Bleeped Obscenity Challenges TV Indecency Rules

September 4, 2012, 6:45 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

A political ad for the Green Party featuring the presidential candidate Jill Stein denouncing the major parties in frank terms.

The Green Party won a public-relations battle with Google on Tuesday, forcing the company's television advertising division to book time for a commercial in which its presidential candidate uses a (partly bleeped) obscenity to describe the policies of the major-party candidates.

Google TV Ads, which fills advertising slots for television stations, initially rejected the commercial in an e-mail to the party's ad agency on Monday, citing the use of “inappropriate language” by Jill Stein, the Green nominee. No doubt try ing to avoid violating the Federal Communications Commission's vague standards for what constitutes indecency on television, Google TV Ads instructs clients to “avoid bleeped-out expletives where curse words are still identifiable from the audio.”

In response to that initial rejection, the Green Party called on its supporters to “Tell Google TV Ads Not to Censor Our Ads!” The party argued, “Never mind that these ads already comply with F.C.C. regulations regarding appropriate content, what Google does not seem to understand is that federal law prohibits broadcasters from censoring ads submitted by candidates for public office.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Google TV Ads relented and agreed to pass the ad on to broadcasters in the 11 media markets where the Green Party hopes its message will have the most impact. In an e-mail shared with The Lede by Ben Manski, Ms. Stein's campaign manager, a Google TV Ads employee also asked th at the party “make immediate arrangements to remedy/retract the message” posted on its Web site.

As my colleague Adam Liptak reported in June, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of two broadcasters who had faced potential fines for programs featuring cursing and nudity, the justices “left open the question of whether changes in the media landscape have undermined the rationales for limiting their free-speech rights in ways the First Amendment would not tolerate in other settings.”

According to Mr. Manski, the Green Party ad was primarily intended to be shown on cable and satellite channels, like MSNBC and Comedy Central, which, like the Internet, are not subject to government regulation of objectionable language in the way that words and images broadcast over the airwaves still are.



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