What Cellphone Carriers Say About Hurricane Recovery

Three days into the aftermath of Sandy, wireless service is still lacking in parts of New York City and other hard-hit areas, according to people living in those areas. The carriers have been struggling to keep their services running, mostly because of the loss of power. But they say they have been making progress. Here's what they have to report.

Verizon Wireless said its network improved a bit. On Thursday, its corporate spokesman, Thomas Pica, said 96 percent of its network “from Maine to Virginia” was operating, up from 94 percent on Wednesday.

While that looks like a great number, Verizon is describing the whole Northeast, even the areas that didn't have network problems to begin with. Another way to look at those numbers: 4 percent of Verizon's cell sites are not operating in the Northeast, down from 6 percent Wednesday. Between Wednesday and Thursday, Verizon shrank the portion of its network that was not operating by 33 percent. The company's state ment:

In terms of our network, we have seen continued improvement overnight with now more than 96 percent of our cell sites in service and serving our customers in the impacted area, including some of the hardest hit areas of the Northeast.

Verizon Wireless continues to deploy its mobile disaster recovery and emergency network assets, including cell sites on wheels and mobile generators, to fortify our network throughout the Northeast where telecommunications infrastructure, utility/power and/or flood damage are issues.

AT&T made a vague statement about its progress in troubled areas and declined to provide statistics. But it said it had made an agreement with Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, to roll out RVs where people can charge their phones. Mr. Bloomberg has said AT&T would also provide satellite hot spots to shore up its network, although the details on that are not yet clear. AT&T's statement:

Di saster response teams from AT&T are fully engaged and making progress in restoring wireless and wireline services in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. The company is closely aligned with state and local officials and emergency response teams, monitoring service disruptions and coordinating our restoration efforts.

The vast majority of our cell sites in the Northeast are online and working. We are making progress in areas that were especially hard-hit, including New York City and New Jersey, where flooding, power loss, transportation and debris all pose challenges. We are working around the clock, including conducting ongoing damage assessment, rapid deployment of generators and equipment, and movement of key personnel from around the region and country, such as engineers and technicians, in order to restore service as quickly as possible.

Sprint was clearer about the status of its network, specifically in troubled areas, saying 25 percent of its net work was still down in New York City. It said on Wednesday night that it had made improvements but still faces challenges.

We have made significant progress in restoring service to our customers across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern U.S., but our biggest obstacle remains obtaining backhaul connections and commercial power. In New York City, for example, we have restored service to approximately three-quarters of our network, but challenges remain in parts of Manhattan most severely impacted by the storm.

T-Mobile USA, too, had some details. It said on Wednesday night that 15 percent of its network in New York City was down, and that in Staten Island 20 percent was still down.

When Cell Phone Chips Rule Data Centers

We are impatient creatures, but this week it was useful to look at products that will not be on the market until 2014. They involve low-power chips based on designs from ARM, useful in large data centers as well as mobile devices.

Previously, ARM designs were not as computationally capable as mainstream chips from Intel, in part because they run on 32-bit instruction sets, not the 64-bit lines that more effectively uses memory. This week, however, ARM and its manufacturing partners announced a 64-bit design.

You'll see the first impacts in places like Facebook and Amazon, but you'll see lots more uses after that, in the data centers of banks and e-commerce companies, which will use more servers that are less costly to run. There are a lot of business applications which now run on 64-bit Intel processors, and they can more easily be adapted to the new ARM design.

That, in turn, is likely to mean more powerful chips in lots of consumer devices, as scale ma kes the chips cheaper, and people want personal machines that run along similar designs.

“We start with an assumption that all of our chips are going to end up in $20 phones” eventually, said Warren East, the president of ARM. “Every new low-end phone replaces something with less sophistication.”

Mr. East said phones using the advanced chips could have three times their current battery life. He also foresaw other chips being used in devices like thermostats and washing machines, which are increasingly connected to the Internet.

Last November, Hewlett-Packard announced it was building a server based on ARM-designed processors. Even at 32 bits, low-power chips were attractive for computer servers that are stacked by the thousands for simple back-and-forth movements of data, like in social media and e-commerce.

On Monday, chip maker AMD said it will be making a 64-bit processor, which it would put into the small, low-power “microservers” made by SeaMicro, a company it purchased earlier this year.

The market, said Rory Read, the chief executive of AMD, is large data centers, video distributors, and Big Data analysis firms.

“These are areas of the market with double-digit growth,” he said. Consumer devices like personal computers, which use AMD's variants of the Intel x86 processor “will continue to sell, but not at high growth.” He indicated that AMD is also looking at putting the ARM design into consumer devices.

Intel, which makes low-power chips of its own, would not use an ARM design, Mr. Read said. “They like the status quo,” he said.

Other chip makers besides AMD that are adopting the 64-bit chip design include Broadcom, which among other things supplies chips to a high-end server maker called Arista; Calxeda ,which supplies the H.P. server; Samsung, Intel's top competitor in terms of volume; HiSilicon, the former chip unit of Huawei; and STMicroelectronics.

“We try to create an environment where people can sell more chips,” said ARM's Mr. East. “We have used that model with handset manufacturers, now we're applying it more widely. This isn't just about servers, or devices. It's about the network infrastructure that is on street corners. It is in everything.”

Microsoft\'s Plan to Sell Answers

Microsoft may be looking at its ventures into machine learning as providing more than just better features for products. They may be a way to transform itself, and many other companies too.

I wrote an article in The New York Times this week that said Microsoft's 100 top managers had been told to think of ways their businesses could incorporate machine learning - which is the engineering of algorithms that analyze textual, behavioral and sensor data, and then try to form patterns and predictions. It is at the heart of the Bing search engine, but has many other potential applications, including better logistics planning, the organization of a calendar or the design of a marketing campaign.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, sees machine learning as a potential means to create entirely new businesses within the company.

Microsoft, he said, “historically sold the software itself, and now in the cloud and services business we'r e not selling you the software, we're selling you a service that the software creates.” By adding machine learning, he explained, “what you could sell to people are answers to things.”

Those answers could be uniquely valuable if they drew from Microsoft's own data resources, culled from assets like Bing, the Windows Azure cloud computing platform and Skype, he said.

“We might have unique capabilities in terms of I.Q., algorithmic capability and infrastructure that the average company wouldn't otherwise have,” Mr. Mundie said. “We may be able to produce an answer to a question that people otherwise can't produce. And to the extent you can do that, it could become another product.”

Microsoft is already headed toward the answers business by increasing the capabilities of tools it offers. The next version of its Excel spreadsheet program, the world's most popular data analysis tool, will be able to incorporate large volumes of new data obtained in real time, from both outside sources and the data sold on Microsoft's Azure Marketplace.

“There is not going to be another enterprise application created from this day forward that does not have some amount of intelligence that's been gained by reasoning over large amounts of data,” said Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft's server and tools business.

“Right now, most enterprises will come to us and say, ‘We have a risk management problem,' or, ‘We have an exploration simulation problem,'” Mr. Nadella said. Microsoft could, he said, maintain a set of algorithms in the Azure Marketplace that customers could rent as needed to solve these problems.

The next step, offering people insight into the type of data they might want, will involve educating them in the tools and skills they should draw from. This may be among the greatest challenges for the business, given the typical mind-set of most businesses.

“There is a class of people called enterprise data warehouse zealots,” said David Campbell, who leads development of Microsoft's SQL Server, which is the basis for many other Microsoft products, like SharePoint. “They have this notion of one version of the truth, that nothing is of consequence unless it's in their enterprise data warehouse.”

In the world of Big Data, however, truth tends to be contingent, based on the needs of the moment and the data at hand. Data on the speed with which an online order is filled means one thing to a marketing person, looking to maximize customer satisfaction, another to a security professional trying to stop fraud, and a third to a network engineer trying to balance resources. “In this new world,” Mr. Campbell said, “there are multiple versions of the truth.”

Different versions will come from “the customer's information, with information that we have,” he said. “We're one of the few entities on the planet that has a fresh snapshot of the Web, and represents all sorts of online and social activity every day. To be able to join these things in interesting ways to answer a bunch of questions is very, very interesting.”

Left unanswered is whether Microsoft's managers, who are largely hard-core engineers schooled in certainty, can adapt themselves to the products that Mr. Mundie and Mr. Campbell see the company selling. Or for that matter, whether they can accept an uncertain world, bounded mostly by contingency.

Romney and Obama Campaigns Leaking Web Site Visitor Data

The presidential campaign sites BarackObama.com and MittRomney.com have recently ratcheted up their use of third-party Web trackers. These are companies, like ad networks and data brokers working on behalf of the campaigns, that collect information about users' online activities in order to show political ads to people tailored to their own interests and beliefs.

Spokesmen for each campaign have separately said that their own campaign has put safeguards in place to protect that user data, as Charles Duhigg and I reported in an article published in The New York Times on October 28.

But now a new study by Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student in computer science and law at Stanford University, reports that both sites are leaking information about site visitors to a number of third-party trackers operating on their pages.

Several pages on the Obama site included a user's personal information in the page title at the top of the page or in the URL address, Mr. M ayer said, thereby giving third parties operating on the site the opportunity to collect identifying data. The information flowing to third parties, he said, variously included the username; the proper name under which a person registered; and their street address and ZIP code.

On the Romney site, Mr. Meyer said, he found that a number of pages included the user's name in the page title. Many pages also included a unique numerical ID number in the URL which flowed to third parties, he said.

“Are the campaigns identifying their supporters to third-party trackers? Are they directly undermining the anonymity properties that they are so quick to invoke?” Mr. Meyer wrote in a blog post published on Thursday morning. “Yes, they are.”

Spokesmen for the campaigns did not immediately return e-mails seeking comment.

Mr. Meyer tested the Obama and Romney sites by registering as a user and examining the page codes and layouts that resulted as he visited t he sites.

In registering for the Obama site with his e-mail address, for example, Mr. Mayer found that the site by default assigned him a username that was the first part of his e-mail address. On certain pages on the site, he reported, that username appeared in the URL, thereby sharing part of his e-mail address with ten tracking companies operating on the page. Because many consumers tend to use the same e-mail address or username on many sites, leaking such data could allow third parties to link other public accounts on the Web to individual users, Mr. Mayer said.

Meanwhile, after Mr. Mayer found that the Romney site leaked his member ID number in the URL, he logged out and then immediately tried to access his own information on the site using that ID number - a tactic a third party who collected that data could hypothetically use. When he used that ID number on the site without being logged in, the site showed a message that said “Access Denied.” At the s ame time, he said, the very same “access denied” page leaked more information on that page: the name under which he had registered.

I registered on both campaign sites on Wednesday night and had a similar experience.

The Obama site automatically assigned me a user name -nsinger - taken from my e-mail address that was visible in the URL on various pages. Using a tracker identification program called Ghostery, I found four different trackers that could collect that information.

On the Romney site, certain pages leaked the ID number I had been assigned in the URL. Other pages, I noted, leaked my ZIP code or state in the URL.

Advertising industry executives have long argued that third-party tracking is beneficial to online consumers because it helps brands show relevant digital ads. They also argue the data collection about online consumers is “anonymous” because the third parties do not collect identifying information like people's names and home addresses.

But Mr. Mayer said his study, and previous research by other computer experts, indicated that many sites leak users' personal information to third parties - challenging the claims about “anonymous” data.

“I think that for both campaigns this leakage is likely totally inadvertent,” Mr. Mayer said in a phone interview. “But claiming this tracking data is anonymous just ignores the reality.”

He also took a reporter to task for failing to sufficiently investigate the campaigns' claims about their data protection practices.

“The Gray Lady also deserves a light rap on the knuckles for insufficiently scrutinizing the campaigns' anonymity assertions,” Mr. Mayer wrote.

Point taken.

Daily Report: Apple Shake-Up May Lead to Design Shift

Steven P. Jobs, the Apple chief executive who died a year ago, pushed the company's software designers to use virtual doodads that mimic the appearance and behavior of real-world things, like wooden shelves for organizing newspapers and the page-flipping motion of a book. But the management shake-up that Apple announced on Monday is likely to mean that Apple will shift away from such visual tricks, which many people within the company look down upon, Nick Wingfield and Nick Bilton report in Thursday's New York Times.

As part of the changes, the company fired Scott Forstall, the leader of Apple's mobile software development and a disciple of Mr. Jobs. While Mr. Forstall's abrasive style and resistance to collaboration with other parts of the company were the main factors in his undoing, his removal also represents the departure of the most vocal and high-ranking proponent of the visual design style favored by Mr. Jobs.

The executive who will now set the direct ion for the look of Apple's software is Jonathan Ive, who has long been responsible for Apple's minimalist hardware designs. Mr. Ive, despite his close relationship with Mr. Jobs, has made his distaste for the visual ornamentation in Apple's mobile software known within the company, according to current and former Apple employees who asked not to be named discussing internal matters.

This may seem like little more than an internal disagreement over taste. But Apple venerates design like few other companies of its size, and its customers have rewarded it handsomely as a result. Apple's decisions can influence how millions of people use and think about digital devices - not only its own but those made by other companies that look to Apple as a standard-setter in design.

Axel Roesler, associate professor and chairman of the interaction design program at the University of Washington, says Apple's software designs had become larded with nostalgia, unnecessary visual r eferences to the past that he compared to Greek columns in modern-day architecture. He said he would like to see Mr. Ive take a fresh approach.

“Apple, as a design leader, is not only capable of doing this, they have a responsibility for doing it,” he said. “People expect great things from them.”