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On Twitter, Steve Jobs Is Immortal

Steve Jobs is gone, but on Twitter his @name lives on. And on.

The chief executive of Apple, who died in 2011, is memorialized on Twitter by about a thousand fans, parodists, traffic seekers, unrepentant haters and crypto-historians, among others. The accounts use his name as either as a title or, with many variations, as an address.

The copycats include @FakeSteveJobs, @FauxSteve and @SteveJobsFalso, a collection of admitted imposters who are following in the footsteps of a parody Web site that was active from 2006 to 2011. Other versions include @RememberSteve, @PulseonJobs and @RealSteveJobs. There are a couple of @BlackSteveJobs, plus Twitter accounts by various articles of clothing and body parts.

Several of the accounts are operated by start-ups hoping to generate attention for themselves. Their tweets contain links to corporate Web pages. Some of the accounts are in languages like Arabic, Thai or Japanese. Many others use Mr. Jobs's name for the a ccount but have a different address.

Searching the name “Steve Jobs” on Twitter yields about 1,080 accounts, some of which are unrelated to the Apple co-founder; there are people on Twitter who are really named Steve Jobs.

Twitter does not keep score of how many of its 140 million accounts are fakes, but it generally supports the idea of parody accounts. “It's very helpful for political dissidents, who can't write under their own name,” said Rachael Horwitz, a company spokeswoman. She also noted that Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, has a parody account. Jack Dorsey, the chairman of the company's board, is likewise roasted.

Possibly for his close identification with technology, Mr. Jobs does appear to be the most popular identity on Twitter to leverage. President Obama has about 600 versions of his name, either through the “@” address, or in the name of the account. Given much of the venom of the recent election, several of these account s are remarkably ugly, certainly worse than the treatment afforded Mr. Jobs. Michelle Obama, who like the president has an official and verified Twitter account, has about 500 copycats.

Bill Gates, Mr. Jobs's longtime nemesis and eventual frenemey, does better than the president and first lady, with about 840 imitators and parodists. There is also a Klingon version of him, which to date Mr. Jobs's name does not appear to share. There also appear to be a lot more people on Twitter who are simply named “Bill Gates,” a characteristic that must fill their lives with a lot of predictable humor.

Justin Beiber gets a mere 240 people hoping for a bit of his lustre. John Lennon, Mr. Jobs' idol, has fewer than 100.

Twitter will take down parody accounts, but usually when they are aimed at private citizens who are being personally harassed, not public figures being lampooned. “It's a form of speech,” Ms. Horwitz said. On the Internet, everyone needs a thicker skin.

There are parody accounts for Oracle's chief executive, Larry Ellison; for Larry Page, the chief executive and co-founder of Google; and for Mark Zuckerberg, the chief of Facebook. With so many parody accounts around, some technology chief executives may worry if they are not being parodied.



Pakistani Girl, Continuing Her Recovery, Reads in Hospital

This undated photo released by Queen Elizabeth Hospital, shows Malala Yousufzai, as she continues her recovery in Birmingham, England.Queen Elizabeth Hospital, via Associated PressThis undated photo released by Queen Elizabeth Hospital shows Malala Yousafzai, as she continues her recovery in Birmingham, England.

The 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by a Taliban attacker because of her activism for girls education has been photographed reading from her hospital bed in England, where she is being treated.

The teenager, Malala Yousafzai, was shot while riding in a school bus on Oct. 9 in the Swat Valley in her home country, after she had become a symbol of resistance against the Taliban by advocati ng access to education for girls. She was later flown to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the Midlands city of Birmingham on Oct. 15, where her family later joined her. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, later said she was recovering at an “encouraging speed.”

Her recovery continued to be followed on Twitter with widespread interest, and online petitions and international events have been initiated in support.

More than 90,000 names had been added to an online petition to nominate Ms. Yousafzai for the Nobel Peace Prize, a movement started by a man living in Canada, Tarek Fatah, who identifies himself on Twitter as an Indian born in Pakistan. Mr. Fatah is a co-founder of the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress.

Another online petition has circulated on the Web site of the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, is calling on Pakistan to agree on a plan to deliver education for every child; for discrimination against girls to be made illegal in all countries; and for international organizations to ensure that the 61 million children who are not in school worldwide are provided an education by the end of 2015.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Mr. Brown's petition will be delivered on S aturday, the day designated by the United Nations as the day of a global support campaign for her.

The U.N.'s Ban Ki-moon talks about Malala Day on Saturday.


Google Is Blocked in China as Party Congress Begins

All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China on Friday night and into Saturday, the company confirmed. The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way.

Traffic to Google sites fell off Friday evening in China, according to Google's Transparency Report, which provides information about traffic worldwide.

The company said it was not having any technical problems, but did not say whether it believed its sites had been blocked by the government or were the victims of hacking.

“We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end,” said Christine Chen, a Google spokeswoman.

Despite great fanfare, China's Party Congress takes place under wraps. Reporters are not allowed in, and in the days preceding the event, the government has imposed restrictions ranging from replacing books in bookstores to banning balloons because they could carry messages of protest.

Internet speeds have also slowed, while Chinese citizens have been satirizing the meeting online.

The block on Google sites appears to be the latest in a long pattern of increasingly sophisticated Internet censorship by the Chinese government. It comes two weeks after China blocked Web access to The New York Times, following an article about its prime minister's family wealth.

Google has had a particularly strained relationship with China. In 2010, the company said it had been the victim of serious hacking attacks coming from China. In response, it removed its Chinese language search engine from China and began redirecting traffic to the Hong Kong version of the search engine.

YouTube, Google's video site, has been blocked in China since 2009. And Gmail has been partially blocked at various times, beginning around the time of the Arab Spring.



Video of Emotional Obama Thanking Staff Is Last Act of Social Media Campaign

As my colleague Michael Shear reports, video of President Obama tearing up as he thanked his campaign staff on Wednesday in Chicago was quickly viewed more than a million times on YouTube.

Video of President Obama thanking his campaign team in Chicago on Wednesday was sent by e-mail to his supporters on Thursday night.

A link to the video was sent to Obama supporters by e-mail on Thursday night, one day after a celebratory update on the president's @BarackObama Twitter feed became the most popular tweet in the brief history of the social network.

As election post-mortems roll in, some analysts have described Mr. Obama's re-election as a victory for social networking - both the online variety and an older form, of direct appeals to voters in person and through telephone calls - which proved powerful enough to counteract the hundreds of millions of dollars of negative ads that blanketed the airwaves of traditional broadcast media.



Readers Respond: Password Hygiene and Headaches

My article on Thursday about password hygiene prompted many e-mails from readers, some detailing their own struggles with online security, others ready with tips the experts missed.

One reader, Sean Hulbert, e-mailed to say he had spent 20 years in the security industry and occasionally “taunted hackers” to crack his passwords. “To this day, I have not been hacked,” he wrote. His secret? The Alt key.

In addition to the experts' tip that a long passphrase - such as a song lyric or movie quote - should be used instead of a password and using only the first letter or letters of each word in the phrase, Mr. Hulbert said he makes his password stronger by translating the result using the Alt key. For example, assuming the site allows passwords with special characters, he might take this line from the film “The Princess Bride” - “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”- and convert it into the 15 character password: †œHmNiImYkMfPtDie.” Holding down the Alt key (on a Mac) as you type would make that password: Ã"µ˜ˆˆµÁ˚Æ'∏†Îˆ´.

Hack that!

Another reader, Roger Bohl, wrote to say he memorizes the same basic password for every online account but tweaks it for each account by adding two or three letters based on his own simple algorithm. For example, he may start with “HmNiImYkMfPtDie” as his password for every account. Then he may add three or more letters based on the name of the vendor but amended slightly - maybe three letters down from the alphabet. So for Amazon, he may convert Ama to Dpd (“D” being three letters down the alphabet from the letter “A”, “p” being three letters down from “m” and so on) to make it: HmNiImYkMfPtDieDpd. For Chase, it might be: HmNiImYkMfPtDieFkd.

“Not unbreakable,” Mr. Bohl conceded. “But better than using a common password and easier to use than a list - and you don't have to carry it with you.”

Many readers expressed frustration with the suggestion that they needed different passwords for every single site.  “Your suggestion to never use the same password twice is impractical,” wrote Daniel Dunn. “Why not, instead, reuse the same password in contexts where it really doesn't matter if I am hacked?”

Indeed, while many experts advise against it, some concede that they will use a “throwaway” password for sites that do not store personal or financial information, like a recipe forum.

“I use a common browser/e-mail/password combination for what I perceive as low or no risk uses,” wrote Steve Patriquen. “I then ratchet up on complexity of my security based on the escalating risk.”

David Ziegelheim appreciated the tip about using different Web browsers for different Web activities, but thought it could be taken one step further. “It should really be coupled with a recommendation to delete all cookies on a regular basis,” Mr. Ziegelheim wrote. “For a browser dedicated to financial transactions the cookie should be deleted minimally every time the browser is closed.”

Those most critical of the article were - unsurprisingly - password protection software vendors like AgileBits, which sells 1Password software. AgileBits took issue with the fact that both cybersecurity experts cited in the story, Jeremiah Grossman and Paul Kocher, said they did not trust password protection software because they did not write it themselves, and because if their computer is stolen, hackers could access all their passwords.

“There is a very, very small handful of people who can get away with saying that they will only trust a password management system that they build themselves,” the company wrote in a blog post. “You should definitely not trust a password management system that you develop yourself.”

As for what happens to passwords if a computer is stolen, AgileBits said it designed its 1Password software with that possibility in mind. “We've made it very, very difficult for password cracking systems, such as John the Ripper, to recover your Master Password.”

The only people more angered by our password guide than AgileBits were devotees of Bruce Schneier, the security technologist and author.

“I remain skeptical of any article in this space that doesn't quote or at least refer to Bruce Schneier,” one reader wrote on Twitter. (Indeed, it should be noted that Mr. Schneier designed Password Safe, a password management software that, like LastPass, SplashData and AgileBits, stores passwords in an encrypted file that you can unlock with one master password.)

Finally, many readers (and even my editor) said that after hearing about my own harrowing experience with my computer's webcam, they too were now covering their webcam's tape with masking tape.



The Obama Campaign\'s Technology Is a Force Multiplier

Technology doesn't win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon - a force multiplier, in military terms.

Both sides in the presidential contest mined click-stream data as never before to target messages to potential voters. But a real edge for the Obama campaign was in its use of online and mobile technology to support its much-praised ground game, finding potential supporters and urging them to vote, either in person or by phone, according to two senior members of the Obama technology team, Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for the Obama campaign, and Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign.

A program called “Dashboard,” for example, allowed volunteers to join a local field team and get assignments remotely. The Web application - viewable on smartphones or tablets - showed the location of field workers, neighborhoods to be canvassed, and blocks where help was needed. “It allowed people to join a neigh borhood team without ever going to a central office,” said Mr. Slaby.

Another ground-game program was a tool for telephone canvassing from people's homes instead of having to travel to a campaign office and work from a telephone bank. The call tool was a Web program that let people sign up to make calls and receive a list of phone numbers, names and a script to use, noted Mr. Reed.

Often, the profiles of volunteer callers and the lists they received were matched. So the callers were people with similar life experiences to those being called, and thus more likely to be persuasive. Here is a YouTube video of a 91-year-old World War II veteran, who joined the Obama phone corps.

In 2008, there was some remote callers in the Obama campaign. But this year, there were ten times as many, Mr. Slaby said.

The sheer scale of the online outreach and data collection dwarfed the effort four years ago. For example, the Barack Obama Facebook site had 33 million “ likes,” compared with 2 million for the previous campaign. A Facebook like, Mr. Slaby noted, is the “just the first rung on a ladder of engagement” but it is a starting point.

Another truly important change was in the technology itself. “Cloud computing barely existed in 2008,” Mr. Slaby said.

This time, the Obama campaign's data center was mainly Amazon Web Services, the leading supplier of cloud services. The campaign's engineers built about 200 different programs that ran on the Amazon service including Dashboard, the remote calling tool, the campaign Web site, donation processing and data analytics applications.

Using mainly open-source software and the Amazon service, the Obama campaign could inexpensively write and tailor its own programs instead of using off-the-shelf commercial software.

“It let us attack and engineer our own approach to problems, and build solutions for an environment that moves so rapidly you can't plan,” Mr. S laby said. “It made a huge difference this time.”



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