Brazil\'s Banknotes Still Praise God, For Now

A close view of the Portuguese words for “God Be Praised” on Brazil's currency.

A federal prosecutor in Brazil is seeking a court order to force the country's central bank to replace the nation's entire supply of paper currency with bills that do not display the phrase “God Be Praised,” the newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported on Monday.

The prosecutor, Jefferson Aparecido Dias, whose office defends the rights of citizens in the city of São Paulo, said that he had received a complaint last year about the use of the phrase. He argued in a 17-page motion filed on Monday that the words “Deus Seja Louvado,” which have ap peared on notes of the Brazilian real since 1986, violate the rights of non-Christians and non-believers.

Although he acknowledged that most Brazilians are Christian, the prosecutor wrote, “the Brazilian state is secular and, as such, should be completely detached from any religious manifestation.” To make his case that the phrase was inappropriate, he asked the court to consider the reaction of Christians if the nation's currency included calls to worship figures revered by Muslims, Buddhists, observers of Candomblé or Hindus - or a statement endorsing atheism. “Let's imagine if the real note had any of these phrases on it: ‘Praise Allah,' ‘Praise Buddha,' ‘Hail Oxossi,' ‘Hail Lord Ganesh,' or ‘God does not exist.'”

Writing on Twitter, the Archbishop of São Paulo, Cardinal Odilo Scherer, wondered if anyone even noticed the phrase, which is rendered in tiny letters on the notes.

Você já percebeu que as notas Real tem uma rederência a Deus? Há alguém querendo tirar. Que v. Acha?

- Dom Odilo Scherer (@DomOdiloScherer) 12 Nov 12

The cardinal also said in a statement, “The phrase should make no difference to those who do not believe in God. But it is meaningful for all those who do believe in God. And those who believe in God also pay taxes and are most of the population.”

Brazil's central bank had previously replied to the complaint by arguing that the religious reference was valid because the preamble to the Brazilian constitution explicitly states that the democracy was formed “under the protection of God.” The bank's response to the prosecutor added that the state, “not being atheist, anti-clerical or anti-religious, can legitimately make a reference to the existence of a higher being, a divinity, as long as, in doing so, it does not make an allusion to a specific religious doctrine.”

CareZone, an Anti-Facebook

Social media is about sharing ever more information about ourselves with an ever larger crowd. But some of the most valuable information, about things like health and children, needs to be kept close. Now there is a social too for that, too, and it comes from a well-known name in technology.

Jonathan Schwartz, the former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, is cofounder of CareZone, a service that enables families to organize care of their loved ones. CareZone provides secure storage of patient information like medical records and prescriptions, plus critical phone numbers and digitized documents associated with care, like insurance information. There is also a journal feature, for keeping notes on things patent conditions and future appointments.

“It's a biological reality that we are all going to take care of somebody,” says Mr. Schwartz, who oversaw the sale of Sun to Oracle in 2009. “You need a safe place to keep information about things like doctors , care and medicines. You need to be able to share that with your spouse, your immediate family and trusted neighbors.”

The service debuted last February with little notice, and while Mr. Schwartz would not say how many subscribers he has attracted, he says it is growing. On Tuesday, Mr. Schwartz added voice broadcast and calendar features designed to make it both more functional and more accessible to larger groups of people.

The calendar enables subscribers to assign tasks, like picking up medication or taking someone for an examination. The broadcast service enables messages of up to 10 minutes to be sent to the phones of up to 100 people at a time. Formerly a Web-based service, the company is adding a mobile application.

CareZone is not taking the usual social media route of targeted advertising, since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, closely guards how closely medical information must be shared. “Advertisin g and HIPAA are oil and water,” Mr. Schwartz says, adding that CareZone will have an overt policy of “no ads, no data mining.”

It is an interesting reflection of changing times. During the early days of the Internet, Scott McNealy, Sun's cofounder and Mr. Schwartz's onetime mentor, was known for saying that “privacy is dead, get over it.” Now that we are under even more corporate surveillance, Mr. Schwartz calls privacy “something people will pay for. There is a lot of value in the data that only you have.”

The trick is to keep things private, but widen the circle of trust to include larger organizations that participate in care, and also pay. The new features are intended to make CareZone an attractive tool for home care workers, outpatient hospitals, and church groups trying to establish food and care services for a parishioner.

While the main application is free for up to five individuals under care, from January 1 it will cost $5 a month or $49 a year to use CareZone for five to 10 people. From 10 to 100 individuals, CareZone charges $25 a month. There may be additional charges for above 100 people. CareZone will also add other paid features, like charging for lots of data storage.He figures that professional caregivers will pay for the service because it will help them manage patients.

“My bet is that a year from now hospitals will be a revenue stream,” says Mr. Schwartz. “Pharmacies and hospitals are looking to communicate with you in a secure way.”

RIM\'s Chief Is Confident of BlackBerry 10 Success

Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of Research In Motion, visited The New York Times readily tells his employees, developers and customers, BlackBerry 10, the name for the new phones and the software platform running it, is a very big bet for RIM. If it catches on, he has saved the company.

In a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters, he expressed his confidence. “I don't expect things to get much worse,” he said.

It was clear from the presentation that the final versions of the phone, which will debut Jan. 30, won't introduce any significant hardware innovations. It has the rectangular slab look of smartphones already on the market.

The hardware varies in the absence of a home button and the inclusion of a red LED light that flashes when a message comes in. According to earlier announcements by Mr. Heins, RIM is also making a model with a physical keyboard.

On Monday, Mr. Heins focused on the integration of the usability of the software. A home button is needed on iPhones and phones using Google's Android operating system, he said, because those operating systems require users to repeatedly switch between applications to perform different tasks. In contrast, BlackBerry 10 will consolidate bits of information and capabilities that are distributed through separate apps on current smart phones. BlackBerry 10's messaging center, for example, can display Facebook updates, LinkedIn messages, texts and Twitter posts along with e-mails. In turn, BlackBerry 10 users will be able use that hub to reply to, as an example, Facebook messages without opening their phones' Facebook app.

And he says it can be done with a flick of the thumb.

Similarly, the BlackBerry 10 address book can display all recent e-mails from any contact and even pull news stories and other information related to his or her company from the web.

“It is stress relief, it doesn't make you look at all your applications al l the time,” Mr. Heins said. “This is going to catch on with a lot of people.”

First, of course, RIM will have to show consumers how BlackBerry 10 differs and then persuade them that its features are indeed an advance.

On Monday, it look the RIM group just over 30 minutes to demonstrate only some of the new phone's features. But Mr. Heins said that the new phones' advantages will be so apparent to customers that it will only take “a one-minute sales pitch in a shop” to win them over.

It was clear from RIM's presentation, however, that the company is banking on it really catching on with corporate information technology departments. Frank Boulben, RIM's chief marketing officer, who was also at the interview, said that he believes that only about half of companies allow employees to choose their own smart phones. Unlike many other industry observers, Mr. Boulben also predicted that some companies may return to selecting their employees phones to reduce technology support costs.

To that end, BlackBerry 10 will allow corporations to segregate corporate data and apps from a user's personal material. As a result, Mr. Heins said, information technology departments will be able to wipe out all of a company's data on a phone when an employee quits while leaving the former worker's data, including photos, untouched.

Despite the dismal failure of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer, Mr. Heins has grand ambitions for the BlackBerry 10 phone in the corporate workplace. He said that RIM is pitching the new phone to corporations as a replacement for desktop and laptop computers in the offices over time. He sketched out a scenario where BlackBerry 10 phones will act as a building passes for employees who, once at their desks, will connect their BlackBerry to a keyboard and display.

“Whenever you enter an office you don't have your laptop with you, you have your mobile computer power exactly here,” Mr. Heins said patting a BlackBerry 10 phone sitting in a holster on his hip. “You will not carry a laptop within three to five years.”

Nokia to Offer Its Maps for iPhones and Android Phones

Nokia still hasn't found its way to a successful comeback in the smartphone market. But the company is hoping to get its tentacles into competitors' phones through mapping applications, a move it hopes will help it improve its maps.

The company said on Tuesday that in the coming weeks it would release a maps app called Here in Apple's App Store. It will be a free download for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch owners. Nokia also said it would release a toolkit for programmers to make Nokia-powered mapping apps for Android phones. And it is forming a partnership with Mozilla, the browser company, to develop location features for its new operating system, called Firefox OS.

Nokia has emphasized the power and thoroughness of its mapping database, which has information on 200 countries, in an effort to distinguish its new Lumia smartphones from the competition. For instance, when Apple's new maps system turned out to have some embarrassing lapses, Nokia published a b log post that compared its maps with Apple's and Google's and, of course, concluded the Nokia maps were better.

But Nokia's Lumia smartphones haven't sold very well. So why give away its secret sauce to rivals?

Stephen Elop, chief executive of Nokia, said in an interview that in order to ensure that its mapping platform stays competitive, it needs lots of users. The more people who look up directions or search for locations on its maps, the smarter the system gets. And Nokia can still build exclusive location features into its Lumia phones, he said.

“For the location platform to be at the highest quality, one needs scale, and you need as many different people contributing as possible,” Mr. Elop said. “Of course, Nokia will build apps, some of them unique to Lumia devices, that gain a competitive advantage for Nokia.”

He said that, for instance, current Lumia phones use an app called City Lens that enables users to point the camera at real-wor ld objects and see data overlaid on top of them on the screen. Pointing the camera at a restaurant pulls up online reviews for it. That feature will not be available in the apps for other phones.

If Nokia's mapping app for the iPhone is released soon, it could beat Google to the punch. Apple's maps app previously used Google's mapping data, and now Google is reportedly developing its own iOS maps app.

Nokia's Here app for iOS includes voice-guided walking navigation and public transportation directions - features that Apple's maps app lacks. And Mr. Elop noted that a particular feature that iPhone owners using the Now app might enjoy is offline support. A person can specify that he spends most of his time in New York, for example, and download the maps in advance so that location searches can be done more quickly, or even in areas with no cellphone reception, like in a subway tunnel.

“Many people have stared at their map waiting for their tiles to downlo ad for some time,” he said. “We're able to put that computational mapping data onto the devices, so that's a significant improvement.”

Nokia also announced that it had agreed to acquire Earthmine, a mapping company based in Berkeley, Calif., that specializes in three-dimensional maps showing street views. It said it expected the deal to close by the end of the year. Doug Dawson, a Nokia spokesman, declined to say how much the company was paying for Earthmine.

Dropbox Passes 100 Million Users

Dropbox, the online storage company, said Tuesday that it had surpassed 100 million users.

The company said it quadrupled its user base in the last year, and it attributed its rapid growth to more consumers and small businesses porting their personal and professional files to the Internet.

“Even 100 million is still at a single dot percentage of the people we could reach,” said Drew Houston, one of the founders of the company, in an interview.

The milestone is an important one for the start-up, which is aiming to stay neck-and-neck with technology juggernauts like Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft that are ramping up their own cloud storage offerings. Apple alone said recently that it has 190 million users of its online storage service, iCloud.

But Mr. Houston said the company was not worried about the competition.

“Those companies are busy trying to build something we had four years ago,” he said. “We're out front. We're already out there and building smaller features and things. All those other companies have turf to protect, and they're fighting a battle on a totally different front.”

Dropbox's main goal, he said, was to offer people a service that lets them save any file from anywhere, regardless of “the logo on the back of the computer or device,” and access it from anywhere, whenever they need it.

Dropbox has had several security skirmishes in the last year, including a breach that caused some users to received spammy messages. But Mr. Houston said the company had added features to prevent future discrepancies and insisted that the glitches had not deterred people from signing up or storing their personal files with the service.

“If anything, people are only putting more in there than they were six months ago,” he said. Each day, Dropbox users store more than 1 billion items in its service, said Mr. Houston.

“That's more tweets than are on Twitter,” he said . “We're talking Libraries of Congress every day.”

Last year, the company raised a staggering $250 million in venture capital, which lifted the company's valuation to $4 billion, making it one of the hotter properties in Silicon Valley, along with Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb and Square.

Why Sinofsky Left: A Web Round-up

The announcement of Steven Sinofsky's ouster from Microsoft came late on Monday, so the story has only begun to be reported. Here is what various news organizations and bloggers are saying:

Ashlee Vance at BusinessWeek wrote:

The big knock on Sinofsky was his often-prickly nature. He wasn't seen as a team player within Microsoft and was instead known for protecting his fiefdom. That approach doesn't go over well at today's Microsoft, which needs to prove that Windows is just one piece of a larger collective that includes phone software, online services, and entertainment products delivered via the Xbox. Sinofsky also proved reticent to speak with the press and was barely heard from as Windows 8 hit the market late last month.

Mary Jo Foley, one of the wisest Microsoft watchers, wrote at ZDNet:

Windows 8 launched commercially just about three weeks ago; it's too soon to judge if the latest Windows release and the Microsoft Surface tablet will be deemed successes or failures. And still months before anyone will be sacrificed if internal projections are unmet.

I give more credence to the politics theory.

She referred readers to a recent article on Mr. Sinofsky by Jay Greene of CNet. Then she noted:

Remember that word: collaboration. It can mean anything from being willing to use other teams' code, to not standing in the way when another division launches its product on a competitive platform.

Sinofsky is known inside and outside the company as a guy who got things done and done his way. Rumors regularly reappeared about Sinofsky angling to take over more business units. And until recently, it seemed like Microsoft's own senior leadership team, as well as Ballmer himself, had capitulated, allowing Sinofsky to make whatever management decisions he deemed fit. Those who disagreed left or were shown the door (and probably won't be back, though never say never).

But more recently, something seemingly changed, including the rhetoric.

Kara Swisher, at AllThingsD, concurred, writing:

In the case of the seemingly sudden departure of Windows head Steve Sinofsky yesterday, several high-level sources at the company said that it came down to former C.E.O. and co-founder Bill Gates's backing of current C.E.O. Steve Ballmer in the controversial decision to part ways with the powerful exec.

The goal? To better allow various units work together more closely going forward.

An industry blog, Tim Anderson's ITWriting, said:

One line of thought is that Windows 8 and Surface RT are failing because users do not like the dramatic changes, with the new tiled personality and disappeared Start menu, and therefore its architect is departing.

I do not believe this for several reasons. One is that the promoted Julie Larson-Green is a key c reator and proponent of the new design (call it Metro if you like). She worked with Sinofsky on the Office Ribbon way back, a project that has some parallels with Windows 8: take a critically important product and revamp its user interface in ways that customers are not requesting or expecting.

And then there was Twitter silliness. Charles Cooper of CNet captured a lot of it â€" ties to the Petreaus Affair and Scott Forestall's recent departure from Apple.

Daily Report: Facebook Confronts the Problem of Fakery

Fakery is all over the Internet, but it is a particular problem for Facebook because it calls into question the social network's basic premise, Somini Sengupta reports in The New York Times.

Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and the service has been used to spread false information, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.

But Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”

Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It's pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook. But Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company's user base, now in excess of one billion, was false, duplicate or undesirable.

The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process of going public. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.

Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members who use machine learning and human skills to w eed out fraud.

Daily Report: Facebook Confronts the Problem of Fakery

Fakery is all over the Internet, but it is a particular problem for Facebook because it calls into question the social network's basic premise, Somini Sengupta reports in The New York Times.

Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and the service has been used to spread false information, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.

But Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”

Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It's pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook. But Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company's user base, now in excess of one billion, was false, duplicate or undesirable.

The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process of going public. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.

Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members who use machine learning and human skills to w eed out fraud.

The Leader of Windows Exits Microsoft

SEATTLE - Microsoft has unexpectedly parted ways with Steven Sinofsky, the leader of its lucrative Windows division and an executive often mentioned as a possible successor to the company's current chief executive.

In a surprise announcement made late Monday evening, Microsoft said that Mr. Sinofsky, the president of its Windows division, would leave the company immediately after a 23-year career there. His departure was a mutual decision by Mr. Sinofsky and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, according to a person briefed on the situation who was not authorized to speak on the matter.

His departure comes just weeks after Microsoft released Windows 8, the company's biggest overhaul to its flagship software product in years. The move raises questions about how Microsoft, one of the giants in the technology business, will prepare itself for a new generation of leadership.

In an e-mail sent to all Microsoft employees Monday evening, Mr. Ballmer said the departure of Mr. Sinofsky, which he described as Mr. Sinofsky's decision, comes at the start of a “new era” at Microsoft with the release of a wave of new products like Windows 8.

“I am grateful for the work that Steven has delivered in his time at our company,” Mr. Ballmer said in the e-mail. Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, said Mr. Sinofsky was not available for an interview. In a statement announcing his departure, Mr. Sinofsky, 47, said, “I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.”

Mr. Sinofsky was seen as one of the most competent managers within Microsoft and earned high marks for helping to improve the quality of its software after the company released Windows Vista, a widely criticized version of the operating system. A former technical assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, he was known to be a big admirer of Apple's attention to detail in its products.

His name was often floated by people speculating about a possible successor to Mr. Ballmer, who has not announced any plans to retire from the company.

But Mr. Sinofsky was also a polarizing figure who alienated many other members of Microsoft's senior leadership team. For that reason, he was viewed by many insiders as an unlikely replacement for Mr. Ballmer, one whose elevation to the top job would have created waves of dissent within the company.

By his detractors, Mr. Sinofsky was seen as territorial and often unwilling to cooperate with other divisions. In an internal review of his job performance last year, Mr. Sinofsky was faulted for failing to make sure that Microsoft lived up to a 2009 agreement with European regulators to offer users an easy way to install competitive Web browsers in Windows, according to a filing with securities regulators.

Mr. Sinofsky was also faulted for a 3 percent decline in the revenue of Microsoft's Windows business, long one of its most profitable divisions and the foundation for its strength in the personal computing market. As a result of those failings, Mr. Sinofsky received 60 percent of the bonus he was to receive last year.

Windows 8, the product Mr. Sinofsky most recently oversaw, has received mixed reviews so far. The product has a drastically different look than previous versions, and Microsoft tailored the new operating system for use with tablets and other devices with touch-sensing screens.

Mr. Sinofsky also oversaw Microsoft's decision to get into the computer hardware business with Surface, a tablet computer that has also earned mixed reviews.

Julie Larson-Green, another longtime Microsoft employee in its Windows division, will take over the leadership of all engineering responsibilities related to Windows. Tami Reller, the chief financial officer of the Windows division, will run business and marketing for the group.

More Companies Are Tracking Online Data

The number of trackers collecting data on users' activities on the most popular Web sites in the United States has significantly increased in the last five months, according to new research from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Called the “Web Privacy Census,” the Berkeley project aims to measure online privacy by conducting periodic web crawls and comparing the number of cookies and other types of tracking technology found over time on the most visited sites.

During a Web crawl conducted on Oct. 24th, researchers, using a list of the 100 most popular sites compiled by Quantcast, an analytics and audience targeting firm, found cookies on every site.

On those top 100 sites, researchers found 6,485 standard cookies last month compared to 5,795 cookies in mid-May. In both months, third party trackers, not the Web sites themselves, set a majority of those cookies, the report said.

In both October and last May, cookies placed by DoubleClick, Google's ad technology service, appeared on the most sites on the top 100 list. ScorecardResearch, an analytics unit of comScore, was the second-most prevalent tracker, researchers reported.

The number of cookies on the top 1,000 and 25,000 web sites also increased significantly, researchers said.

“More popular sites are using more cookies,” the report said.

The Berkeley study comes at a time of fierce debate between federal regulators, advertising associations and consumer advocates over how to best regulate online tracking. Marketers advocate self-regulation, allowing consumers who wish to opt out of receiving ads based on data-mining to use an already-established industry program. Some consumer advocates are pushing for federal regulation as well as a “Do Not Track” mechanism that would allow Internet users to control tracking through settings on their own computer browsers.

Chris Hoofnagle, the director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley center and the co-author of the study, said he hoped the data would set a baseline, providing all sides in the debate with empirical information as to the optimum method to regulate tracking.

“I'm hoping that it will inform which approach is the best,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “We are not going to be well-served unless we measure these trends more rigorously.”