How cybercrime hijacks your computer

International police have teamed up with civilian specialists from Microsoft to inflict a devastating blow on internet crooks. Lia Timson reports.

At exactly 11am on March 16, data centres in seven US cities heard an unusual knock on the door.

US Marshals bearing search warrants wanted access to the premises and their computer servers. Tools were immediately downed. No one was allowed to leave.

But the bulletproof-clad law enforcement officers did not conduct the ensuing searches.

In an unprecedented move, they stood aside and watched as civilian computer forensic specialists and lawyers bearing the Microsoft logo on their tags seized hard drives and severed internet connections.

Their actions were repeated with the help of police in the Netherlands a few hours later.

In the days that followed the raid, more than a million unsuspecting computers in homes and offices all over the world, including Australia, rang for their masters in vain, reaching instead newly established links into Microsoft's internet security labs.

It was the audacious private legal coup that outmanoeuvred canny cyber criminals and the usual slow progress of police investigations.

A civil court in Seattle had a few days earlier granted permission for the world's biggest software maker to dismantle the world's biggest known spam botnet, Rustock.

Botnets are robot networks of infected personal computers - our computers - at the mercy of cybercrime bosses. They are used to automate the distribution of spam, viruses and phishing, and counterfeit drugs. They are also deployed in money laundering, online advertising fraud and bringing down websites, an action known as a denial-of-service attack. Most users do not know if their computers are infected.

Rustock had hidden 96 command and control centres in the servers housed in those eight locations.

At its peak the five-year-old botnet was believed responsible for 30 billion spam messages daily, mostly peddling fake Viagra, Microsoft-branded lottery scams and bogus news items leading to malicious websites that installed malware on victims' machines. One Rustock-infected PC was sending 10,000 emails hourly.

Viagra's manufacturer, Pfizer, provided evidence and a private cyber security firm, FireEye, intelligence for the civil action.

Patrick Ford, Pfizer's global security chief and a former FBI agent, told The Sun-Herald the company bought advertised drugs to test.

Products pretending to be Viagra, the anti-inflammatory Celebrex and the hypertension medicine Norvasc, among 50 others, turned out to be generic drugs, placebos or a cocktail of wrong doses and chemicals including rat poison.

''We gave the courts something they could have a good understanding of. Not only people's computers get a virus and machines are compromised but it is bad in a health safety sense,'' Ford said.

He said innocent people were unsuspectingly drafted into botnets. ''You become an unwitting partner in the criminal organisation by clicking on those things.''

According to the security company, Symantec, Rustock's downfall caused global spam volume to drop from 121.5 billion emails a day last year to 36.9 billion. Last month it was still below 40 billion, or 72.6 per cent of all global email traffic.

Adrian Covich, a security expert at Symantec, says spam won't go away. There are at least two other botnets ready to take over Rustock's reins.

New Microsoft intelligence recently showed 702,860 infected computers, identified by their IP addresses, were still reporting for Rustock work in June.

It is a 56.12 per cent reduction on the 1.6 million IP addresses commanded before the takedown but those computers are not clean yet and infected computers are more likely to be redeployed.

Symantec estimates there are up to 5.4 million personal computers operating under the control of 10 major botnets at present. Waledac, Rustock and Coreflood may be down but Bagle and Cutwail are still active. Grum recently earned the nickname ''son of Rustock'', while Dark Mailer and Harvester have increased their output since March.

Even when arrests are made, crime bosses move their servers and domain addresses to other jurisdictions. The Rustock civil action was thus a masterstroke. Its conductor, Richard Boscovich, the senior attorney at Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, is a former US Department of Justice white-collar crime prosecutor.

Without a full understanding of how botnets worked and with no technical training, the legal eagle admits to being overwhelmed when asked to advise on the takedown.

''I'll be frank, I was really worried because [I thought] 'what exactly am I going to contribute to these guys?' '' he said. ''I'm not anengineer, you know, I'm a lawyer … I started thinking out of the box and it just came to me. I went back to the basics of law school to see what we could do and that's how I came up with the first legal strategy.''

He used an ex-parte ''John Doe'' legal action to sue unknown defenders without the other party present. Such action is commonly used to seize counterfeit goods such as luxury handbags.

''It was amazing no one had used the ex-parte restraining order [in technology] this way before,'' Boscovich said. ''The judge could've said no, but it was a smart calculated risk - you can't be too risk averse.''

Microsoft is now in the process of advertising in newspapers in Russia, where it believes the bot masters live, giving them due notice to reclaim the servers. It does not believe they will.

Eugene Kaspersky, owner of the Russian anti-virus software company Kaspersky Labs, said in May that cyber criminals are very difficult to locate. ''Cybercrime is integrated into the computer world like in Australia sharks are integrated into the beautiful ocean.

''Cybercrime is organised, but not like the Mafia … [They're] interconnected groups that trade information, develop malware by request, then infect thousands of computers.

''They steal everything from the infected machines, even software licences that they sell on eBay, they steal pictures, scans of your passports, your driver's licence. Everything that is stolen from infected machines is sold. It's the criminal economy.''

James Turner, a security analyst with IBRS in Sydney, said cybercrime seems abstract and hard to understand until it happens to you.

''Every single dollar spent on computer security is wasted. It's money we could be spending on roads, on schools, on health, but we have to do it because we have to defend ourselves. We don't live in a world of unicorns, rainbows and cute baby ducks,'' Turner said.

Meanwhile, in April the FBI borrowed the lawsuit idea and took it a step further in dismantling another botnet, Coreflood. After obtaining a court order to hijack botnet servers, it sent infected PCs a ''stop'' command, effectively blocking the fraudulent online banking transactions they were enlisted to make.

But others have questioned the leading role of private companies in such criminal cases.

Critics say Microsoft's motives for dismantling botnets are more commercial than altruistic. Spam costs its Hotmail service millions of dollars a year in filtering technology and human resources - and still 450,000 spam messages bypass its filters every day. Its Windows market leadership is at risk if computers run on pirated copies, or users believe it is exposed to more viruses than competing platforms. And its trademark is under siege when lottery scams branded with its logos deceive unsuspecting citizens.

But Boscovich denied the company's actions were designed to solely protect its market positioning. ''We don't know if you're running a pirated copy or not - all we know is your computer is infected. Our operation is not an anti-piracy program.''

Dave Dittrich, a University of Washington researcher who provided expert advice in the lawsuit, said other technology companies should consider similar action. He had helped Microsoft take down the smaller Waledac botnet last year, a process used as a test case for Rustock.

''This is a model that is very expensive, very time-consuming and requires close collaboration with experts and academics,'' Dittrich said. ''But it is a sustainable model and I'm hopeful the [technology] community will start adopting it.''

A spokesperson for the Attorney-General's Department said 16,464 computers had been compromised each day in Australia in 2010-11, up from 11,215 the previous year.

The Australian Federal Police's Detective Superintendent Sharon McTavish, who is seconded to the Microsoft DCU in Redmond, said Australians were not immune to cybercrime. ''Ultimately the consumer is a threat to themselves. They are opening, there are clicking.''

Next week top lawmakers of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand will meet in Sydney to discuss how to respond to the growing threat posed by cybercrime.

Turner said it was idealistic to leave it to law enforcement alone.

''Sadly, they are not fully funded,'' he said. ''It is also unrealistic to expect computer users to always be right in defending themselves. We should be able to depend on software vendors, ISPs and law enforcement together.''

Microsoft admits to ''an aggressive roadmap'' to attack botnets but wants others to share the load. While the names Google and Apple do not cross their lips, Boscovich would like the industry to do more.

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HP fiddles while Apple innovates

by Brooke Crothers

commentary The paradox of Hewlett-Packard only gets more pronounced with each high-profile product announcement: its TouchPad tablet is the latest head-scratcher. Meanwhile, Apple continues to spit out one stunning product after another.

HP's paradox is that it sits in the cradle of innovation--Silicon Valley--but fails to innovate. And HP is the original Valley start-up, founded in a garage more than 70 years ago, long before Apple's legendary start.

Fast forward to the reign of former CEO Carly Fiorina. She talked a lot about going back to the garage but never actually went back. And nothing in device-design innovation changed with her successor, Mark Hurd.

I'm hoping, as always, for change with the current CEO Leo Apotheker. But his focus is still the on the enterprise--which demands design stability--the antithesis of innovation. A profitable segment, yes, but not one that can create an iPod or even a MacBook Air.

And a recent statement by Apotheker doesn't offer much hope. "If you use a state-of-the-art laptop it is as sleek, as slim as [an iPad]," he said at the D9 conference last month. Really? I have yet to see an HP laptop that comes near the iPad in thinness (0.34 inch) and portability (1.33 pounds). In fact, the only thing that gets close is another Apple product: the 11.6-inch MacBook Air.

He then added as a parenthetical: "There's a whole new product refresh coming out." Yeah, I've heard that one before. He's either so disconnected from product design that he believes HP actually has a laptop that rivals the iPad, or he knows about some truly groundbreaking newfangled product in the pipeline. Should we give him the benefit of the doubt?

That brings us to the TouchPad. Probably the first high-profile product to emerge with his imprimatur. In a word, disappointment. I listened to HP's Jon Rubinstein talk for most of an hour about the virtues of the TouchPad (before it was announced as a shipping product) at a Qualcomm conference in San Diego last month. And I stood with an HP product manager later in the day as he demonstrated the TouchPad (and got some hands-on time, albeit brief, with it, too).

In the end it was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing about innovation. The TouchPad is a thick, relatively heavy black slab of plastic, just like a dozen other no-name tablets on the market. And let me quote from a CNET review of the TouchPad: "The bottom line: The TouchPad would have made a great competitor for the original iPad, but its design, features, and speed put it behind today's crop of tablet heavyweights."

That's putting it rather diplomatically. I don't even think as an organic product--the marrying of hardware and software--it competes with the original iPad.

And what about laptops? You would think that with all of the Silicon Valley-based R&D HP does and with all of the business and consumer laptops that it makes--and has made over the years--that it could come up with one MacBook Air. Or, better yet, surpass it. Apparently not. HP was headed in that direction with Envy 13. But of course it killed that product after killing the truly innovative Voodoo Envy 133--a design conceived not by HP but VoodooPC, which HP acquired.

The huge design void left by HP in Windows laptops is now being filled by companies like Asus, Samsung, and Sony. And if HP isn't careful that could ultimately translate into market share loss as the world turns increasingly to products like the Asus UX21 and Sony Vaio Z instead of a less-inspired business laptops like the HP EliteBook 2560p (which, as an innovative design is OK, in my opinion, but could be a lot better).

Let me close by saying that I've owned a lot of HP products over the years: a few laptops and docking stations, half a dozen printers, and a few flat-screen displays. The last product I owned was the 2510p, an ultraportable design carried over from the Compaq (which HP acquired) Armada M300. Compaq had, in turn, gotten design elements of the M300 from the Digital Equipment (which Compaq acquired) HiNote Ultra (PDF) laptop design team.

Unfortunately, by the time HP's design committees had gotten through with the 2510p, it was a far cry from the MacBook Air-like Armada M300 and far removed from the inspired HiNote Ultra. In short, the 2510p was a quintessential HP laptop: practical but with most design innovation stripped out (and afflicted with sudden shutdown syndrome because of overheating--but I won't delve into that here).

My obvious advice: HP should become less like HP and more like Apple. Or at least more like Samsung. Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a gorgeously-thin tablet that screams "buy me!" And Samsung's Series 9 laptops are also serious head-turners, like the MacBook Air.

But then, maybe Apotheker has something up his sleeve. I would like to think so.

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PTT makes weird recommendations for Pak cricket – P-I

By: Anisuddin Khan





KARACHI - Pakistan Task Team (PTT) set up two years ago has finally submitted a long list of recommendations aimed at improving and reforming the working of Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). A close study of the 65 recommendation released two days ago reveal that the PTT has interfered and overstepped its mandate in areas where it was not asked to make any suggestion. The PTT in one stroke of pen has totally rejected everything good that was done in the past sixty years.
List of recommendations by ICC-Pakistan Task Team 
1) ICC members should continue to support PCB through fulfilment of FTP commitments at neutral venues in circumstances where safety and security remains a concern. 
2) Where ICC members are confident following their own risk assessments, they should consider touring Pakistan to honour their FTP commitments
3) ICC President and CE should continue to facilitate ongoing discussions on the resumption of bilateral series with India
4) ICC should support ongoing activity involving the Pakistan ambassadors (Brearley and Chappell) to keep issues relating to tours involving Pakistan in the public eye. 
5) ICC management should continue with ongoing monitoring of PCB’s implementation of these important integrity-related actions and provide six-monthly integrity updates to the ICC Board through to the end of 2012.
6) There must be stability in the composition of the Selection Committee. 
7) The Selection Committee should be granted sole responsibility and be held accountable for all selection issues. No outside interference should be allowed.
8) There should be a clear process for the nomination and the appointment of candidates to the Selection Committee, including the Chairman of Selectors. 
9) Appointments of Selectors should be approved by the Governing Board which should also retain the right to remove selectors for valid reason.
10) Clear criteria should be determined for appointees to the Selection Committee including a requirement of previous first class, and, preferably, international playing experience. 
11) The Chairman’s right of veto on the selection of players should be removed.

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South Sudan becomes world's newest nation

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — South Sudanese citizens, international dignitaries and the world's newest president are convening in the new country capital of Juba to celebrate the birth of a nation.

South Sudan became the world's newest country Saturday with a raucous street celebration at midnight.

Dignitaries including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell will watch under a blazing sun as South Sudan President Salva Kiir hosts a noon-hour ceremony.

South and north Sudan battled two civil wars over more than five decades, culminating in a 2005 peace deal that led to Saturday's independence declaration.

Sudan President Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of the south, is also to attend Saturday's ceremony.

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In Israel, diggers unearth the Bible's bad guys

By MATTI FRIEDMAN - Associated Press








TEL EL-SAFI, Israel (AP) — At the remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible.

The city of Gath, where the annual digging season began this week, is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the perennial enemies of the Israelites.

Close to three millennia ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistines, who occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain, and the Israelites, who controlled the inland hills. The city's most famous resident, according to the Book of Samuel, was Goliath — the giant warrior improbably felled by the young shepherd David and his sling.

The Philistines "are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story," said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation.

The latest summer excavation season began this past week, with 100 diggers from Canada, South Korea, the United States and elsewhere, adding to the wealth of relics found at the site since Maier's project began in 1996.

In a square hole, several Philistine jugs nearly 3,000 years old were emerging from the soil. One painted shard just unearthed had a rust-red frame and a black spiral: a decoration common in ancient Greek art and a hint to the Philistines' origins in the Aegean.

The Philistines arrived by sea from the area of modern-day Greece around 1200 B.C. They went on to rule major ports at Ashkelon and Ashdod, now cities in Israel, and at Gaza, now part of the Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip.

At Gath, they settled on a site that had been inhabited since prehistoric times. Digs like this one have shown that though they adopted aspects of local culture, they did not forget their roots. Even five centuries after their arrival, for example, they were still worshipping gods with Greek names.

Archaeologists have found that the Philistine diet leaned heavily on grass pea lentils, an Aegean staple. Ancient bones discarded at the site show that they also ate pigs and dogs, unlike the neighboring Israelites, who deemed those animals unclean — restrictions that still exist in Jewish dietary law.

Diggers at Gath have also uncovered traces of a destruction of the city in the 9th century B.C., including a ditch and embankment built around the city by a besieging army — still visible as a dark line running across the surrounding hills.

The razing of Gath at that time appears to have been the work of the Aramean king Hazael in 830 B.C., an incident mentioned in the Book of Kings.

Gath's importance is that the "wonderful assemblage of material culture" uncovered there sheds light on how the Philistines lived in the 10th and 9th centuries B.C., said Seymour Gitin, director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and an expert on the Philistines.

That would include the era of the kingdom ruled from Jerusalem by David and Solomon, if such a kingdom existed as described in the Bible. Other Philistine sites have provided archaeologists with information about earlier and later times but not much from that key period.

"Gath fills a very important gap in our understanding of Philistine history," Gitin said.

In 604 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and put the Philistines' cities to the sword. There is no remnant of them after that.

Crusaders arriving from Europe in 1099 built a fortress on the remains of Gath, and later the site became home to an Arab village, Tel el-Safi, which emptied during the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948. Today Gath is in a national park.

An Israeli town founded in 1955 several miles to the south, Kiryat Gat, was named after Gath based on a misidentification of a different ruin as the Philistine city.

The memory of the Philistines — or a somewhat one-sided version — was preserved in the Hebrew Bible.

The hero Samson, who married a Philistine woman, skirmished with them repeatedly before being betrayed and taken, blinded and bound, to their temple at Gaza. There, the story goes, he broke free and shattered two support pillars, bringing the temple down and killing everyone inside, including himself.

One intriguing find at Gath is the remains of a large structure, possibly a temple, with two pillars. Maeir has suggested that this might have been a known design element in Philistine temple architecture when it was written into the Samson story.

Diggers at Gath have also found shards preserving names similar to Goliath — an Indo-European name, not a Semitic one of the kind that would have been used by the local Canaanites or Israelites. These finds show the Philistines indeed used such names and suggest that this detail, too, might be drawn from an accurate picture of their society.

The findings at the site support the idea that the Goliath story faithfully reflects something of the geopolitical reality of the period, Maeir said — the often violent interaction of the powerful Philistines of Gath with the kings of Jerusalem in the frontier zone between them.

"It doesn't mean that we're one day going to find a skull with a hole in its head from the stone that David slung at him, but it nevertheless tells that this reflects a cultural milieu that was actually there at the time," Maeir said.

(This version CORRECTS in paragraph 3 that it was a 'sling,' not 'slingshot' used by David.)

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Former first lady Betty Ford dies at 93

By CONNIE CASS -
 Associated Press,
LINDA DEUTSCH - Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Betty Ford said things that first ladies just don't say, even today. And 1970s America loved her for it.

According to Mrs. Ford, her young adult children probably had smoked marijuana — and if she were their age, she'd try it, too. She told "60 Minutes" she wouldn't be surprised to learn that her youngest, 18-year-old Susan, was in a sexual relationship (an embarrassed Susan issued a denial).

She mused that living together before marriage might be wise, thought women should be drafted into the military if men were, and spoke up unapologetically for abortion rights, taking a position contrary to the president's. "Having babies is a blessing, not a duty," Mrs. Ford said.

The former first lady, whose triumph over drug and alcohol addiction became a beacon of hope for addicts and the inspiration for her Betty Ford Center in California, died at age 93, family friend Marty Allen said.

Family spokeswoman Barbara Lewandrowski said Betty Ford died Friday at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage. Other details of her death were not immediately available.

"She was a wonderful wife and mother; a great friend; and a courageous First Lady," former President George H.W. Bush said in a statement on Friday. "No one confronted life's struggles with more fortitude or honesty, and as a result, we all learned from the challenges she faced."

While her husband served as president, Betty Ford's comments weren't the kind of genteel, innocuous talk expected from a first lady, and a Republican one no less. Her unscripted comments sparked tempests in the press and dismayed President Gerald Ford's advisers, who were trying to soothe the national psyche after Watergate. But to the scandal-scarred, Vietnam-wearied, hippie-rattled nation, Mrs. Ford's openness was refreshing.

Candor worked for Betty Ford, again and again. She would build an enduring legacy by opening up the toughest times of her life as public example.

In an era when cancer was discussed in hushed tones and mastectomy was still a taboo subject, the first lady shared the specifics of her breast cancer surgery. The publicity helped bring the disease into the open and inspired countless women to seek breast examinations.

Her most painful revelation came 15 months after leaving the White House, when Mrs. Ford announced that she was entering treatment for a longtime addiction to painkillers and alcohol. It turned out the famously forthcoming first lady had been keeping a secret, even from herself.

She used the unvarnished story of her own descent and recovery to crusade for better addiction treatment, especially for women. She co-founded the nonprofit Betty Ford Center near the Fords' home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in 1982. Mrs. Ford raised millions of dollars for the center, kept close watch over its operations, and regularly welcomed groups of new patients with a speech that started, "Hello, my name's Betty Ford, and I'm an alcoholic and drug addict."

Although most famous for a string of celebrity patients over the years — from Elizabeth Taylor and Johnny Cash to Lindsay Lohan — the center keeps its rates relatively affordable and has served more than 90,000 people.

"People who get well often say, 'You saved my life,' and 'You've turned my life around,'" Mrs. Ford once said. "They don't realize we merely provided the means for them to do it themselves, and that's all."

In a statement Friday, President Barack Obama said the Betty Ford Center would honor Mrs. Ford's legacy "by giving countless Americans a new lease on life."

"As our nation's First Lady, she was a powerful advocate for women's health and women's rights," the president said. "After leaving the White House, Mrs. Ford helped reduce the social stigma surrounding addiction and inspired thousands to seek much-needed treatment."

Mrs. Ford was a free spirit from the start. Elizabeth Bloomer, born April 8, 1918, fell in love with dance as a girl in Grand Rapids, Mich., and decided it would be her life. At 20, despite her mother's misgivings, she moved to New York to learn from her idol Martha Graham. She lived in Greenwich Village, worked as a model, and performed at Carnegie Hall in Graham's modern dance ensemble. "I thought I had arrived," she later recalled.

But her mother coaxed her back to Grand Rapids, where Betty worked as a dance teacher and store fashion coordinator and married William Warren, a friend from school days. He was a salesman who traveled frequently; she was unhappy. They lasted five years.

While waiting for her divorce to become final, she met and began dating, as she put it in her memoir, "probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids" — former college football star, Navy veteran and lawyer Jerry Ford. They would be married for 58 years, until his death in December 2006.

When he proposed, she didn't know about his political ambitions; when he launched his bid for Congress during their engagement, she figured he couldn't win.

Two weeks after their October 1948 wedding, her husband was elected to his first term in the House. He would serve 25 years, rising to minority leader.

Mrs. Ford was thrust into a role she found exhausting and unfulfilling: political housewife. While her husband campaigned for weeks at a time or worked late on Capitol Hill, she raised their four children: Michael, Jack, Steven and Susan. She arranged luncheons for congressional wives, helped with her husband's campaigns, became a Cub Scout den mother, taught Sunday school.

A pinched nerve in her neck in 1964, followed by the onset of severe osteoarthritis, led her to an assortment of prescription drugs that never fully relieved the pain. For years she had been what she later called "a controlled drinker, no binges." Now she began mixing pills and alcohol. Feeling overwhelmed and underappreciated, she suffered an emotional breakdown that led to weekly visits with a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist didn't take note of her drinking but instead tried to build her self-esteem: "He said I had to start thinking I was valuable, not just as a wife and mother, but as myself."

The White House would give her that gift.

In 1973, as Mrs. Ford was happily anticipating her husband's retirement from politics, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced out of office over bribery charges. President Richard Nixon turned to Gerald Ford to fill the office.

Less than a year later, his presidency consumed by the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned. On Aug. 9, 1974, Gerald Ford was sworn in as the only chief executive in American history who hadn't been elected either president or vice president.

Mrs. Ford wrote of her sudden ascent to first lady: "It was like going to a party you're terrified of, and finding out to your amazement that you're having a good time."

She was 56 when she moved into the White House, and looked more matronly than mod. Ever gracious, her chestnut hair carefully coifed into a soft bouffant, she tended to speak softly and slowly, even when taking a feminist stand.

Her breast cancer diagnosis, coming less than two months after President Ford was whisked into office, may have helped disarm the clergymen, conservative activists and Southern politicians who were most inflamed by her loose comments. She was photographed recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital, looking frail in her robe, and won praise for grace and courage.

"She seems to have just what it takes to make people feel at home in the world again," media critic Marshall McLuhan observed at the time. "Something about her makes us feel rooted and secure — a feeling we haven't had in a while. And her cancer has been a catharsis for everybody."

The public outpouring of support helped her embrace the power of her position. "I was somebody, the first lady," she wrote later. "When I spoke, people listened."

She used her newfound influence to lobby aggressively for the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed nonetheless, and to speak against child abuse, raise money for handicapped children, and champion the performing arts.

It's debatable whether Mrs. Ford's frank nature helped or hurt her husband's 1976 campaign to win a full term as president. Polls showed she was widely admired. By taking positions more liberal than the president's, she helped broaden his appeal beyond traditional Republican voters. But she also outraged some conservatives, leaving the president more vulnerable to a strong GOP primary challenge by Ronald Reagan. That battle weakened Ford going into the general election against Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Carter won by a slim margin. The president had lost his voice in the campaign's final days, and it was Mrs. Ford who read his concession speech to the nation.

The Fords retired to a Rancho Mirage golf community, but he spent much of his time away, giving speeches and playing in golf tournaments. Home alone, deprived of her exciting and purposeful life in the White House, Mrs. Ford drank.

By 1978 her secret was obvious to those closest to her.

"As I got sicker," she recalled, "I gradually stopped going to lunch. I wouldn't see friends. I was putting everyone out of my life." Her children recalled her living in a stupor, shuffling around in her bathrobe, refusing meals in favor of a drink.

Her family finally confronted her and insisted she seek treatment.

"I was stunned at what they were trying to tell me about how I disappointed them and let them down," she said in a 1994 Associated Press interview. "I was terribly hurt — after I had spent all those years trying to be the best mother, wife I could be. ... Luckily, I was able to hear them saying that I needed help and they cared too much about me to let it go on."

She credited their "intervention" with saving her life.

Mrs. Ford entered Long Beach Naval Hospital and, alongside alcoholic young sailors and officers, underwent a grim detoxification that became the model for therapy at the Betty Ford Center. In her book "A Glad Awakening," she described her recovery as a second chance at life.

And in that second chance, she found a new purpose.

"There is joy in recovery," she wrote, "and in helping others discover that joy."

Family spokeswoman Lewandrowski the family expects to organize a service in Palm Desert over the next couple days. Ford's body will be sent to Michigan for burial alongside former President Gerald Ford, who is buried at his namesake museum in Grand Rapids.

___

Associated Press writers Shaya Tayefe Mohajer in Los Angeles and Mike Householder in Detroit contributed to this report.

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People won’t watch film only for kiss: Katrina

Prashant Singh, Hindustan Times
“
Kissing scenes in Bollywood have always made tabloid headlines. So it’s not surprising that the lip-lock shared between Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (ZNMD) too is creating ripples. But Katrina is not amused and remains completely unfazed. The actor feels too much attention is being given to the scene.


Why give it so much importance? I don’t feel the sequence is even worth talking about. People won’t watch the film only for the kiss, I can promise you that. Personally too, I don’t give it any attention. People will come only if they are interested in the film, like the promos, or if they like the vibe of the film,” she says. “It’s part of an actor’s job.”

Of late, talks have been rife that the makers of ZNMD were confused about the Hrithik-Katrina kiss. They were believed to be in two minds regarding how much of the elaborate sequence should be retained in the film. But apparently, the kiss remains unedited in the final version.

This is not the first time Katrina has locked lips in a film. Her kiss with Gulshan Grover in her debut film, Boom (2003) was deleted from the initial versions of the DVDs , but is reportedly set to appear in the new versions. But she wasn’t bothered about her first on-screen kiss being made public too. “What’s there to react? And what’s new about those scenes?” she had said a couple of months ago. The actor had further added that she doesn’t deny having done scenes in the past she wasn’t comfortable with.

But Katrina is clearly excited to share screen space with Hrithik for the first time. “He is an amazingly talented person. I always wanted to work with him and I’m happy to have got the opportunity now. You can really learn a lot about focus, concentration and dedication from him,” she says. As ZNMD gears up for release, director Zoya Akhtar and her team have been serving up several promotional activities, including a tie-up with UTV Movies and the entire cast going on a road trip from Mumbai to Gurgaon. Ask Katrina about working with her second female director after Farah Khan (Tees Maar Khan, 2010) and she shrugs, “A female or male director... that’s not important to me. Actually, I don’t see any difference. You are either a good director or you are not, and hopefully I have met a good director (in Zoya Akhtar).”

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Motorola’s Latest Phone Comes as No Friend to Hackers

• By Mike Isaac

For phone modification junkies, the Android software platform comes with a host of mod-friendly features. It’s too bad, then, that Motorola’s latest Android phone lacks all of them.

Motorola’s Droid 3 features a locked boot loader, which is a program that loads the operating system software on every smartphone when it’s turned on. The company said it planned to change the policy this year.

The news first came from a Motorola support forumsrepresentative.

“As we’ve communicated, we plan to enable the unlockable-relockable boot loader in future software releases, starting in late 2011, where channel and operator partners will allow it,” said a Motorola spokesperson in a statement provided to Wired.com. “Droid 3 is not built on a software version that includes this feature.”

Locking down the boot loader is a big pain for those who want to modify their Android phone operating systems. Essentially, it drastically limits the extent of modification and customization you can accomplish on your phone. If you wanted to install a particularly popular piece of modding software like, say,CyanogenMod — a very popular custom Android build that optimizes a phone’s hardware performance and adds a number of nifty flourishes — with a locked boot loader, you’re out of luck.

In today’s smartphone landscape, handset manufacturers face pressure from wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T to lock down phone boot loaders. This is done especially to prohibit the potential installation of software used to do things that carriers don’t want you doing, like, say, capture licensed streaming content. There’s also software available that lets you tether your phone to your computer — providing it with an internet connection for free — a feature for which wireless companies normally charge users. Bypassing that charge means cutting into a carrier’s bottom line.

Motorola doesn’t want to deal with the tech support nightmare that widespread phone hacks entail. “If you brick your phone messing with it” — which basically means rendering the device useless, like an electronic “brick,” as it were — “we don’t want to have to fix it under warranty,” a Motorola representative wrote in a message board post.

Because of all this, hacker-unfriendly phones aren’t uncommon. Motorola’s Atrix debuted with a locked boot loader, as have many of the company’s phones since the release of the Droid 2. Motorola’s upcoming Photon 4G smartphone will also be locked down.

Android modification junkies aren’t happy about Motorola’s decisions. In March, one Motorola smartphone owner started an online petition, asking others who don’t agree with the company’s locked boot loader decisions to sign and bring up the issue on Moto’s Facebook page. As of this post’s publishing time, the petition has over 10,000 signatures.

Given the hardware specs on the Droid 3, it’s especially disappointing for hackers to see the phone debut as mod-unfriendly. The Droid 3 has a beefy dual-core 1GHz processor under the hood, which, when used in conjunction with modding software, can be overclocked to faster speeds.

The future isn’t entirely grim for phone hackers. Motorola continually promises a change in locked boot loader policy come late 2011, and other companies like Sony Ericsson have even begun to court the modding community, providing a detailed list of instructions on how to unlock the company’s phones.

It seems as if the predominant feeling is “we’ll believe it when we see it.”

“There’s not a single reason to believe that Motorola has truly changed their views,” wrote an angryMotorola message board user in a post. “We’re not saying you have to unlock all our devices now, but a little sign of good faith would be much appreciated.”

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Sony game phone strikes odd balance

By ROBERT EVATT World Staff Writer 

Anyone remember the N-Gage? In 2003, Nokia tried to marry a cellphone with a full-fledged video game system. The resulting taco-shaped, button-infested mass was, in a word, horrible, and nobody has tried since. 


At least until now, with Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play. This new device, which goes for $199 on Verizon Wireless' network, blends an Android smartphone with the controls of a portable gaming system. Unfortunately, this stone only kills one bird and slightly wounds the other. 


Let's start with the exterior. When closed it looks like your standard Android smartphone, with a dominant touchscreen and the four small Android navigation buttons. It's thicker than just about anything on the market, but it's nothing that will destroy your pants pocket. 


But rotate the Xperia Play to the side and slide the bottom out, and you've instantly got an array of PlayStation-like game controls. There's the directional pad, four buttons and even the shoulder buttons in the back. 


To save space, the PlayStation's two analog sticks have been replaced by two circular touchpads, which I'll talk more about later. 


Everything you'd expect from a phone running Android 2.3 is here. You can download hundreds of thousands of Android apps, take pictures and video, customize your home screens and even place phone calls if you're feeling crazy. It all runs fine. 


But the selling point is the games, and for the most part, the phone's controls work well. The d-pad and buttons do their job admirably, and anyone who has used a game controller will be set without a second thought. 


Unfortunately, the circular touchpads are a different story. When I played Gameloft's first-person shooter "Modern Warfare" knockoff "Modern Combat 2," the touchpads had me stumbling around like a drunken and easily killed lemur. I got a little better with practice, but I still found myself wishing for the tactile feedback you get with thumbsticks. 


The games looked great - then again, they look great on other Android phones. Nearly all of the three dozen games available that use the Xperia Play's controls are regular Android games that use the buttons rather than the touchscreen. Some play better than the vanilla versions and some don't, but regardless, you've seen them all before. 


The lone unique offering for the Xperia Play is "Crash Bandicoot," the 3D platformer that first came out for the original PlayStation. The game plays well, but it's an odd showcase for the phone, since the 15-year-old game really shows its age alongside the more advanced Android offerings. 


Sure, the phone just came out, and Sony briefly mentioned a handful of exclusive games at last month's Electronic Entertainment Expo. But there's no indication of when they'll arrive, and Sony seemed a lot more interested in plugging the upcoming PlayStation Vita, the successor to the PlayStation Portable, than upcoming smartphone games. Not an encouraging sign. 


At this point it's hard to recommend the Xperia Play. If you're a gamer, both Nintendo and Sony's portable game systems offer much more robust and unique gaming experiences on the go. If you're not a gamer, there's better and cheaper Android phones out there. Maybe things will improve with time, and at least it's better than the N-Gage. 

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Week in Apple: pirates versus iTunes Match, yet more iPhone rumors

By Jacqui Cheng

It was a short holiday week in the US, but we were still flush with new iPhone and iPad rumors. Ars also dug into some of the legal issues that might be involved with iTunes Match and music piracy, and we discussed exactly how much time iPhone users spend playing games in a month. If you need to catch up, here's the roundup:

WSJ: next iPhone to be "thinner and lighter" than iPhone 4: Sources for the Wall Street Journal claim that Apple's next-gen iPhone will have a "thinner and lighter" form factor, and that Apple might want 25 million of the devices from a single supplier.

Ask Ars: will iTunes Match be used to chase down music pirates?: Plenty of people are wondering if signing up for iTunes Match could reveal the questionable source of their copy of the Village People's "Cruisin." Will Apple use iTunes Match to sort the pirates out from those that actually pay for their music? Apple won't say, but legal experts don't believe they will.

Report: Apple orders 15 million iPhone 5s: Apple has ordered 15 million iPhone 5s from Taiwanese manufacturer Pegatron for shipment in September, according to DigiTimes.

Big bidding: Apple, Microsoft, RIM nab Nortel patents for $4.5 billion: A group of tech giants has entered a "staggering" winning bid of $4.5 billion for bankrupt Nortel's portfolio of 6,000+ patents which cover, among other things, 3G and 4G wireless networking. While it keeps the patents out of trollish hands, it won't help Android fight off the patent infringement lawsuits.

iPhone users spend 14.7 hours a month playing games: Nearly all smartphone users are willing to pay for games, but it's iPhone users who log the most hours with the games they buy.

Rumor: "iPad HD" with "Retina" display could launch this fall: The iPad line may get a "Retina" display model as early as this fall, but the new device might not be an "iPad 3."

Apple denied preliminary injunction against Amazon's "Appstore": Amazon can continue to use the term "app store" while Apple's trademark infringement suit continues, and Apple may have a hard time convincing the judge that infringement is even taking place.

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