LAS VEGAS  — Technology innovations are often blended into buzzword trends like “curation” and “social graph.” This is shaping up to be the year of “ecosystem.”

What does that mean? Depends on who you ask. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) chairman Eric Schmidt offered up his view during a panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Schmidt started with a canned answer about how he defines ecosystem — “scalable network platforms that deliver the best customer value” — but he warmed up when the talk turned to Google’s Android operating system.

“We even have Android in refrigerators now,” Schmidt said. “By open-source we mean, ‘take it and have fun.’ And people have.”

The panel moderator, CNET’s Molly Wood, pointed out the pitfall of that strategy: hundreds of devices are running dozens of various versions of Android. But as soon as she said the word “fragmentation,” Schmidt cut her off.
“You have to be careful with that word, fragmentation,” he said.

“So what would you say?” Wood asked.

“I would say differentiation,” Schmidt replied. “Differentiation is positive, fragmentation is negative.”

Whatever you call it, the approach is working: Google activated 3.7 million Android phones on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Schmidt revealed.

But Wood pressed the fragmentation issue, asking Schmidt whether the new Android operating system — 4.0, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich — is a chance to “give [Google] a little more control.”

Schmidt replied: “Well, control … I mean, we want to get everybody under Ice Cream Sandwich, but we absolutely allow our developers to add or change anything, as long as they’re not breaking anything.”

He added: “The great thing is if you don’t like one phone, you can choose another. You’re not bound to certain hardware.”

That potshot was aimed at Apple, whose iOS appears only on its own devices.

Schmidt’s digs at competitors continued when Wood brought up Internet-connected TV and the success of Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) gesture-controlled Kinect system.

“How big a barrier is it that Microsoft seems to have all the pieces in place, with the Kinect and the Xbox and all, but hasn’t really gotten it together yet?” Wood asked.

“Microsoft is trapped in an architectural problem it might not get through,” Schmidt replied.

The blunt comment drew a few laughs from the audience. Schmidt shrugged them off saying, “My sense is that they’re going to get there. It’s a problem of user interface design. It’s a matter of getting people with great taste into the company, designing.”

Next on Schmidt’s slam list: Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500), whose Kindle Fire tablet runs on a highly altered version of Android. Schmidt said Google welcomed the customization, but that the tablet “has some limitations, [which] have been well documented.”

Wood tried to close the discussion with a question based on the panel’s theme: “Which is most important for the ecosystem: Hardware, content, services or software?”

Schmidt went the politician’s route. He tossed that query out and swapped in his own.

“They work together,” he said. “I’ll answer a different question: What was the most surprising thing in 2011?” Schmidt asked himself, as attendees laughed.

“It’s always surprising to people when they realize how significant these ecosystems are,” he continued. “I saw this with respect to Apple, Amazon and even Facebook.”

The open ecosystem allows multiple types of players to work together, Schmidt said. That means “everyone can be a winner” in a financial sense.

“All of these people can operate without your knowledge or control,” he said. “It’s about making it open enough so that the creative people, the app developers, the consumers — you build something tremendously valuable for everyone.” To top of page

To keep your personal information and your finances safe, here are five things you need to know about online security.

1. You are now under attack by machines
After a hacking scare at Gawker Media last year, security firm Duo Security showed that it could crack 200,000 user passwords in under an hour using a “brute force” attack, in which computers try millions of passwords until one works.

Popular picks like “123456″ take seconds to crack, but one with at least eight upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols will hold out long enough to send hackers searching for easier prey.

Online password generators like Random.org can help create a strong one.

2. Hackers look for your keys in public …

Do you have photos of your kids or dog posted on Facebook?

Make sure they aren’t useful to crooks: A password or security question based on, say, a pet’s name is vulnerable, notes security expert and former hacker Kevin Mitnick. (Last year a Florida man was charged with using such info to hack the e-mail of celebrities, including Mila Kunis and Scarlett Johansson.)

So crank up your privacy settings — and don’t assume your mother’s maiden name is a secret.

3. … Or just ask for them

A strong password is pointless if you reveal it to others.

You’ve probably heard of “phishing” — e-mails or fake websites that try to persuade you to give up your own info. Poor grammar is one red flag, says Rob Rachwald of data security firm Imperva. But the latest version is harder to spot: “Spear phishing” is realistic-looking, personalized e-mail that appears to be from a familiar source, like your spouse. When in doubt, just pick up the phone.

4. It’s easy to limit the damage

The good news about password hacking? It needn’t be a disaster — if you simply maintain unique passwords for each account and change them regularly. (Sound hard? Read No. 5, below.)
Top 10 looming computer security threats of 2012

According to Experian, nearly two-thirds of web users rely on the same password for at least two websites. That enabled hackers to compromise 90,000 Sony gaming accounts last October using passwords stolen from other websites.

5. You don’t need a photographic memory

The average Internet user has 25 password-protected accounts to keep track of, according to a Microsoft study.
Send The Help Desk your money questions

A sticky-note cheat sheet can be safe if you omit or scramble some of the info. But a password manager may be your best bet: Free software like KeePass can store log-in information in an encrypted database on your own computer.  To top of page

NEW YORK — Think your programming skills are world class? Facebook wants you to prove it at its second annual Hacker Cup challenge.

“Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook,” the company said in a blog post announcing this year’s competition. “Whether we’re building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at our new headquarters, we’re always hacking to find better ways to solve problems.”
Open to coders anywhere in the world, Facebook’s competition pits participants against each other in five rounds of programming challenges. The first kicks off January 20 with a 72-hour qualification round. Three more online rounds will thin the field down to the final 25 competitors, who will be flown out to Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters for a final competition in March.

The winner will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Last year, nearly 12,000 programmers participated in the Hacker’s Cup. Petr Mitrichev, a Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) employee from Russia, took home the top prize. (In a nicely ironic twist, Mitrichev wore his Google employee badge during the competition.)
Tech companies have an ulterior motive for running hacking contest: They’re a great way to find skilled programmers, one of the industry’s scarcest resources. Google runs an annual Code Jam contest, which Mitrichev won in 2006.
Facebook prides itself on its hacker culture, and dangles coding puzzles on its recruiting page with the slogan: “Solve programming challenges. Get a phone interview.” The company frequently holds marathon staff hackathons as part of its product-development process.

Facebook also likes to crowdsource its site hacking. In August, the social network launched a “bug bounty” security initiative, inviting security researchers to send details of any Facebook vulnerabilities they uncover. Facebook offers up a finder’s fee of at least $500 to those who find security holes.

NEW YORK — After four leaderless months, Yahoo named Scott Thompson as its new CEO on Wednesday — choosing an outsider to take over the helm despite shareholders’ calls to sell the company.

Thompson was previously the president of PayPal, an eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) subsidiary. His appointment, which becomes official January 9, follows the ouster of former CEO Carol Bartz — who was unceremoniously fired by the company’s board via phone in September.
Shares of Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) closed 3.1% lower Wednesday.

In a prepared statement, Thompson called Yahoo “an industry icon” with a “rich history.” Although that’s true, Yahoo has struggled mightily in recent years. The company gave up on search two years ago, a market that it once led. It is also losing ground with its other cash cow, display advertising, to new entrants to the market such as Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Facebook.

On a conference call following the announcement, journalists and analysts hammered Thompson on those points. He said he needs time on the job to develop strong answers.

“It’s too early for me to have any informed opinion as to the display space, what’s going on there and what’s happening next,” Thompson said on the call. “I have a lot to learn, and it’s still very early days … but down in that data we’re going to find ways to innovate and compete.”

Roy Bostock, chairman of Yahoo’s board of directors, was also on the call and jumped in to answer many of the hardball questions.

“What we’re doing at Yahoo, you can call it a turnaround, but it’s really building on strong assets,” Bostock said.

Will Yahoo sell itself? Despite Bostock’s insistence Yahoo can stand alone, the company’s weakness has attracted buyout interest from a long list of both private equity firms and tech titans. Reports in late October said Google was preparing a bid, in addition to Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), which offered to buy Yahoo for more than $47 billion in 2008 and was turned down. Reports last month said Chinese Internet company Alibaba, of which Yahoo owns a stake, is preparing a takeover bid.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and other board members have privately told four major private equity firms that the board would not support a takeover offer for the entire company, Fortune reported on Wednesday.

Several groups of activist shareholders had pushed Yahoo’s board to sell the company, but bringing in an outside CEO makes that possibility more remote.

An analyst on the conference call asked Thompson whether he “see[s] Yahoo as public or private” in the future.

Thompson got out half a word before Bostock jumped in: “We are a public company, with roughly a $20 billion market cap. We don’t see that changing right now.”

But earlier in the call, Bostock said Yahoo is “considering a wide range of business investments” and other options. He stressed several times during the call that “the primary focus will be on core business.”

That leaves Yahoo room to shed more of its vast product portfolio. It began winnowing in late 2010, killing off struggling services like its Buzz community news site and aging AltaVista search engine. Yahoo also thinned its blogs and sold off bookmarking service Delicious.

Thompson said his aim is “to return this business to one of the great iconic brands. I have a core belief that what happens in the next five years, and the next ten, is almost impossible to imagine.”

He closed the call by saying, “I’m genuinely excited to be here. I would not be here if I didn’t think the future of this brand could be spectacular.”

Yahoo chief financial officer Tim Morse had been serving as interim CEO, and he will return to his former position once Thompson takes the helm. Morse will also join the company’s board. To top of page

Looks like it could take awhile for new Twitter user Rupert Murdoch to get the hang of things.

For starters, the 80-year-old media mogul, who signed up for Twitter over the New Year’s holiday, might want to make sure the people he follows are real.

As of Monday, the oft-controversial Murdoch was following a grand total of four people on the social networking site. One of them, at first glance, appears to be Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page.

Except that it’s not Larry Page but a parody account that’s part of a university project.

“This is a fake account – part of a series created for @plaidavenger’s class at Virginia Tech,” the owner of the account tweeted Monday in reply to a follower asking about it after seeing an interaction with Murdoch. It wasn’t clear Monday whether the News Corporation CEO was aware of the misunderstanding.

The Twitter chat started with “Plaid Larry Page” welcoming the magnate to the site. “Welcome @rupertmurdoch to Twitter! Could Google+ be next?” he wrote Sunday.

Murdoch’s reply: “Maybe soon, but I’m getting killed for fooling around here and friends frightened what I may really say!”

Indeed. Less than a day into his Twitter tenure, Murdoch had been publicly chastised by his wife (fellow Twitter newbie Wendi Deng) for a tweet saying that “maybe Brits have too many holidays for [a] broke country.”

He quickly backed down, deleting the tweet in question.

Murdoch tweets support for Rick Santorum

It’s hard to figure out what to make of Murdoch’s other three follows, other than that he appears to be taking his new venture into Web and social-media culture seriously. Some have ventured it’s part of a “charm offensive” after a year in which he was embroiled in a phone-hacking controversy at his now-defunct “News of the World” newspaper.

Alan Sugar, a British magnate and reality-TV judge, as well as Twitter nemesis of CNN’s own Piers Morgan, is one of them.

The other two are Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus — the man behind such online time-killers as “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars.”

Online lotteries and poker may be poised to become legal thanks to a new decision by the Justice Department reinterpreting the Wire Act of 1961.

The decision, written in September but made public last Friday, found the Act’s prohibition of wagers via telecommunications crossing state lines or international borders refers only to bets on a “sporting event or contest” and not to lottery tickets sold online. The decision doesn’t mention online poker, but some reason that the ruling will pave the way for online poker.

“The United States Department of Justice has given the online gaming community a big, big present,” Prof. I. Nelson Rose wrote on his blog, Gambling and the Law.

“If the Wire Act is limited to bets on sports events and races, what other federal anti-gambling statutes are left?” wrote Rose. “There are prohibitions on interstate lotteries, but Powerball and the other multi-state lotteries show how easily these can be gotten around, even before Congress passed an express exemption for state lotteries. And poker is not a lottery under federal law.” Rose continued that since the Wire Act refers to bets on an event, poker would be except because poker is itself the event.

The DOJ has aggressively enforced the ban on online poker. In April, the agency shut down three foreign-based online poker firms — Absolute Poker, Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker — charging that each of the companies had violated the law by serving U.S. residents.

Dropbox is trying out a neat new feature that will give it magical Photo Stream-like abilities. Everybody’s favorite cloud-storage app has added photo and video import.

In a new “Experimental Forum Build” of the app for Windows, Mac and Linux, photos and videos will be slurped up from any memory card or camera connected to the computer. These will then be sent spinning off to the DropBox servers, ready for access by all your other Dropbox-connected devices.

There have already been some well reasoned complaints over in the Dropbox forums. For instance, some people might take so many photos that they don’t want them all clogging up their limited cloud storage. This feature also adds complexity to the Dropbox application itself, when it’s already pretty easy to have a third-party app store selected photos inside your Dropbox folder.

On the other hand, anything that makes backing up photos easier can only be a good thing. And as most nerds are at home right now enjoying Mom’s home cooking, mightn’t it be a good idea to make sure Mom’s precious photos are also stored somewhere a little safer than the hard drive of her rickety old PC?

I think it’s a great idea, although I won’t be recommending the feature to my parents until it makes it into an official non-beta build. And Dropbox has one big advantage over the current version of iCloud’s Photo Stream: You can delete those embarrassing Christmas photos.

Be honest: has Facebook chat ever been your favorite form of instant messaging?

For many of us, Gchat, Skype or even AIM are our preferred defaults.

Now, a new gimmick is making us like Facebook’s built-in chat function a whole lot more. As demonstrated in the photo above, you can make the profile pictures of Facebook users and pages show up inside your chat windows.

Here’s how:

1. Start chatting with someone (pretty simple).

2. When you’d like to refer to a mutual friend or, say, Coca Cola, you dump their profile id (either their name or a string of numbers for those users who haven’t claimed their choice URL) into double brackets. So, that would be [[cocacola]] for a picture of Coke, [[zuck]] for Mark Zuckerberg and [[mashable]] for the logo of where your learned about this new feature, and so on.

3. Amaze everyone on Facebook chat with this cool new gimmick.

What do you think, will inserting your friend’s faces bring the end of the emoticon era, or will the Internet forever be dominated by the : ) face?

His fans are literally throwing money at him

The Chinese artist, activist and Internet sensation Ai Weiwei has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from fans who want to help him pay back taxes of $2.3 million.

Many are simply throwing the money into his Beijing compound.

“His supporters have folded 100 yuan notes — the equivalent of $15.75 — into paper airplanes that glided into the compound. Others wrapped the money around pieces of fruit and hurled it over the wall,” the LA Times wrote on its World Now blog. “Or more traditionally Chinese, they stuffed it into red envelopes.”

Ai Weiwei pays $1.3M tax bond over jail fears

If you’re not one of his 110,000 Twitter followers, you may never have heard of Ai. But the architect who designed the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 has become one of China’s most noted political dissidents and online activists.
At the recent PopTech conference in Maine, sat down with Alison Klayman, who spent several years following Ai for an upcoming documentary called “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” to learn more about his fame in China and his mastery of the Internet.

“The truth is I don’t believe it’s his art — in terms of what’s shown in a museum — that may have put him in the position that he’s in,” Klayman said, referring to Ai’s three-month detention, which ended in June, and the fact that he’s been targeted by Chinese authorities as a dissident.

“It’s really about how his life is his art. It’s about his activities, how he gives interviews very freely. He does not self-censor what he thinks,” she said. “It’s also the organizing he’s done online. Part of his art includes underground documentaries that he films with collaborators and posts online for free. They have to do with the questions and conversation that he curates online — first on his blog, until it was shut down, and now on Twitter.”

Ai was able to use the Internet, to a degree, to circumvent authorities, she said.

“In a society where all official media is subject to censorship — from micro-blogs up to party papers — that’s also an incredibly subversive thing to be able to connect to people,” Klayman said. “And the truth is censorship cannot be an all-knowing eye, and people are having very interesting conversations even within the firewall — and on Twitter, which is blocked in China, so people have to use technology to go outside the firewall.”

Ai came late to technology but adopted it with gusto, she said.

“Ai Weiwei never used a computer — never really knew how to type — before 2005,” she said. “And in 2005 he was invited by Sina.com, which is a big Internet company in China, to have a celebrity blog. He was a well-known architect and artist, and he decided to take that on. His father was also a poet, so he was also interested in seeing how his writing chops or his literary chops were. And he immediately was drawn to the medium. He’s always been looking for ways to communicate — and suddenly he saw the Internet.”

Last year, Klayman asked Ai about the biggest paradigm shift in his life.

“His answer to me was the Internet. ‘The Internet is what affected me and has opened up so many doors and has ignited me.’” she said.

“Now, as I’m completing the documentary … I really understand what that means.”

Few people seem eager to return to the news articles they didn’t have time to read during the day, and even fewer are willing to pay for that privilege.

So to attract new users, Readability began offering its news-inbox service for free starting Tuesday evening. Previously, people had to pay $5 per month to access the tools for saving articles to their accounts and synchronizing them between computers, e-readers, phones and tablets.

Readability is in one of several services, which also includes Instapaper and the venture-capital-backed Read It Later, for bookmarking a lengthy article to revisit when in a more leisurely setting. Some people prefer reading on a Kindle or iPad, rather than on a computer or smartphone, and these services typically allow people to customize fonts, strip out ads and other distractions, and read on a device without an Internet connection on, say, a subway ride.

In addition to the free Readability service, the New York software developer will also offer an application that runs on the iPhone and iPad. The app should be available in Apple’s App Store, also for free, as early as this week, and people will be able to subscribe through the app, Readability co-founder Richard Ziade said in a phone interview.

Readability was spun out of consulting firm Arc90. It first launched its subscription Web service in February, and after a disagreement with Apple over financial terms, the company said in March that it would eschew the App Store in favor of tools that could be accessed exclusively through a Web browser.

Beyond the inbox service, Readability also offers website publishers a button so that users can choose to read on the site without distractions from ads. About 4.4 million articles are accessed through Readability’s system a month, Ziade said.

However, Readability’s paid service, which is designed to give most of the revenue to the publishers whose links are being read, has only managed to attract between 2,000 and 10,000 subscribers, he said.

“It’s been quite clubbish,” Ziade said. “We tell you to get your credit card out after, like, the second click, which is unheard of on the Web.”

The free version of Readability will limit users’ inboxes to 30 articles each, and they won’t be able to access links saved in their archive folders until they pay the $5 monthly fee. Sending an inbox full of articles to a Kindle will also require a subscription.

A rival, Read It Later, sells its mobile apps for $3. Another called Instapaper, which says it has about a million subscribers, took an alternate route when the one-man startup announced in April that it would stop offering a free version. Founder Marco Arment said then that the free app brought more users but that they were unhappy with the limits imposed on it. As a result, they were publicly tarnishing the app’s reputation with negative reviews.

Arment, who has advised Readability in the past, declined to comment for this article. In an interview with in May, he said, “I think a lot of people are getting a little bit tired of what comes along with being free.”

A greater concern for these small software companies is the lion in the room. Starting in the latest Mac operating system called Lion, Apple added a feature called Reading List to its Safari browser allowing users to temporarily save links. The newest iPad and iPhone software then allows users to freely access those same articles and by clicking a button called Reader, removes the ads. Apple’s Reader tool happens to be based on the work at Arc90 that eventually became Readability.

Arment has said, in his optimistic view, that the recent developments at Apple could introduce more people to the concept of article inboxes, and when they want more powerful features, maybe they’ll buy Instapaper. However, Ziade sees Apple’s moves as competition, but he said Apple leaves an opening for other apps to flourish because the Safari tools won’t work on every platform.

Readability is soldiering on, and the company will begin allowing developers to build apps that integrate deeply with its service. It is holding a New York event on Thursday to announce a major partnership with Longform.org.

“There’s a real surge of interest in long-form, generally, on the Web,” said Matthew Howard, a director for the New York Review of Books. “It’s kind of exciting to have these tools coming out that are bringing new readers to this kind of stuff.”