Isadora blog

Reporter says Cameron's ex-aide knew about hacking

LONDON (AFP) – Prime Minister David Cameron was "either a liar or an idiot" to believe that his former media chief was not involved in phone hacking, a reporter claimed in newly published evidence Friday.

Freelance journalist Paul McMullan claimed that Andy Coulson, who until last month was Cameron's chief of communications, knew that reporters were hacking celebrities' phones when he was editor of the News of The World.

In written evidence to a parliamentary committee investigating the hacking scandal, McMullan said "everyone in the schoolyard did it" when Coulson worked at The Sun tabloid, before he moved to the News of The World.

"For what it is worth Andy Coulson knew a lot of people did it at The Sun on his 'Bizarre' (showbusiness) column and after that at NOTW," he wrote.

"As he sat a few feet from me in the newsroom he probably heard me doing it, laughing about it etc and told others to do it. I worked under Coulson for a year and a half at NOTW.

"The real scandal is Cameron would have been briefed: 'We can probably get away with this one,' when hiring Coulson, so Mr. Cameron is either a liar or an idiot."

Coulson was editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of The World in 2006, when the paper's royal editor, Clive Goodman, was arrested for hacking into voicemails belonging to Princes William and Harry.

When Goodman was jailed in January 2007, Coulson quit his job -- but insisted he had known nothing about the hacking, a position he maintained when Cameron hired him a few months later.

Amid ongoing revelations about the scandal, Coulson quit Cameron's team last month, saying the row was proving too distracting. He denies any wrongdoing.

A spokesman for Cameron told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that the allegations against the prime minister were "complete rubbish".

G-20 refuses to back US push on China's currency

SEOUL, South Korea – Leaders of 20 major economies on Friday refused to back a U.S. push to make China boost its currency's value, keeping alive a dispute that raises fears of a global trade war amid criticism that cheap Chinese exports are costing American jobs.

A joint statement issued by the leaders including President Barack Obama and China's Hu Jintao tried to recreate the unity that was evident when the Group of 20 rich and developing nations held its first summit two years ago during the global financial meltdown.

But deep divisions, especially over the U.S.-China currency dispute, left G-20 officials negotiating all night to draft a watered-down statement for the leaders to endorse.

"Instead of hitting home runs sometimes we're gonna hit singles. But they're really important singles," Obama told a news conference after the summit.

Other leaders also tried to portray the summit as a success, pointing to their pledges to fight protectionism and develop guidelines next year that will measure the imbalances between trade surplus and trade deficit countries.

The G-20's failure to adopt the U.S. stand has underlined Washington's reduced influence on the international stage, especially on economic matters. In another setback, Obama also failed to conclude a free trade agreement this week with South Korea.

The biggest disappointment for the United States was the pledge by the leaders to refrain from "competitive devaluation" of currencies. Such a statement is of little consequence since countries usually only devalue their currencies — making it less worth against the dollar — in extreme situations like a severe financial crisis.

The statement decided against using a slightly different wording favored by the U.S. — "competitive undervaluation," which would have shown the G-20 taking a stronger stance on China's currency policy.

The crux of the dispute is Washington's allegations that Beijing is artificially keeping its currency, the yuan, weak to gain a trade advantage.

U.S. business lobbies say that a cheaper yuan costs American jobs because production moves to China to take advantage of low labor costs and undervalued currency.

A stronger yuan would shrink the U.S. trade deficit with China, which is on track this year to match its 2008 record of $268 billion, and encourage Chinese companies to sell more to their own consumers rather than rely so much on the U.S. and others to buy low-priced Chinese goods.

But the U.S. position has been undermined by its own central bank's decision to print $600 billion to boost a sluggish economy, which is weakening the dollar.

Also, developing countries like Thailand and Indonesia fear that much of the "hot" money will flood their markets, where returns are higher. Such emerging markets could be left vulnerable to a crash if investors later decide to pull out and move their money elsewhere.

Obama said China's currency policy is an "irritant" not just for the United States but for many of its other trading partners. The G-20 countries — ranging from industrialized nations such as U.S. and Germany to developing ones like China, Brazil and India — account for 85 percent of the world's economic activity.

"China spends enormous amounts of money intervening in the market to keep it undervalued so what we have said is it is important for China in a gradual fashion to transition to a market based system," Obama said.

The dispute is threatening to resurrect destructive protectionist policies like those that worsened the Great Depression in the 1930s. The biggest fear is that trade barriers will send the global economy back into recession.

The possibility of a currency war "absolutely" remains, said Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega.

Friday's statement is also unlikely to resolve the most vexing problem facing the G-20 members: how to fix a global economy that's long been marked by huge U.S. trade deficits with exporters like China, Germany and Japan.

Americans consume far more in foreign goods and services from these countries than they sell abroad.

The G-20 leaders said they will try to reduce the gaps between nations running large trade surpluses and those running deficits.

The "persistently large imbalances" in current accounts — a broad measure of a nation's trade and investment with the rest of the world — would be measured by what they called "indicative guidelines" to be determined later.

The leaders called for the guidelines to be developed by the G-20, along with help from the International Monetary Fund and other global organizations, and for finance ministers and central bank governors to meet in the first half of next year to discuss progress.

Analysts were not convinced.

"Leaders are putting the best face on matters by suggesting that it is the process that matters rather than results," said Stephen Lewis, chief economist for London-based Monument Securities.

"The only concrete agreement seems to be that they should go on measuring the size of the problem rather than doing something about it."

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Associated Press writers Erica Werner, Kelly Olsen, Jean H. Lee, Greg Keller, Luis Alonso and Kim Hyung-jin in Seoul contributed to this report.

Facebook Messages Wish List: What Came True?

When Facebook announced a Monday event that was rumored to be the launch of "Facebook E-Mail," weof things the social-networking service should announce. Did we get what we wanted?

Yes and no. Instead of introducing a robust Gmail competitor, the company , not a traditional e-mail client. There's an inbox and an @facebook.com e-mail address, but it's more tightly integrated with chat and text rather than a standalone e-mail service.

"To be clear, Messages is not e-mail," Facebook said in a . "There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation."

So what did we get?

1. Message Folders: Yes, sort of. Facebook is taking atype of approach with its "Other" folder. The inbox will only include messages from friends and their friends; everything else – including messages from friends not on Facebook – will go to the "Other" folder until you move it to the Inbox. There is also a junk folder.

2. Personal E-mail Address: Yes. Facebook said it will offer an @facebook.com e-mail address to "every person on Facebook who wants one," but the company stressed that "Messages is not e-mail." Facebook employees, meanwhile, will use @fb.com e-mail addresses going forward.

3. Multiple Client Support: Sorry, no IMAP here.

4. Offline Mail Reader: Strictly speaking, there's no offline access, but that depends on how you view text message access.

5. Permanently Delete Messages: Yes, says Facebook. "To permanently delete a conversation from your messages, simply open the conversation, then select 'Delete' from the Actions drop-down menu. All of the conversation history will be permanently cleared from your messages," the company said on it FAQ. There is also the option to "archive," which will temporarily hide a message.

6. Bulletproof Privacy: No one use the word "bulletproof," but the same settings that apply to Facebook as a whole apply to Messages, so take that for what it's worth. You can change your message settings to only allow Facebook friends to send you a message, which will bounce messages that come from non-Facebook acquaintances.

7. Support Microsoft ActiveSync: Nope, try again next time.

8. Multiple addresses: Facebook didn't specify exactly how many people you could add to a conversation, but there is the option for multiple people. Open the actions menu and select "add people" to do so. You can't add people to a private conversation between you and one other person, however, Facebook said.

9. Multiple Links: Messages allows you to attach photos, videos, or documents. To add one from your computer, click the paperclip icon next to the message you're composing. For a new photo, click the camera icon and you can attach a photo taken with your webcam; for videos, click the same camera icon but also the "Switch to video" icon. There's no apparent limit to the number of pics or attachments, or the size; if you look like you're spamming, though, Facebook will take action. And, of course, you can be unfriended.

10. Better anti-spam: As mentioned above, you can restrict your Facebook inbox to only friends, so that would prevent unwanted messages, in theory. If you do receive spam, Facebook added a "Report Spam" option in the Actions menu. To view spam messages, click the "Junk" link at the bottom of the page.

Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART]

If you think teens aren't a chatty demographic on , think again. We've seen many teen culture trends hit the top of the charts over the , and this week, Fox's Teen Choice Awards dethroned Inception, which had carried the top spot for nearly a month.

The explosion of chatter from theseems to have left its mark on Twitter, as the regular goings-on in the football world have rarely left the top topics since the end of the tournament.

Movies continue to trend solidly during these summer months, and the week-long Muslim holiday of Ramadan made a strong showing as observers tweeted their spirituality from all over the world.

The best news for long-time Twitter trend fans? The legendaryappears to be back with some new staying power, thanks to a cadre of Twitter-happy "Beliebers."

Have a look-see at the complete chart below, compiled by our friends over at . Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart.

You can check past Twitter trends in oursection as well as read more about this past week's trends on .

Top Twitter Trends This Week: 8/7 - 8/13

Rank

Choice Domain Names Pitched as Investments

Forget real estate, the stock market or Internet startups, the new way to make fast money is to invest in domain names, argues a domain name brokerage that will auction off a passel of domain names on Wednesday in New York.

Stocks.com, Rate.com, Quotes.com, Reggae.com, Cable.com, Artist.com, Alcohol.com and voters.com arethe 934 names up on the block at this auction. Oversee.net, through its SnapNames service, will oversee the auction, which it expects to bring in millions of dollars.

While registrars such asandoffer the ability for anyone to own an previously unclaimed Internet domain name, usually for less than US$20, a secondary market of already claimed but seemingly valuable domain names has long existed. And now the brokers in the field are pitching these domain names as an investment opportunity.

For companies that wish to increase their online presence, the appeal of buying a premium domain name is to "own the category" that the business is in, said Jeff Kupietzky, the CEO of Oversee.net. He referred to how Barnes & Noble owns books.com and Johnson & Johnson owns baby.com. Such names can generate immense traffic just by the virtue of being a commonly used word with an attached .com that curious people will type into browsers.

In addition to targeting companies slow to realize the value in a choice Web address, Oversee.net is also hoping to attract buyers who may not even have business interest in a particular domain name itself. Just buying a domain name, Kupietzky noted, can be a good investment opportunity.

"Domains, really, are almost like commercial real estate. They're investments on their own," Kupietzky said. He called them "Internet real-estate." Purchasers can buy a name with no intent on attaching it to some enterprise, but rather hold on to it, or perhaps run some ads on the site, and then resell it a few years later, hopefully at a profit.

"People could be buying, either for the sake of development, or because they expect to sell the name to somebody else," Kupietzky said. Verisignthat there are about 193 million top-level domain names registered across the Internet.

The domain name aftermarket seems to be a growing one. Another domain name broker, Sedo, has estimated that domain name resales generate about $500 million a year, and that the market grew in the second quarter of this year by 38 percent. At least one investment fund has beenostensibly devoted only to investing in domain names.

Founded in 2000, Oversee.Net now owns over a million domain names itself. The company developed computerized algorithms to determine which as-of-yet unsold domain names have potential value, by scouring the Web for frequently used words and search terms. "It's much more art than science for evaluating the domain name for the purpose of reselling," Kupietzky said.

In May, the company sold Slots.com for $5.5 million, and dating.com for $1.75 million, both on the same day. On Tuesday, the company sold a set of t-shirt related domain names (Tshirt.com, T-shirt.com, T-shirts.com, Tee-shirts.com) for $1.265 million.

The company also offers a set of management services for other domain name brokers, including appraisals and escrow services.

Thus far, the company has held about 10 auctions over the past four years. This week's auction will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. eastern time. Bids can also beonline, via a simulcast. A live caller, who has auctioned homes, cattle and all manner of other physical assets, will oversee the proceedings.

"The benefit of the live action is to allow everyone in the room, and on the Internet, to immediately know the value of a domain name through the auction process," Kupietzky said. The reserve, or the minimum bidding price, for the highest profile names, such as stocks.com, will likely start at $1 million or more.

Bidders are required to preregister, so Oversee.net can check to see if they have the financial wherewithal to purchase a name. Through a partner, Oversee.net can offer financing for up to 80 percent of the cost of the name, using the name as collateral.

Some of the domain names will also come with complete businesses as well. "We're seeing a model where the domain name has all the value and [the business] just comes with it," said Kupietzky.

"Think of it like commercial real estate. If I sold you a property on Columbus Circle in New York, there may be an old apartment building on it. While you know the apartment building brings in some rent, the real value is the location. Ultimately, you will tear that down and build a much more expensive property," he said.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at . Joab's e-mail address is