大象传媒

A forum for fraudsters

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Aug 08, 17:03 GMT

In the last few days, I've entered a whole new web world. It's a place where people speak of getting "dumps... sniffed from ATMs" or using "blinds to cash out" or getting data through "rj 45 taps." The language belongs to a criminal community - the people who make a living out of credit card fraud.

They gather to swap tips and appeal for information on a number of web forums, and the one we've been looking at features some quite astonishingly brazen messages. The one which really caught our attention was about an attempt to use thousands of stolen US credit card details in British supermarkets. You can read the whole of it here.

The discussion on the crooks' forum is a bit of a wake-up call for all those who think that the introduction of chip-and-pin in the UK has wiped out card fraud. It has certainly made it harder - but the fact that the United States has yet to adopt the system gives the crooks a big opportunity in a crime which the internet has helped turn into a globalised business. So, as in this case, British fraudsters can buy stolen credit card details from the US and use them here because retailers still have to allow the "swipe and sign" option for overseas cards without a chip. Equally, card details stolen from UK consumers can be sold overseas for use in countries without chip-and-pin.

The author of the message appealing for information on where to use his cards - and offering "a ps3, 10 bottle of vodka or jd for weekend" in return - also has another post on the forum, generously offering advice on how to steal credit card details from cash machines. His guide to an "ATM skimmer" features photographs and technical details of a machine which is apparently attached to an ATM and then sends data to a mobile phone. Let's hope the police and the banks are studying this website too, and working out how to foil the fraudsters.

But a policeman I contacted admitted that it's a huge struggle to keep track of what's happening on these fraud forums - and virtually impossible to act against sites that are usually based abroad.

The fraudster describes his "interests" in his profile on the forum as: "Get rich... or Die Trying :)". By the sound of it, getting rich is still far too easy.

I suppose all of this is more proof that the internet is a brilliant way of organising people around the world with common interests. How sad that, all too often, those interest are criminal.

Continue reading "A forum for fraudsters"

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The Scrabulous puzzle

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Aug 08, 10:46 GMT

I promised the answers to the little Scrabble/Scrabulous puzzle I set earlier this week - and here it is. The six words were DELUDED, OBLOQUY, IDIOTIC, OPENING, UNHAPPY and CABBAGE, which I managed to fit on the board in the manner shown in the picture.

I reckon that adds up to a score of 162, plus 50 for getting all seven letters out first go, so 212. Someone called "dashing dave" was first to post the answers.

But most of you seemed more preoccupied with wading into an argument about ithe rights and wrongs of the affair. Some championed the right of the Agarwalla brothers - who created Scrabulous - to give Facebook users a better twist on Scrabble than its makers could provide. Others felt Mattel and Hasbro had a perfect right to battle to protect their intellectual property.

But in this war of words you seem to be voting with your feet, and that's bad news for the official Scrabble. The Agarwalla brothers have already launched a Facebook game called Wordscraper, which has a different board and circular tiles to get round the copyright problem. It has a quarter of a million users, as compared to the 71,000 now using the official worldwide version of Scrabble on Facebook - a figure which has actually fallen in the last few days.

And it looks as though more players, desperate for their fix, may be heading for the Scrabulous website and playing the game there. The result? Less traffic for Facebook - and the prospect of a new punch-up over intellectual property between the Agarwallas and Hasbro and Mattel. Now, who's got a seven-letter, high-scoring word for that?

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Scrabulous users - stunned, bemused,baffled.

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 25 Aug 08, 11:24 GMT

My inbox is filling up with the grief-stricken, the angry, the lost and the desperate. Who are they? Sad obsessives who played Scrabulous on Facebook. They had been through a spasm of anxiety a few weeks back when the word game - which some may think resembles a popular offline board game - disappeared from the American site after legal action by Hasbro, but somehow assumed that it would never happen to them.

Now though Mattel - which owns Scrabble outside the US and Canada - has deprived British (and I assume other) users of their drug and they are not happy. One even suggested that the 大象传媒 should rouse itself from its Bank Holiday torpor and give ample coverage of this event of earth-shattering importance. Well I've tried to convince the news editors that the disappearance of a much-loved word game from a popular social network is more significant than some Democratic convention(happens every four years, doesn't it?) or the return of our victorious Olympic athletes (similar argument) but they remain to be convinced.

So it's dirty work but I'm going to have to do it . However, you're going to have to do a little work yourselves. Assume you have a rack of seven tiles and a board with which to spell out the key words of the great Scrabulous disaster.

EEDDDLU

This word sums up the attitude of all those who somehow thought that a game which looks and feels exactly like Scrabble would be permitted by Hasbro and Mattel to go on serving millions of Facebook users around the world, while reaping a steady flow of advertising dollars for its young Indian creators. You might as well expect Rolex to endorse those people selling "Rolex" watches on street markets worldwide, or Viacom to say, "Hey, YouTube, great to see our content on a whole new platform."

LQOYUOB

A fabulous word(and could be high-scoring) which describes what has been directed at Hasbro and Mattel on a number of Facebook groups. "What the HELL ..... where is my scrabulous, I feel sick to my stomach". "I am seething MAD....I had abt 10 games going on and now they have just taken it away????? This isnt fair...". "CURSE YOU HASBRO / MATTEL!!!!!!!! I'm going home to cut up my deluxe scrabble set and feed it to the cat."

It seems capital letters and mass exclamation marks are the natural online response to any traumatic event these days - even for the highly literate Scrabulous crowd. But it does show how powerful a brand an online application can build within a very short space of time. Is there any other Facebook application whose disappearance would cause such grief and anger?

TIIOCID

This word is how some (not the 大象传媒, of course) might characterise the stance of Hasbro and Mattel. Could they really not come to some kind of accommodation with the makers of Scrabulous? Have they enhanced the Scrabble brand - and their own reputations - by their actions? And, if they were going to remove Scrabulous, could they have not replaced it with one official game instead of two - one for American and Canadian users, another for the rest? It's a serious setback for transatlantic relations - two nations not just divided by a common language, but by the lack of a common word game.

OPGNIEN

One of these has now appeared for any other platform that might seek to attract the smart, and presumably prosperous and time-rich crowd that plays Scrabulous. It could be the perfect pastime for a mobile phone with a decent screen - and so far none of the games that have appeared on the new iPhone have broken away from the pack to establish a big lead. Or maybe the first Android phone will feature a compelling way of wasting time trying to work out how to score maximum points with a dodgy word like Qi?

PNYUPAH

And that is how Facebook executives may be feeling. In May last year they were acclaimed for throwing open the social network's doors to outside developers and thus making it a far more "sticky" place for its users, at no cost. "Scrabulous" was a particularly "sticky" application, and some of its fans may now feel they have little reason to spend much time with Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's little firm claimed it was just a playground where users and developers could enjoy themselves as they liked, at their own risk, with no comeback for the network's owner. But, like Google's YouTube, Facebook has now grown into a big media business, and other firms see no reason why it should profit from their intellectual property.

BBGACEA

This, believe it or not, is the name of my mongrel, and it sums up the dog's dinner Mattel has made of its official Facebook Scrabble application. Every time you open it you get "a message from our sponsors", and the first message I got told me that I had won a free iPhone. Is this kind of spam really going to convince Scrabulous users to transfer their allegiance? It does not seem to be working so far - the worldwide version had only attracted 75,000 users when I last looked, as compared with the millions who used Scrabulous. What's more, those users have given it very poor reviews, with an average rating of 1.6 stars out of 5.

All of these words will fit together onto a conventional Scrabble board, and should not prove a challenge for any moderately skilled player. But it might give some of those tortured Scrabulous souls a little respite from their grief. But can you come up with a really high score?Answers later this week.

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Can Brits make bucks from blogging?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 21 Aug 08, 12:58 GMT

The answer is no, according to the co-founder of one of Britain's biggest commercial blog networks . In a fascinating , Ashley Norris, who has just left the business he started in 2003, explains why it is so much harder to make a living from blogging in the UK than in the US.

He points out that in the US the likes of and the are showing that it's possible to make big bucks from blogging, then complains that he's struggled to turn Shiny - which has a stable of technology and fashion blogs - into a moneyspinner.

Amongst the main reasons he cites are the smaller UK market, a lack of imagination from the ad industry and the venture capital firms - and an omnipotent 大象传媒.

I'm not best-placed to judge whether the corporation's excellent web operations are really crowding out investment in UK blogs - I'll leave that to you - but let's try to address two other questions. First, is it true that British bloggers aren't finding a route to commercial success, and, if that is so, what is holding them back?

When I posed the first question on Twitter, I quickly received a flurry of messages - some from bloggers - naming successful British blogs. People mentioned the political bloggers, and , technology blogs like and , and a number of conultancies that earn money by advisiing big corporations on blogging. Hmmm, the trouble is those individual blogs do not seem to be building growing businesses - even if they're providing a new living for people who are often already professional journalists or commentators.

Ironically, it's Shiny Media which stands out as one of the few successes, and Ashley Norris appears to have upset some of his former colleagues by his musings. The current managing director Chris Price told me,"We're turning a small profit," though he admitted it was not on the scale of US blog networks.

And perhaps comparing Shiny with businesses like Gawker Media and Huffington Post tells us something about different ambitions on either side of the Atlantic. certainly thinks so. He gave up his job at an insurance firm when his blogs about the mobile phone world started making serious money, and he now runs a blogging consultancy. He thinks too many UK blogs are too focused on the UK with too much on their local market: "That's what the UK bloggers are missing - you've got to make it relevant around the world."

US blog networks also seem more ruthless about their cost-base. Shiny Media has some rather shiny offices in Covent Garden where its bloggers can chew over ideas, Gawker Media lets its people do it from home - and only pays them according to the traffic they generate. And when Arianna Huffington visited the 大象传媒 recently, she seemed taken aback when I asked her what she paid her bloggers, indicating that the joy of blogging was sufficient reward.

But Mr Altoft says it is their use of social media like and to promote every post that gives the American blogs an edge, particularly those focusing on technology. "If you're on the front page of Digg, that guarantees 50,000 hits. The likes of TechCrunch and Gizmodo are there every day - you'll never see Shiny there." He says the American blogs are much more "professional" about manipulating sites like Digg so that their stories get plenty of votes.

But Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK - another professional journalist making a decent living from blogging - thinks a lack of imagination in the UK advertising industry is part of the problem. "They're a bit lazy. it's easier to buy space on 50,000 Guardian online pages than to deal with hundreds of little blogs."

But Patrick Altoft's best point comes back to what is at the heart of good and successful blogging. "You have to develop your own niche, you need to break news, you need to write stuff that nobody else is writing." He's right. There is a huge amount of information out there - and little time to absorb it - so once readers judge that you are the destination for orginal stories and well-written analysis they will keep coming back, and advertising revenue will follow.

So, yes, just as it is still harder to find funding for a start-up in Shoreditch than in Silicon Valley, UK bloggers are not in the same commercial league as their American counterparts. But if they - and their potential backers - can begin to think big, then a country which punches above its weight in many areas of the media should be able to make a decent fist of commercial blogging.

UPDATE

Just to be clear, Chris Price, described here as the "current managing director" of Shiny Media is actually a co-founder of the business with Ashley Norris, and has been the MD since the launch. Sorry for any confusion.

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Credible news - who decides?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 19 Aug 08, 16:15 GMT

Do we really need another news aggregator to follow in the footsteps of Google News, Digg, Reddit, Netvibes and the rest? Well, the founders of have decided we do - and they reckon they've got two killer angles which will make their service, launched today, into a winner. Simplicity and credibility are what they're pushing.

Shafqat Islam, one of NewsCred's founders, believes all the other news aggregators are just too complicated for most users. "My parents and my friends aren't using the likes of Digg or Netvibes," he told me on the phone from Geneva where he is based.

But what marks NewsCred out is the way it encourages users to rate the "credibility" of the stories it pulls in from a wide variety of news sources and blogs - from the 大象传媒 to Al-Jazeera, from the Huffington Post to Techcrunch. At the bottom of each story are these two options: "If you think this article is credible and quality content, please credit this article." Or: "If you think this article is biased or factually inaccurate, please discredit this article." Now sites like Digg - and every kind of consumer review site - encourage users to give the thumbs up or down to various kinds of content. But NewsCred claims it is going much deeper, building up a detailed picture of the credibility of news organisations and even individul reporters.

It's too early to say how well or badly the likes of the 大象传媒 will come out of this - at the moment there are obviously very few NewsCred readers, and they are mostly giving "credits" rather than "discredits" so far. But in the longer term this is an interesting, if frightening, development for a professional journalist.

When I started in this trade a quarter of a century ago, seasoned journalists were confident about two things. They knew which stories were important, and they had strong opinions about which news sources were credible. A veteran editor lectured me long and hard about the dubious standards of one international news agency, never to be used as a single source by the 大象传媒.

But in the internet age, a lot of that confidence is seeping away. Editors are increasingly casting a glance at the "most-read" lists on their own and other websites to work out which stories matter to readers and viewers. And now the audience - which used to know its place - is being asked to act as a kind of journalistic ombudsman, ruling on our credibility.

In one way, this is obviously a positive development, putting more pressure on news organisations to improve their professional and ethical standards, and to listen to the people who consume their products. My worry is that sites like NewsCred will become playgrounds for lobby groups and obsessives on issues ranging from the Georgia conflict to the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Isn't it likely that those with passionate views will rush to judge the credibility of news stories according to their own prejeudices, while the rest of the internet population just won't bother?

Shafqat Islam is more optimistic: "Is it 'mob mentality or wisdom of the crowds'? We believe in the latter." And he also believes that once NewsCred gets critical mass, the judgements of its readers will matter to editors: "If a million come on and say Fox News or the 大象传媒 is not credible then we think that's worthwhile."

The new media blogger Jeff Jarvis asked earlier this week whether would become a luxury that the news industry could do without, relying instead on the internet audience to provide leads, correct errors, and generally do much of the work. But in some ways, I think editors are becoming more important. In a world where readers and viewers have huge quantities of news and opinion flung at them from every direction, there is also an ever greater demand for ways of working out what is important and what is credible. Should you rely on your fellow news consumers to tell you that on sites like NewsCred - or would you rather trust an editor?

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Broadband - are you mobile or fixed?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 15 Aug 08, 11:01 GMT

My first task on my return from holiday was to plough my way through a 365 page document. Actually, is a fascinating document, with all sorts of insights into what is changing and what isn't in the way we run our media lives. So, we may be spending 24 minutes a day with computers - but we're spending 3 hours and 38 minutes watching the television.

But what really excited the Ofcom researchers was something that we've been tracking here - the extraordinary take-off of mobile bradband in the UK.

Two million people have gone online using a "dongle" or similar device and they're signing up at the rate of 133,000 a month. And these new mobile broadband consumers aren't just using the product on the move - three quarters of them are using it to go online from home, even if they've already got fixed-line broadband. That appears to show that the 3g mobile networks now pose a real threat to fixed-line companies in what is already a very competitive UK broadband market.

This set me thinking about my own experiences, because I've done a bit of what marketing types call "mystery shopping" with both fixed and mobile broadband providers over the last month. First, I switched my fixed broadband supplier after getting tired of slow speeds and poor service. My new provider made no big claims about faster speeds - and was even more expensive than my old ISP - but it did promise better service.

I then went hunting for a mobile broadband contract. Dropping into a mobile phone shop, I was promised what sounded an amazing deal. The salesman wrote down for me what one of his firm's dongles would give me - 7.2Mbps for just 拢15 a month, if I signed up to an 18 months contract. No "up to " - just the full 7.2Mbps.

Naturally, I questioned the salesman a little more closely. Just how good was their 3g network in my area? "Very good", he claimed - amongst the best areas in the country. Seeing as the deal was nine pounds a month cheaper than the fixed line contract I had just signed, I agreed to take the dongle.

So what were the results? Well both the fixed and the mobile broadband services are now performing pretty well. But the one which promised little in terms of speed - the fixed line - is actually delivering up to 5 or 6Mbps, almost three times as fast as my previous ISP.

As for the mobile broadband dongle, that is going at a greater speed than I've achieved with other similar devices - and the 1Mbps it delivers is perfectly acceptable when I'm out and about. But it's a long way from the 7.2Mbps that was promised.

new code of conduct on broadband speeds, which lays down pretty strict rules about what is promised at point of sale, does not yet apply to mobile broadband. If it did, I would be well placed to throw away the contract I've signed for my dongle.

So what have I learned? With fixed line broadband, it can be worth paying a bit more for good service - and you may even find you can get a faster line than you expect. As for the mobile product, it is now delivering the web on the move for millions of users - but take the speed promises with a pinch of salt.

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US media's crimes against Web 2.0

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 13 Aug 08, 09:30 GMT

I've been on holiday - and mostly offline - in the United States for the last couple of weeks, but one story has caught my eye.

Two American "old media" organisations - a TV network and a newspaper - have had ridicule poured upon their heads for crimes against the Web 2.0 orthodoxy. But both companies may feel they are doing what is right for their 2008 audiences - and for their bottom line.

First in the dock is which chose to broadcast the Olympics opening ceremony 12 hours after it happened in Beijing, in American prime-time. To a British viewer it was a bizarre move - while the rest of the world watched the ceremony live Americans had to wait - and even in the US, NBC came in for some heavy flak.

The New York Times described what it called a game of "whack-at-mole" as footage of the ceremony kept popping up all over the web, while NBC tried to protect its exclusive rights by suppressing it in a seemingly doomed attempt to prevent American citizens from getting an early peak.

The other media business under fire was the newspaper whose managing editor sent a to staff suggesting that much of the paper's best content - investigative scoops, reviews, features - should appear in print before it went online. You'd think from the reaction of the digerati that the Inquirer was planning to take down the internet and burn bloggers at the stake.

The US new media pundit and professor Jeff Jarvis described the move this way: "You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You're setting a match to it...It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves." So, um, he thinks they might have got it wrong?

Of the two cases before the Web 2.0 court, NBC's is the easier. Its decision to show the Beijing opening in prime-time rather than live over American breakfast tables has left it rolling in Olympic gold. 34 million people tuned in to watch the ceremony - and the endless "messages" from big advertisers that proved an irritating distraction for this British viewer but hugely lucrative for NBC.

All the leaks on the web and the chatter in the blogs about the spectacular show may even have helped boost the audience, the biggest in the US for any Olympics not held in their territory.

For all the talk of the web taking the power from the schedulers and giving it back to the audience, it's still quite a struggle for anyone but the determined few to get what they want from the Olympics online.

Desperate to see Nicole Cooke's gold medal sprint in the cycling, I had to resort to YouTube - the footage was "not available in this territory" when I tried to watch it on the 大象传媒 website from New York. So, in 2008 at least, the broadcasters and the IOC are managing to hold back the web tide, to the benefit of the bottom line, if not the audience.

And what of the thought-crimes at the Philadelphia Inquirer? The paper may be in decline, but it may also feel that, right now, it still has to give its remaining old economy readers a reward for the 75 cents they shell out most days. Jeff Jarvis and many who've responded to his blog suggest there is now a perfect opportunity for a new Philadelphia online news operation to come and steal the Inquirer's lunch. But maybe breaking news - which will still go online first on the paper's - is not the future for newspapers anyway?

Perhaps in-depth investigations, crafted features, and trenchant, well-informed columnists will provide a more compelling reason to keep buying a paper. And will the Inquirer's online customers really be so aggrieved to get that content at the same time, or even a few hours after the sad old saps who like to turn a page rather than click on a link?

As the new media future arrives, old media organisations on both sides of the Atlantic are experimenting furiously with platforms they may struggle to understand. Newspaper reporters are trying to become broadcasters, TV news correspondents are doing a little light blogging, and broadcasters are making more of their content available online - NBC has had more than a million viewers for streamed footage of one swimming event.

But the habits of media audiences are changing more slowly than some pundits predicted - and getting too far ahead of them is as dangerous as being left behind. By 2012 the revolution may have happened, but for now the likes of NBC and the Philadelphia Inquirer are betting that they can still profit from the old model.

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