The feature, known as “two-factor” authentication, is already used by companies like Google and Apple and works by sending a pin code via text message to a user’s cell phone. Twitter has details and a tutorial video here.

The decision to add an extra security feature comes after hackers have repeatedly gained control of high profile Twitter feeds. The most prominent example occurred last month when hackers used the Associated Press’s account to say bombs had injured President Obama. The fake tweet roiled financial markets and led to calls for Twitter to improve its security features.

Attackers have also targeted CBS, the BBC and the Onion. The latter offered a candid account of how the hackers phished employees accounts and induced some of them, including a person with control over social media passwords to share log-in information.

Two factor authentication would likely have prevented those attacks because the attackers would have had to enter a password sent to the employee’s cell phone.

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In a complaint filed in Vermont’s Supreme Court, the state accuses MPHJ Technology — which operates 40 shell companies through a UPS store in Delaware  – of violating consumer protection law by demanding small businesses buy a license or face a patent lawsuit.

“Hopefully would-be patent trolls will see this and realize that if you want to prey on Vermont businesses large and small they’re going to have a fight on their hands,” Attorney General, William Sorrell, said by phone on Wednesday.

The patents in question date from the year 2001 and involve technology for scanning documents and attaching them to an email. Despite being around for more than a decade, no one tried to enforce the patents until 2012 when an attorney from Texas — a notorious troll forum — named Jay Mac Rust began brandishing them.

The Vermont complaint explains that Mr. Rust and his friends have been sending letters to hundreds of businesses in Vermont, including non-profit groups that help the disabled, and telling them to pay $900-$1200 or face a federal lawsuit.

Patent trials are one of the most expensive forms of litigation and are an ordeal for even big companies — let alone a small shop in the Green Mountains. Worse, the defendants are out of luck even if they win since the shells that sue them don’t have any assets.

According to Sorrell, “patent trolling is a national problem” and the trolls have been harassing Vermont’s tech sector, as well as small business and non-profits, for years.

Vermont’s lawsuit, which demands the troll pay $10,000 for each letter it sent out, is based on consumer protection laws that forbid deceitful communications. The state’s governor this week also signed a new anti-troll law that Sorrell describes as “another arrow in the quiver.”

The site will almost surely raise constitutional issues concerning state power and patents but, for now, businesses will welcome a big new ally in the fight against patent trolls; others include Google and patent scholars like Mark Lemley and Brian Love. It will be interesting to see if states with big tech centers, like California and Massachusetts, ask to intervene or file suits of their own. You can read the complaint yourself here:

Vermont v MPHJ Technologies Complaint

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The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks.

The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product:

According to a spokesman, the idea reduces friction in the marketing process because Twitter already has users’ email addresses and other contact information — meaning that it takes just one click for a user to connect with the brand.

The move comes as Twitter continues to expand its ad products, including its self-serve platform, ahead of a rumored IPO later this year.

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The outfit got a big boost this week thanks to a $1 million donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will be used to expand its growing video library and to make it easier for video browsers to find everything from Jon Stewart to Walter Cronkite.

Right now, the Internet Archive has more than 400,000 news clips dating from 2009 that it offers as a research tool to scholars, journalists and the general public. Users can search them using closed captioning tags and other metadata the Archive has assembled.

“You can discover culture that’s languishing unseen and unheard,” Roger Macdonald, Internet Archive television news project director, told me by telephone.

He explained that the Internet Archive, which last year began using BitTorrent as a distribution system, had been recording the broadcasts for years — “we ingest, index and make available,” in Macdonald’s words.

The new money will help the nonprofit afford the petabyte’s worth of broadcast data it collects every year, and stores on servers located at its office, a converted Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district. Macdonald said the Internet Archive will also hire people to improve what is for now a fairly rudimentary user interface.

There is also the question of how the Internet Archive will be able to obtain older TV footage — think Dan Rather, Howard Cosell, I Love Lucy and so on. For now, the television networks jealously guard their copyright and make such content available in very limited ways; for instance, users can watch old shows from NBC, ABC and CBS at New York’s Paley Center for Media — but cannot do so online.

Macdonald said the Internet Archive, which lets users watch 30 second clips or rent DVDs, is in talks with the networks about gaining access to their content in the capacity of a digital librarian.

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At a time when many publishers are trying to improve comments or else refuse to permit reader participation in the first place, Above the Law — which is a must-read for many lawyers and even judges — continues to let readers be as abrasive as they like. For example, here’s a screenshot of responses to a story by editor Elie Mystal about a scholarship for white people at Columbia:

I spoke this month with Mystal and John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media (the company that owns Above the Law), to learn more about the site’s comment philosophy and its effect on business strategy.

“If you write on the internet, people will say horrible things about you. We allow them to say it to our faces — if we didn’t, they’d say it on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr,” said Mystal. “Anyone who wants to write professionally better be prepared for ad hominem, unfair personal criticism. That’s not just part of media in 2013.”

Above the Law’s writers, most of whom are Ivy League law school graduates, are frequent targets of personal vitriol by readers, but Mystal says he still appreciates them.

“Commenters got me my job. Online people voted me in. I remember that when they’re screaming about how I look like a walrus.”

The commenters also serve as a vital part of the site’s overall content and business strategy. Lerner explained that the story comments appear as separate web pages, which allows Above the Law to sell additional ads, and that the site also works with comment platform Disqus to sell sponsored comments on its app. And, contrary to popular wisdom, advertisers aren’t skittish about their brands appearing next to off-color stories (like this one about a lawyer who invoked the First Amendment to excuse “slut-shaming” someone who turned him down) – a quick look shows that most of ATL’s sponsors are big and boring professional firms.

“It’s not like five years ago when a lot of advertisers didn’t know how the internet works,” said Mystal. “They realize there’s horrible comments on the Washington Post too.”

Above the Law readers can flag comments as offensive but that doesn’t mean the editors will respond. The only thing likely to be pulled down is something that offends absolutely everybody — “no one one cares if you’re offended”, says Mystal, adding that moderating each comment would be a full time job.

Ultimately, the no-holds-barred policy is not just simpler for the editors to oversee, but may also offer a more authentic view of humanity than the curated comments of other forums:

“I used to work in a big firm in downtown Manhattan, and there were some racists there. We’re the legal community, and there’s people who hold racist, homophobic views — you’re going to meet people like that. Those people may be your boss.”

(Image by ArTono via Shutterstock)

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The latest theory comes from IT pioneer Ted Nelson, who offers a three-part hypothesis – based on the Bitcoin inventor’s intelligence, publishing methods and interests — to show that Satoshi can be none other than Japanese math professor Shinichi Mochizuki.

Nelson’s “deduction” (which Forbes and others have portrayed as more crackpot than convincing) comes weeks after programmer Sergio Lerner published a blog post that claims to show Satoshi has mined a fortune worth of Bitcoins, and that he has spent only a small fraction of it. A related report by The Verge endorses Lerner’s account and says the financial trail provides new clues to help establish Satoshi’s identity.

This “who made Bitcoin?” buzz is a fun parlor game, especially at a time when everyone from serious investors to Homeland Security are clamoring to get a piece of the new currency. But, while many of the guesses are as silly as saying Lewis Carroll is Jack the Ripper, the process also raises the question of whether Satoshi is entitled to be left in peace.

Last week, someone who has corresponded with Satoshi told me he believes the Bitcoin inventor is one person, not three as some suggest, and that he is not Japanese (this is consistent with the Forbes writer’s theory that the pseudonym is a tribute to 1980′s Tokyo cyber-punk culture). I asked him why Satoshi has decided to remain anonymous in the first source.

According to the source, who is a Bitcoin developer and did not want to be named for this story, Satoshi’s motives are not rooted in myth-making or anything sinister. Instead, they reflect a simple desire for privacy and are consistent with the ethos of open-source coders who work on a project out of altruism or interest and then pass it on to others when they want to move on.

If this is the case, then Satoshi is part of a tradition of private people who eschew the spotlight and prefer to let their work speak for themselves. It’s easy to think of others such as Groklaw‘s Pamela Jones (who does heroic work opposing software patents), cartoonist Bill Watterson and literary figures like Harper Lee and Emily Dickinson. Together, these quiet and relatively anonymous figures provide an inspiring counter-narrative to suggestions by Google and Facebook that anonymity is somehow sinister and that our entire selves should be open for media merchandising.

The point is that we may never know the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto — and that’s okay.

(Image by Shutterstock 69195535)

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“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue stream that is still growing.”

Thompson added that media pundits predicted that the Times’ subscription model, which is based on a so-called “metered paywall,” would be a disaster when it launched in 2011. Since then, he noted, it’s become a standard for the rest of the newspaper industry. ”In modern media, you could make the case that the best way forward is to listen carefully to what the industry has to say and then do the exact opposite.”

Thompson also equated disruptions in the news business to what’s happening in other industries, like high tech and car rental, and said that risk-taking is the secret of America’s culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Commencement speeches are, by nature, restricted to this sort of soaring stuff. A skeptic, however, might note that the New York Times‘ digital subscription model has already begun to plateau and that the company is still shedding ad dollars and assets. Likewise, Thompson, who arrived from the BBC only months ago, still has to prove he can run an institution that isn’t supported by mandatory contributions from the public.

But the tone of Thompson’s speech is the right one, and it’s welcome to see the New York Times waving its banner not just in the safe halls of Columbia’s journalism school but among the MBA crowd as well. If you want to read more of what he said, here’s a longer excerpt:

The American news business is living through revolutionary times. For The New York Times, which I joined six months ago, it means catapulting the Grey Lady into a world very different from the one in which she spent her first century and a half: multimedia, multi-platform, multi pretty much  everything.

There are some things we’re not going to take risks with. The quality, authority and accuracy of our journalism. Our values, including the time-honoured but still vital tradition of keeping our journalism independent from the commercial interests of the company. In the age of so-called ‘native’ advertising in which the boundary between editorial and commercial content is more and more frequently blurred, that tradition of maintaining a clear line between the journalism and the business of The New York Times is more important than ever.

But we will not secure the future of The Times without the kind of bold innovation – in products and services, in
business-model – which is intrinsically and necessarily risky. Two years ago The Times launched a new digital pay model, essentially asking users of The Times on digital to do what more than a million print users of the newspaper were already doing, which is to pay a regular subscription in return for extensive access to our journalism.

The consensus among the experts was that it wouldn’t work, was foolhardy in fact and not needed. People just weren’t prepared to pay for high quality content on the internet and, besides, wasn’t digital advertising enough – wouldn’t it grow until, just as with print advertising in the golden age of physical newspapers, it alone was enough to support America’s newsrooms?

In fact the launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue-stream which is still growing. Much of the rest of the US newspaper industry is now following suit. And developing this pay model, launching a suite of new subscription products to attract additional new subscribers, is central to our plans for the future.

What’s interesting, though, was that initial widespread skepticism. It won’t work. It’s mad. They’re barking up the
wrong tree.

In many ways, the thing that gets disrupted in a disruptive age is the conventional wisdom. Wherever you end up, in this country or abroad, starting your own business or joining an established company large or small, you’ll bump into conventional wisdom and all the apparently excellent advice that flows from it. But the definition of a disruptive age is one in which the discontinuities outnumber and overwhelm the continuities and in which predictions based on the past or the smooth projection of current trends into the future frequently prove unsound. Conventional wisdom tries valiantly to keep up, to recalibrate in the light of recent developments, but because it cannot foresee transformational breakthroughs or the kind of behavioral and business-model pivots which digital technology makes possible, it never can.

Take my industry. The movies are finished. TV advertising is dead. Exactly what happened to music will happen to TV. Nobody wants news anymore. No one will ever pay for anything on the internet. Not just said, but said widely and widely believed. And – for the most part and within the time horizon which the prophets themselves were suggesting – just plain wrong.

All of the strategically successful things I’ve been involved in – whether a set of new TV channels or developing the BBC’s digital on-demand service, the i-Player – have had this thing in common: that, at the point of launch, pretty much everyone not involved in the project has agreed that it was going to be a total disaster. In modern media, you could make the case that the best way forward is to listen carefully to what the industry has to say and then do the exact opposite.

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In case you missed it, the controversy turns on Toronto’s buffoonish mayor, Rob Ford, who has embarrassed the city numerous times in the past but has now outdone himself: Reporters from Gawker and the Toronto Star claim to have witnessed a clear video tape that shows Hizzoner sucking on a glass crack pipe and calling the leader of Canada’s Liberal party, Justin Trudeau, “a faggot.”

The video in question is now in possession of shadowy figures who want cash for it. The Star, a respected newspaper, turned down an offer to sell it for $40,000 and Gawker, which says the price is now $200,000, has taken to Indiegogo – a site normally used to raise money for artsy people — to ask the public to buy the video. The “Rob Ford Crackstarter” (see pic at right) has 10 days to reach its goal and has already pulled in $26,000 as of Friday afternoon.

Gawker’s gambit raises some very juicy ethical questions. First, while bringing down crack-smoking mayors is clearly in the public interest (see Barry, Marion), it’s less clear whether it’s acceptable to pay people who are likely serious criminals in order to advance the story.

And while check-book journalism has been around for centuries, turning it over to the public could have unforeseen consequences. Until now, publicly funded journalism has been largely been contained to organizations like Pro Publica that launch investigations into things like patient safety and vote buying. Is the world ready for a publicly funded version of TMZ where everyone can pool money to see celebrity’s private lives?

For now, the political dimensions of the scandal are moving too fast to assess the media fallout. We’ll report back next week on what happens to the tape — and the money collected by Gawker.

(Image by Chris Howey via Shutterstock)

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On Thursday evening, GigaOM hosted a meetup in San Jose where six Bitcoin authorities, including investors and engineers, shared their views on how the currency is evolving and who is using it. Here are three of the larger ideas to emerge from the discussion (if you want to catch up on the basics of Bitcoin, see “Yes, you should care about Bitcoin and here’s why“):

Bitcoin can help ordinary people

Wences Casares, a venture capitalist and CEO of Lemon Wallet, grew up in Argentina, where he experienced first hand what happens when a government mismanages its currency: inflation, capital controls and the destruction of family savings. Today, the same thing is happening all over again as desperate Argentines try to convert their pesos into a store of value that the government can’t seize or destroy.

One option is Bitcoin. Casares explained how some people in his country are using “old Android phones” to acquire and exchange Bitcoins at a time when the government is clamping down on the trade in U.S. dollars. More remarkably, Casares noted, is that many of the people using Bitcoin don’t know much about technology — but they do know, through hard experience, about currencies and can recognize alternate sources of money.

Other speakers and audience members also described the potential of cyber-currencies like Bitcoin to ameliorate the broken or compromised banking infrastructure in places like Latin America and Asia.

In the larger picture, Bitcoin could be just one part of an impending revolution in the world’s money transfer networks. Specifically, new currencies and transfer platforms may provide a way for people, including those who rely on remittances, to escape the high transfer fees imposed by credit card and wire companies — and simply exchange money directly with one another around the world at almost no cost.

Bitcoin is complicated — and is going to stay that way for a while

Mike Hearn is a young engineer from Google who uses his 20 percent time to work on developing Bitcoin software. At the meetup, he chatted about infrastructure and security with Bennett Hoffman, a former Microsoft employee who is building a new Bitcoin exchange called Buttercoin.

The two engineers agreed that the system that creates Bitcoins is secure and stable, even if parts of the surrounding ecosystem (exchanges, wallets and so on) are not. Hearn said Bitcoin is not ready for “your grandma” just yet — and that is, in part, a choice by those who are building and fine-tuning the Bitcoin open source code bequeathed by the currency’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakaomot.

Hearn’s point is that he and others are focused now on improving the processing and ledger system that facilitates Bitcoin transactions; they are ensuring that it can scale in the same way that the Visa payment network is able to handle sales spikes. This focus on “the guts” of Bitcoin means that, for now, the software will remain complicated and will be a challenge to those who aspire to build consumer-facing interfaces on top of it.

This won’t, however, prevent Bitcoin from gaining traction in the real world. David Barrett, CEO of Expensify, explained earlier in the evening that his firm now allows companies to reimburse their employees’ expense reports in Bitcoin. According to Barrett, the Bitcoin option is not a gimmick but rather a cheap and practical solution for companies to pay employees across borders.

Bitcoin will be regulated — and that’s a good thing

Bitcoin watchers gasped this weekend when the Department of Homeland Security executed a seizure warrant against the owner of Mt. Gox, the Japanese exchange where many people trade the currency. The law enforcement action, which comes after U.S. securities regulators said they are looking at Bitcoin, posed a new liquidity threat to the currency and also reinforced its outlaw reputation.

Surprisingly, the Bitcoin backers at the event appeared to welcome the government’s growing involvement. According to Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital, which is investing in Bitcoin ventures, regulation is not just inevitable — but desirable.

“I’m already regulated by eight central banks,” said Malka, explaining that regulation is simply part of any mature financial system and that, in the case of Bitcoin, it is likely to introduce a new level of stability. Malka and others, including the Bitcoin Foundation, said they are less interested in libertarian fantasies than they are in establishing a rational and informed regulatory structure around the currency. Malka added that his biggest fear for Bitcoin is not the U.S. government but shenanigans by speculators.

The bottom line

The San Jose event felt at times like a cross between an investor seminar and a church revival, with the packed room sometimes applauding wildly at the blue skies of Bitcoin. But that doesn’t mean there’s not something very real going on here — a lot of very smart and credible people are putting a lot of time and money on the line in an effort to redefine the world’s financial infrastructure.

According to Wences Caseres, the moment feels like 1992, when the world was on the cusp of discovering the world wide web but hadn’t yet found the right user interface. He might be right.

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In case you missed it yesterday, the federal government took its most serious action to date against Bitcoin-related activity when it shut down money transfers between Mt. Gox and payment processing service, Dwolla. Dwolla is one of the few easy ways Americans can buy and sell Bitcoins at Mt. Gox.

On Wednesday, Ars Technica unearthed the search warrant that Homeland Security used to seize a bank account that Mt. Gox used to obtain dollars from Dwolla. The account was registered to Mutum Sigillum LLC, a Delaware subsidiary of Japan-based Mt. Gox.

In an affidavit, a federal agent states that Mt. Gox owner, Mark Karpeles, lied when opening the bank account in 2011. Specifically, Karpeles said “no” to questions asking if he would be engaged in a currency business and money transmissions.

This misrepresentation means Karpeles has apparently violated a law prohibiting unlicensed money transmission businesses. Breaking the law can result in a 5-year prison term and permits the feds, under another statute, to seize property and keep it.

So what does all this mean for Bitcoin aficionados? In short, the investigation is more bad news for Mt. Gox and Karpeles than for the currency itself. The loss of Dwolla as a payment mechanism at Mt. Gox will crimp a popular source of liquidity for speculators but more options are appear poised to come along. These include Coinbase, which recently received $5 million from Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures, and OpenCoin which just got backing from Google Ventures.

To hear what all the Bitcoin fuss is about, come join us on Thursday in San Jose for a GigaOM meet-up from 6 to 9 where we’ll be talking with CEO who use it as well as engineers from Facebook and Google about the currency’s perils and possibilities. The event is free (and filling up fast!) thanks to our friends at Ribbit Capital. It includes cocktails too.

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