“We had a lot of momentum early in the morning, but now anyone who hasn’t been to our site can’t access it,” Wilcox said. “Our launch got squashed.” Still, he’s philosophical about the experience and says he’s content to stay with GoDaddy depending on what caused the outage and how GoDaddy handles the situation.

And like any entrepreneur, he’s trying to take the lemon of having his site not being up and turning it into lemonade. He’s hoping to find a few other startups whose launches may have been affected by GoDaddy’s outage and see if he can package those up as a story for tomorrow when his site is hopefully back online.

Update: Still working on it, but we're making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.—
Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

And people should check out his project, ThingsWeStart.com (wait until the GoDaddy outage is over), because Wilcox and a team of volunteers has scraped the Kickstarter site for data about all of the projects to determine where they are held and in what industries. (Wilcox says that because he’s not planning to make money off the site, he’s not breaking the Kickstarter terms of service.) Visitors to the site can sign up for notifications of Kickstarter projects in their areas or in certain fields.

And next week, the project hopes to launch a calculator based on more data crunching it’s doing that will tell you things like the best day to post a new project based on your industry, how much you want to raise and other factors. Given how much Kickstarter has become a source of funds for entrepreneurs, having a source of data and analysis on the site’s past projects seems like a good resource. So bookmark it, and check out some of the maps it has released so far. Or check out the file of all the data it has gathered so you can crunch your own numbers.

As for GoDaddy, spokesperson Elizabeth Driscoll said the company is currently working to restore all of the affected services. As to the cause of the outages — rumored to be the work of hacktivist collective Anonymous — Driscoll said, “We have not made a determination.”

With additional reporting by Derrick Harris.

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The company is called BlueToad, and it builds mobile apps for 6,000 publishers to display their content on mobile devices like Apple’s iOS devices. CEO Paul DeHart said his company compared the file released by the hackers and found a 98 percent match to UDIDs in its own databases, according to NBC’s report. The group published 1 million device IDs, but claimed to have stolen 12 million from the FBI.

DeHart also told the NYT that the 12 million number isn’t correct, and that the theft didn’t occur in March, another claim:

‘We decided to come forward to apologize to our customers, partners and the public in general that this got out there,’ Mr. DeHart said in an interview. ‘We face thousands of attacks every day that we’ve been successful at defending. This one happened to get through.’

Mr. DeHart said his company had contacted law enforcement, as well as Apple, to alert them to the breach and had hired an outside security firm to patch its systems. He said BlueToad had ‘nowhere near’ the 12 million identification numbers that the hackers claimed to have stolen.

Anonymous last week said that part of its aim in posting the UDIDs, besides to illustrate that the FBI might be tracking Americans’ cell phones, was to demonstrate that Apple’s use of the identifiers tied to specific devices, even while anonymized, was a dangerous idea. But even while it appears the group was lying, the point reminded us of the possible privacy invasion resulting from advertisers, app makers, Apple and possibly other organizations having a number that, with a bit of additional information, can reveal the identity of a device’s owner.

Apple denied handing over the UDIDs to law enforcement, but also noted that it intends to do away with the use of UDIDs in favor of a new solution in its next major mobile software update, which should be sometime in the next few weeks.

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Here’s what Apple told AllThingsD on Wednesday about the millions of device IDs in question:

‘The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization. Additionally, with iOS 6 we introduced a new set of APIs meant to replace the use of the UDID and will soon be banning the use of UDID.’

To back up a bit: On Tuesday a group associated with Anonymous posted a file online that contained 1 million Apple UDIDs, or ID numbers assigned to 1 million iOS devices. In a long note posted with the download link to the file, the group claimed it stole a file with 12 million Apple UDIDs from the laptop of an FBI agent in March. The group says it chose to post just 1 million of those to start with.

Then, later Tuesday the FBI issued a statement that it hadn’t found any evidence to back up the hackers’ story: “At this time there is no evidence indicating that an F.B.I. laptop was compromised or that the F.B.I. either sought or obtained this data.”

Anonymous said part of the plan of releasing the list of UDIDs was to highlight the danger of letting companies and advertisers (or law enforcement) know the potential identity of whereabouts of a device and its owner.

But if Apple didn’t hand over the UDIDs and the FBI didn’t have them, where did they come from? The hacking group has some more explaining to do — which, doubtless, it will.

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Web-based hacker collective Anonymous published 1 million Apple UDIDs on the web early this morning from a trove of 12 million that it allegedly stole from an FBI agent’s laptop in March. Buried within the rambling, bizarre missive from the group about why it published these unique device identifiers — besides attempting to embarrass the FBI for tracking that many iOS devices, and creating general mayhem — was a pointed comment about Apple’s decision to use and publish UDIDs in the first place with iOS devices.

From the group’s post about it on PasteBin:

Also we think it’s the right moment to release this knowing that Apple is looking for alternatives for those UDID currently and since a while blocked axx [access] to it, but well, in this case it’s too late for those concerned owners on the list. we always thought it was a really bad idea. that hardware coded IDs for devices concept should be erradicated [SIC] from any device on the market in the future.

There are many problems associated with having the unique number on a device as personal as an iPhone or iPad or iPod touch be public and associated directly with a device. UDIDs do not contain information that allows a device’s owner to be identified, but when combined with other information, it can. Apple knows this, and that’s why a year ago it started trying to get app developers and advertisers to stop tracking users across apps through vast databases of collected Apple UDIDs. In August 2011 Apple outlawed the practice, but it wasn’t until March that it started to actually crack down.

A June report in the Wall Street Journal hinted Apple was working on an alternative to UDIDs.  The new identifier would be anonymous and “likely to rely on a sequence of numbers that isn’t tied to a specific device.” The idea is to make owners of iOS devices feel slightly less creeped out and that their iPhone, iPad or iPod’s couldn’t be so easily tracked by app makers or advertisers — or law enforcement.

But Apple still hasn’t publicized any alternative yet, as Anonymous has helpfully reminded us.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Update 2:25 p.m.: The plot thickens: the FBI has issued a statement denying the UDIDs were taken from one of its agents. As the agency told the New York Times, ”At this time there is no evidence indicating that an F.B.I. laptop was compromised or that the F.B.I. either sought or obtained this data.”

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The messages came from @YourAnonNews, a source popular with hackers and tech journalists for its regular updates about hacking activities. In response to news of the arrests, the site said Anonymous would continue because it was an idea not a group.

The arrests were first related in a Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News report this morning that quoted an FBI official who said law enforcement officials in the US and UK were “chopping off the head” of hacking group LulzSec. Fox and other news outlets like Wired have portrayed the arrests as significant because they were based on information supplied by the group’s reported leader, an unemployed father living in a New York City housing project.

An indictment unsealed today accuses LulzSec and Anonymous of a “deliberate campaign of online destruction, intimidation and criminality.” It cited attacks against governments and businesses that led to loss of data and the the exposure of people’s personal information online (a practice known as “doxing”).

In response, the Anonymous Twitter site said “Love all, trust few, do harm to none” and downplayed the significance of the informant and the arrests. But this afternoon, it also retweeted a message proposing a “black fax” attack on the FBI along with a link to phone and fax numbers for the agency. Black faxes are a nuisance prank that tie up fax machines and drain them of toner.

The site this afternoon also warned members to beware of another as-yet unidentified informant described in the indictment.

The activities of Anonymous have become a source of growing popular interest in the last year, and the subject of books and documentaries.

Critics of the hackers portray them as nihilistic vandals while defenders say the tactics they use, like denial-of-service attacks, are akin to sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience.

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In a letter filed in federal court late Friday and embedded below, a US Attorney wrote:

Should the defendants wish to obtain independent access to the Mega Servers, or coordinate third-party access to data housed on Mega Servers, that issue must be resolved directly with Cogent or Carpathia. It is our understanding that the hosting companies may begin deleting the contents of the servers beginning as early as February 2

The two companies are based in the US and were the targets of raids that coincided with the unsealing of an indictment against Megaupload and its founders. The comment about possible data deletion created a stir after the Guardian and others reported it this morning. Critics like Cory Doctorow have said the federal government could be complicit in the destruction of personal photos and the music of independent bands, but it is unclear what percentage of the files are this type of material and what percentage are simply things like bootlegged copies of the Fast & the Furious.

The attorney’s letter, like other aspects of the Megaupload case, appears to be driven driven in part by political calculations. (The government, for instance, decided to unseal the indictment one day after Hollywood interests expressed frustration at the collapse of proposed anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA and PIPA.)

The attorney’s letter may be a way to inform users of the Megaupload service that their data could be lost. Or it may be a warning to other communications companies about the risks in providing services to file-sharing companies. The share-price of publicly-traded Cogent Communications tanked after news of the indictment broke ten days ago. Neither Cogent or privately-held Carpathia immediately returned calls for comment.

Documents under Seal

Other documents in the case remain under seal. They likely contain additional details about the case and could be part of the US government’s efforts to persuade other countries to extradite the Megaupload defendants:

In the US criminal system, prosecutors often do not put all of their evidence into an initial indictment — instead they put what was needed to persuade a grand jury.

The standard of proof needed to obtain a grand jury indictment is much lower than an actual conviction (in the words of author Tom Wolfe, a grand jury “would indict a ham sandwich”).

Prosecutors’ chances to obtain a conviction are likely to turn in large part on the criminal law of conspiracy. Conspiracy has in the past been a powerful tool for the federal government and provides an easier path to conviction than does the law of copyright.

The case is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon as the US government must first resolve extradition proceedings in New Zealand where Megaupload’s gun-toting founder, Kim Dotcom, remains in jail. Two others made bail and three other defendants are still at large.

In another development, the Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) reported
this weekend that the federal government has been giving a low-profile to prosecutors and agents involved in the case. The paper reported that the government is concerned about retaliatory attacks from the hacking group Anonymous, which crashed several government servers in response to the Megaupload shutdown.

US Attorney Letter re Cogent
var docstoc_docid=”111605150″;var docstoc_title=”US Attorney Letter re Cogent”;var docstoc_urltitle=”US Attorney Letter re Cogent”;

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Here’s a photo of the logo that I snapped upon encountering it on the Pulaski bridge, a span that connects the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens:

The logo must have been painted in the last few weeks as it was not there earlier this month. The bridge site appears to be something of a hotbed for tech-themed street art. Nearby, someone has scrawled “Stop Sopa” and another artist had painted a Guy Fawkes mask, one of the symbols of hacker collective Anonymous.

The appearance of the surveillance logo comes at a time when the company is facing criticism over changes to its privacy policy. The policy means Google (NSDQ: GOOG) will be able to better combine user data across multiple products — social search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

The graffiti may be someone’s attempt at a contemporary riff on Paul Simon’s long-ago lyric, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.”

[Correction/Amplification: an earlier version of this story said the privacy changes will require users to access its products through a single account. It should have also stated that users will not be obliged to sign in to use Google products like YouTube and search.]

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In a press release this morning, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx) announced that the House Judiciary Committee is suspending a planned mark-up for the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that would have created new powers to target foreign “rogue” websites. Here are excerpts from the release:

I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy…

The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.”

The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.

Smith’s announcement came shortly after Senate leader Harry Reid (D-Nv) said he was suspending a procedural vote on SOPA’s cousin, the Protect IP Act.

The news comes after a chaotic week in which the technology industry flexed newfound political power by blacking out popular websites in opposition to the bills, and the hacking collective Anonymous took down industry and government websites, including that of the FBI.

The upshot is that the current version of the legislation appears dead as a doorknob though some political watchers predict a modified version will reappear under a new name.

In the meantime, Reid and others are calling for a political rapprochement between Hollywood, who had pushed hard for SOPA, and Silicon Valley which ultimately sank it.

Many Republicans this week retreated from the legislation in the face of political pressure, meaning any new legislative proposals may not appear until after the November elections.

This week’s developments are remarkable considering that the legislation had wide bi-partisan support just months ago.

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Update: We’ve also published a new story with further developments here. [To read about how events unfolded last night, continue reading below...]

Using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the hackers have gone after the Department of Justice’s site, the RIAA, the MPAA and the major record labels — so far Universal, BMI and Warner Music Group have been affected.

At the moment, the hackers are updating a Twitter feed with news of developments of the attack, which it is code-naming #OpMegaupload. It also appears that it is also going after related sites outside of the U.S. as well.

A series of messages posted on Anonymous’ Twitter feed, have detailed the group’s trail of destruction across the internet.

They are covering not just U.S. sites but also extending their work to similar organizations in Europe, such as Hadopi.fr, which is now also down.

Hadopi is the French law that was introduced in 2009 and is used to regulate internet access and copyright violations in France. This controversial bill basically outlines a three-strikes procedure for suspending internet access for those who download illegal content. There are legislators now considering how to apply this to streamed services as well, which are currently not covered.

Taking down government sites like the DOJ’s and potentially the FBI’s — the Anonymous Twitter feed has mentioned it is working on the latter, although at the time of writing the FBI’s site is still up — could mean the group would be subject not just to felony charges but also potentially terrorist violations.

Update: FBI.gov is now down, too.

Cases involving the prosecution of Anonymous hackers are still being played out, so it’s not clear what route authorities may take over this current spate of attacks: hackers that were identified as part of Anonymous are currently being prosecuted in California for allegedly hacking PayPal when the Ebay-owned payments provider halted payments to Wikileaks. Defendants in that case pleaded not guilty in November 2011.

This case could be considerably more difficult to track for authorities: Anonymous says that there are 5,635 people confirmed to be working towards taking down sites.

A DDoS attack can mean several things, but one of the most common is when a person or network of people “attack” a site or server with a flood of communications requests, so that the target cannot respond to normal requests.

Adrian Chen at Gawker further describes how those DDoS attacks are getting amplified using viral techniques: hackers are at the moment spamming out links that effectively rope innocent users into also taking part in the attacks, by clicking on the links to automatically start pinging one of the sites on the target list.

Many of the sites listed above are simply leading to blank pages now, or “down for maintenance” pages, but one site, for the Utah police association, which might have less administrators than those of the DOJ, has been hacked with a message from the hackers about Megaupload:

The MPAA, meanwhile, has taken to posting Twitpics of its statements — for the moment, it has no website to use to post them, and a Twitpic can’t get hacked. “Our website and many others…were attacked today,” begins the 150-word statement. It also says it is working with law enforcement agencies to identify those responsible, and that “Protecting copyrights and protecting free speech go hand in hand.”

Update 2: Several of these sites are back up and running, but so is Anonymous’ own effort, with some 9,000 users participating in its site take-down. Read about other developments in this separate post.

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Voting Booth

Another presidential election year is a month away, and just as with every election cycle, technology will play a critical role in determining who the next President of the United States will be.

Have your doubts? Just look at the last two elections.

In 2004, the rise of blogs opened the door to an influential new source of political commentary outside the traditional press,while in 2008, we witnessed the rapid rise of social media (and the Obama campaign’s early embrace of it), which played a big role in dissemination of messaging as well as fundraising.

In both elections, the growth of online video proved important; 2004 saw mainly short-form political entertainment/commentary from the likes of JibJab, but by 2008 both parties saw online video as a real competitive weapon, and YouTube became the testing ground in efforts to find a “Daisy”-like message to sway voters.

Just how will technology be part of the story in the 2012 election?  Here are four possible ways:

Mobile

Since money is, for better and for worse, the lifeblood of American election politics, it seems there are always new ways to utilize technology to raise money.  Just a few years ago, it was novel to have a website as a central way to raise money for an election on the Internet, and more recently, social media has become an important part of fundraising for any campaign.

So what technology could play an important role in fundraising in 2012?  The simple answer is the mobile phone. We’ve already seen Square being used at political fundraisers and multipurpose mobile apps like Mobilecause for fundraising and communication, and as I’ve written previously,  there’s no reason in-app payments couldn’t be extended to apps such as enhanced e-books.  Expect all the major candidates to make mobile a big part of their fundraising and messaging efforts throughout the year.

Twitter Mistakes

If 2008 was the year Facebook wagged the dog in terms of social media’s impact on politics, 2012 might be the year in which Twitter could prove decisive.  Over the past few years, Twitter has become the new real-time newswire for influencers and the media, and it has emerged as a way for candidates to connect directly to constituents without the filter of campaign managers and media experts.

However, Twitter has also shown why a filter is sometimes necessary.  The unfortunately (and appropriately) named Congressman Anthony Weiner got his own “gate” as a result of accidentally tweeting lewd photos of himself, and other politicians in the States and elsewhere have shown it’s all too easy to hit that tweet button.

With more politicians tweeting and at greater frequency, there’s no doubt Twitter could play a big role in 2012, and in possibly unforeseen and unwanted ways.

Big Data Analytics

While Facebook proved significant in 2008 as a way to build a following for a candidate, it was early days for social media and big data analytics in general. Four years later, it is likely savvy use of analytics by a candidate to sift through the mountains of data made available through social, mobile and other types of profiling and behavioral data could give them a significant advantage over their opponent.  Political campaigns have already proven themselves to be  fairly advanced users of polling analytics and there is no doubt that campaigns will only double down this election cycle on data scientists to possibly squeeze more advantages out of the huge cache of new data available from a variety of new sources.

Internet activism

In 2010 and 2011, one of the biggest political stories of all had nothing to do with traditional political establishments, but instead was about the rise of a new form of political activism on the Internet.  Wikileaks showed how by releasing huge caches of documents about political actors online could destabilize traditional political establishments, while new groups such as Anonymous showed that the Internet is the new frontier for civil disobedience.

How will the use of Internet political activism take shape in 2012?  It’s impossible to predict at this point, other than to say there’s a high likelihood that new and existing groups will likely try to make their voices heard in new and unforeseen ways, making this new frontier of Internet activism perhaps the biggest x-factor of all in next year’s Presidential election.

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