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Most stocks on the CNET Tech Index were positive, with an overall increase of 4.13 percent on the day.

It wasn't the best day for RIM after an analyst published a negative research note.

Research In Motion was a big loser in an otherwise positive day for tech stocks after it was the subject of a research note authored by a pessimistic financial analyst.

An up-and-down day on the Nasdaq finished strong.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

In the broader markets, the Nasdaq rose 58.74 points, or 3.43 percent, to 1,770.03. The Dow Jones Industrials rose 413.21 points, or 4.67 percent, to 9.265.43 while the S&P 500 rose 44.85 points, or 4.77 percent, to 985.40.

After the bell, Sun Microsystems warned that its first-quarter profit would be well below expectations, sending its stock down 6.6 percent in after-hours trading.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

James Faucette of Pacific Crest Securities rained on RIM’s parade with a research note Monday suggesting that October sales of RIM’s BlackBerrys have been less-than-impressive, causing the stock to plunge $5.10, or 8.64 percent, to close at $53.91 on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The note also comes a day before Apple is expected to report iPhone sales of around 5 million units during the past quarter.

Motorola was up 8 percent on a report that its Android smartphone is getting closer to reality, and Time Warner was up 9 percent on news of pending layoffs at Yahoo, which could force the struggling search company into a deal with Time Warner’s AOL division. Yahoo itself was down slightly, just 0.31 percent.

I chose to follow them myself, though. I don’t need any help from Mr. Tweet.

By employing a wiki and allowing anyone to access it, TwitterPacks does a fine job of arranging Twitter users into groups based on their interests, location, company, or favorite topics.

TwitterLocal

If you haven’t tried Twubble out yet, it’s time you give it a spin.

Overall, Twitter’s search tool is really fast, and will find the person you’re looking for without much digging. That said, it has one severe limitation: finding people with common names like John Smith will take some time, and it’s only useful when searching for a specific person.

Although the same results are returned multiple times, it’s the first run-through that matters. If you want to find friends and colleagues quickly, Twubble offers a fine solution for doing just that.

Finding friends on Twitter was simple when the service was in its infancy, but today, Twitter is home to millions of users. In fact, 70 percent of the entire Twitter community is composed of people who signed up in 2008 and 5,000 to 10,000 new users sign up each day.

That’s why I’ve compiled a list of some great solutions that have helped me find friends more efficiently than asking for their usernames.

Maybe this is an obvious pick, but using Twitter search to find friends on Twitter actually works quite well. The feature allows users to search for a person by name and based on that information, it will return all the Twitter users who registered under that name.

Twubble

The main attraction to TwitterPacks (and probably its biggest issue) is that it relies on the community to provide value. For anyone to find people who share interests on Twitter, they first need to join the wiki and place their Twitter profile under one topic, interest, or company. If the millions of Twitter users actually used TwitterPacks, it would be an invaluable tool to find others that share your interests or live in the same area. But because it’s only used by a relatively small number of users, you’ll probably have a tough time finding people you know. If you want to make new friends, TwitterPacks will work just fine, though.

Want to know where to find Don Reisinger on Twitter? Right here!

If you want, Mr. Tweet will even auto-follow all the people it finds for you, but it requires you to hand over your username and password to the service to do it–a major security issue, if you ask me. Regardless, it works extremely well and returned a nice list of people worth following.

In essence, Twits Like Me works great if you and your friends tweet about the same topics, but if you talk about tech and the buddy you’re trying to find loves sports, you may have some trouble using this app.

TwitterPacks

If you want to find people in your area that may be using Twitter, TwitterLocal is a great service to do it. Upon entering a city and state or ZIP code, you can quickly find all the people within a 40-mile radius that have recently issued tweets.

TwitterLocal doesn’t analyze your Twitter profile like Twubble or Mr. Tweet, so the chances of finding a link between yourself and another person in your area are quite slim. But if you’re sure that some of your friends are on Twitter and you can’t find them through any other means, TwitterLocal will do a fine job of narrowing your search to your city. That said, you’ll be hard-pressed to find folks you know. I tried multiple ZIP codes trying to find someone and each time, I failed. But if you’re only looking to meet new people in your town, TwitterLocal is a great place to start.

Twubble is simple and requires little to help you find friends. Upon surfing to the site, you’re presented with a “Find some friends!” button, which when clicked, analyzes your Twitter account and finds people who you may want to follow. I was skeptical at first, but after clicking the button, the service returned a slew of colleagues and friends that I had no idea were on Twitter. I followed many of them and tried the button again. This time, it returned many of the same people and most of the users that I had already followed were displayed. Twubble realized that, though, and delivered a disclaimer saying it may not work as well the second time around if you follow many people.

Twits Like Me is a simple app that won’t win any prizes for its design, but it skillfully finds other folks who share your same interests.

Mr. Tweet is similar to Twubble in that it analyzes your Twitter account to find other people that it thinks you should follow. But what it provides that Twubble doesn’t is a host of stats with information about how you may know a particular person and how active they are on Twitter.

Mr. Tweet

Once you input your Twitter username into the service, Twits Like Me searches through Twitter to find others that the app believes you will find interesting. It works well and I found a slew of people I knew by using the service. The only issue is that there’s really no logic in how it finds those you may share interests with. As far as I can tell, it searched for people who tweeted about the same topics as I had in the last few days, but it didn’t analyze those tweets to determine which topics I talk about most often.

Twitter search

Twits Like Me

Google is taking its marketing strategy for Google Apps to the next level by renting prominent billboards in major U.S. cities.

Google has steadily increased the drumbeat behind Google Apps over the past several months, openly touting it as an alternative to Microsoft’s suite of office productivity and e-mail software with customer testimonials and applications designed to make the switch easier. The company said 1.75 million organizations are now using Google’s online services for word processing and e-mail, which is still a drop in the overall bucket but growing.

Commuters in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco will be greeted by a progressive series of ads for Google Apps starting Monday and running for a month. The idea is to catch IT managers stuck in horrific traffic spots like New York’s West Side Highway or San Francisco’s U.S. 101 and press them on the benefits of switching to Google Apps with a different ad for each day of the week.

(Credit:
Google)

Traditionally Google hasn’t been big on ads, but it has produced TV spots for its Chrome browser and posted a cryptic series of job ads on Silicon Valley billboards years ago.

Some commuters will see billboards such as these touting Google Apps for a solid month.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Toysmart and eventually blocked the sale. As part of a settlement, Disney agreed to purchase Toysmart’s customer information for $50,000 and then destroy it.

SpiralFrog CEO Joe Mohen authorized former employee Tim Bieber to sell customer e-mails with no privacy restrictions. Bieber’s address has been redacted from this document.

That wasn’t a problem. Bieber had asked Mohen for written authorization two weeks earlier, documents show.

Mohen said SpiralFrog had stopped paying employees sometime in November 2008 and that Bieber had worked for an extended period without receiving compensation. On February 26, 2009, Bieber wrote Mohen that he was prepared to take legal action, if he wasn’t paid.

Internet users often go to great lengths to protect their e-mail addresses from spammers. The history of the Web, however, shows that for dying start-ups, the temptation is to look upon the data as just another asset to be liquidated. The situation at SpiralFrog is similar to one that occurred when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET Networks)

Ever since ad-supported music service SpiralFrog shut its doors in March, former users have complained about receiving a glut of spam.

Click the image above to read our story on how a fractured management hurt SpiralFrog

In 2000, Arizona Sen. John McCain called for legislation that would prevent bankrupt Web stores from selling their customers' personal information without their knowledge.

“SpiralFrog seems to have sold their members’ e-mail (addresses) to spammers,” a CNET reader commented in response to a May story about some of the company’s struggles. “I signed up for the service with a unique e-mail address. As soon as the service shut down, I started getting massive amounts of spam sent to that address. Anyone else have this problem? Pretty slimy.”

“I’m hanging by (the) ends of my fingernails.”–Tim Bieber, former SpiralFrog salesman, in an e-mail to Mohen

Mohen then gave him rights to use the list “for commercial purposes on a nonexclusive basis” for six months. Bieber forwarded the document to the start-up that purchased the list. In addition, the start-up’s executives met in New York with Mohen, who confirmed that Bieber had the right to sell the list, the start-up’s attorney said.

“The users who signed up with SpiralFrog were given the clear impression that their e-mail addresses would not end up in the hands of spammers,” according to a former SpiralFrog employee with knowledge of the sale, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Companies routinely promise to protect privacy and very rarely break it. SpiralFrog kept its promise until the day before shutting down.”

It’s still unclear how many spammers obtained a list of e-mail addresses belonging to about 2.5 million registered users of the now-defunct service, as well as how they all obtained the addresses. But it is clear that at least one company obtained the e-mails by paying a former SpiralFrog salesman $8,500, CNET News has learned.

Nine years ago, CNET News reported that three dot-com failures, including Disney-backed Web store Toysmart.com, tried to auction off customer data the companies once promised never to share, such as credit card data and phone numbers. Members of Congress, including Arizona Sen. John McCain, argued that bankruptcy didn’t give companies the right to break promises to consumers.

“SpiralFrog will not share, sell, or trade personally identifiable information collected at the site with third parties, except as described in this privacy policy,” the company said in its privacy agreement. “On a confidential basis only, SpiralFrog may share personally identifiable information collected at the site with corporate affiliates, consultants, or third parties performing a specific service or function on our behalf.”

It is unclear whether Bieber distributed the list to anyone else.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET)

A review of SpiralFrog’s documents provided by a start-up that purchased the e-mail list shows that SpiralFrog’s founder and CEO, Joe Mohen, authorized the sale days before creditors took control of the company’s assets on March 13, 2009. Leading up to the sale, Mohen gave the list to Tim Bieber, a former SpiralFrog salesman, as compensation for back wages the company owed him, records show. Mohen did this despite SpiralFrog’s promise to protect users’ privacy.

Authorizing the sale

The sale of SpiralFrog’s user data began sometime around March 27, when Bieber approached executives at the start-up that purchased the list, according to that company’s attorney.

In two interviews with CNET, Mohen acknowledged that in March, he “licensed” the user data. Mohen told CNET in June that to the “best of my recollection,” the licensing deals complied with SpiralFrog’s privacy agreement. Last week, however, Mohen said the agreement he had with Bieber, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, did not go far enough to protect customer privacy.

Plenty of consumers suspect retailers of secretly sharing their information, but because of the shadowy way in which spammers conduct their business, tracking down the responsible party is nearly impossible. And once an e-mail list falls into the hands of spammers, it can be sold and resold.

Documents show the sale of the addresses had nothing to do with a company working on SpiralFrog’s behalf. Indeed, the sale took place weeks after the music service shut down. Mohen acknowledged to CNET News that there wasn’t anything in his agreement with Bieber to prevent the former salesman from selling the list as many times as he wanted, to whomever he wanted. Bieber did not respond to numerous interview requests.

Editors’ note: Go here to read some copies of SpiralFrog’s correspondence.

“Joe, hope (you) got good news from your conference call last night. I file a lawsuit next week naming (SpiralFrog) and 3V (the hedge fund that loaned SpiralFrog money for nearly two years), unless you provide me with funds and a payment schedule by end of week…I’m hanging by (the) ends of my fingernails.”

“In retrospect, I should have added tighter language to that agreement,” Mohen said a week ago. “In the later days of the company, Tim Bieber was owed money by the company, and I struck an agreement with Tim to avoid litigation. To satisfy the liability, I licensed to Tim the user database.”

The start-up’s lawyer, who has asked to remain anonymous, said that after wiring $8,500 to Bieber on March 31 to obtain the user e-mail list, the company has not shared or sold SpiralFrog’s user information with anyone, and it has obeyed all laws in acquiring the list. To prove his point, the attorney said that when Bieber first approached the start-up about selling SpiralFrog’s user addresses, executives there wanted proof that he was authorized to sell the list.

“Joe, I’ll be needing something simple in writing from you authorizing me to (be) selling this database as part of remuneration,” Bieber wrote in an e-mail dated March 12, the day before creditors took control of SpiralFrog. “So far, the list is useless without some paper authorizing its resale–even loose paper explaining the nature of how I came across the list…You dig. Let me know ASAP.”

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Net Applications has finally published its browser market share numbers for July, and the results are surprising. Given European summer holidays and Mozilla Firefox’s large user base in Europe (35 percent market share),
Firefox should be seeing a significant decline in market share through the summer months.

After all, eventually even the Griswalds come home and get back to work. When they do, more and more will be using Firefox.

With Firefox recently surpassing its one-billionth download, we should see rising market share in the fall, unless back-to-school PC sales give IE a bump.

But it isn’t.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Browser Market Share Data, July 2009

But I don’t think IE will win over the student crowd, which is more likely to be a
Mac (Safari) crowd than a Microsoft one. And so I suspect we’ll continue to see Firefox (along with Safari and Chrome) rising against IE.

Instead, as detailed below, Firefox market share continues to hold steady at 22.47 percent, while Internet Explorer also treads water at 67.68 percent. Only
Safari (4.07 percent) and Google Chrome (2.59 percent) show appreciable, sustained growth over the past few months.

(Credit:
Net Applications)

Michael Howard, a security program manager at Microsoft, explained in his blog that the typo corrupted the code of an ActiveX control used by the browser. The control was created by Microsoft using an older library of code, which Howard admitted has flaws. Because of those flaws, the typo caused the code to write untrusted data, exposing the browser to the bad guys.

In his blog, Howard acknowledged the need to clean up the company’s coding process. He said that Microsoft will update the tools it uses to find these types of errors. The company will also require its programmers to use the newer ATL code. In the past, Microsoft never told its programmers what to use. But says Howard in his blog, “We’re going to change that!”

A security hole in Internet Explorer that opened the browser to hackers since early July was caused by a single typo in Microsoft’s code.

Outside of its regular Patch Tuesday routine, Microsoft issued an emergency fix for IE, which it said would block attempts to exploit the flaw in ActiveX controls.

The code lines he listed were:
__int64 cbSize;
hr = pStream->Read((void*) &cbSize, sizeof(cbSize), NULL);
BYTE *pbArray;
HRESULT hr = SafeArrayAccessData(psa, reinterpret_cast(&pbArray));
hr = pStream->Read((void*)&pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL);

The hole was originally uncovered earlier this month by a pair of German researchers. Thomas Dullien (also known as Halvar Flake), CEO of Zynamics GmbH, and his friend Dennis Elser detailed their discovery in a blog. After the exploit became known, the two did some digging into the code and found the unwanted “&” character.

Development tools like Microsoft’s own Visual Studio use the same library of code, known as Active Template Library (ATL). On the same day it released the emergency patch for IE, the company also released a Visual Studio fix.

Howard said the typo would have been difficult to spot in a review of the code, and that none of Microsoft’s code analysis methods would have uncovered it either.

In his blog, Howard played a high-tech version of “Where’s Waldo?” by challenging readers to find the typo amid a few short lines of code, even hinting that it was a single character.

So what will Microsoft do to guard against future typos?

And his riddle for readers:
“I’ll give you one more clue - it’s a one character typo. Give up? Look at the last line. The first argument is incorrect. It should be: hr = pStream->Read((void*)pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL);”

An errant ampersand (”&”) took the blame for the exploit, admitted Microsoft in a blog published Tuesday at its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Web site.

In addition, the mobile OS offers a more touch-friendly user interface with a new Today screen, Start menu, and Lock screen. As part of the HTC Touch series, however, you can choose to stick with the company’s TouchFlo 3D interface.

HTC Pure

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HTC)

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The rest of the features are similar to the other models, which include a 3.6-inch WVGA tilting touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, and HTC’s Straight Talk Technology for improved speakerphone quality. The HTC Tilt2 is expected to be available in the coming weeks and will cost $299.99 with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate.

Designed to have both consumer and business appeal, the HTC Pure features a slick design and offers a 3.2-inch WVGA touch screen with both a gravity and light sensor. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G support are all onboard as well as a 5-megapixel camera and a music player. The Pure is available now for $149.99 with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate.

The Pure is a rebranded version of the HTC Touch Diamond2, which we took a look at earlier this year, and sports some design changes and, of course, the new features of Windows Mobile 6.5. This includes the Microsoft’s MyPhone backup service, an improved Internet Explore
Mobile browser that offers Flash Lite support and better navigation tools, and support for Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which will launch later this year.

Meanwhile for AT&T’s power business customers, they’ll finally get their turn at their own version of the HTC Touch Pro2 in the coming weeks. Dubbed the HTC Tilt2 (and obviously the successor to the AT&T Tilt), the smartphone has a leg up on T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon’s version of the smartphone by shipping with Windows Mobile 6.5 out of the box.

HTC Tilt2

With the launch of the first round of Windows Mobile 6.5 devices just a day away, AT&T threw its hat into the ring and announced two of its own Windows phones, the HTC Pure and the HTC Tilt2.

(Credit:
HTC)

Recently, my colleague Rafe Needleman wrote a column titled “Why consumers won’t buy tablets.” The article was a direct reference to the long-standing rumor that Apple may be releasing a slate-style, jumbo
iPod Touch this fall. Rafe doesn’t really believe Apple would be misguided enough to release a tablet and that if it does put one out in the rumored $700 to $800 price range, “it will die.” He also believes that, “This whole category is a nonstarter.”

I tend to agree with Rafe on a lot of his points. I think tablets and tweener devices–like Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs)–that are too big to put in your pocket, cumbersome to operate, and overpriced, are problematic and have no place in the marketplace.

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But as Rafe pointed out, there’s another possibility. “Of course,” he wrote, “you’ll probably be able to plug a keyboard into any of these yet-to-be-released tablets…but you’ll pay extra for the hardware and it’ll mean more gear to keep track of and prop up on your desk.”

Because it has to. The only way for an Apple slate-style Netbook to succeed at the price point we’re looking at is for it to be a flexible device that can appeal to a wide range of users and usage scenarios. In short, it will be what you want to it to be. (One reader suggests that Apple call it the Omni, which isn’t bad).

At home, it will be a media pad you can take to bed with you. On the road, it’ll be a Netbook during the day (I’d like to see kickstand on the back) and an e-book reader and video phone at night. At school, students will use it was a digital notepad. In the
car, it’s a game machine for the kiddies.

Comments?

Alas, that probably won’t cut it for Apple. Low-end computers just aren’t in the company’s DNA, so rumor has it we’re looking at a $700-$800 tablet, which, to guys like Rafe and me, doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense. But at same time I also have enough faith in Apple to realize that if it’s going to come out with such a product, it’s probably going change the tablet’s paradigm to the point where it suddenly makes abundant sense.

Name that Netbook: What should Apple call its rumored tablet PC
Why consumers won’t buy tablets
Why an Apple tablet will succeed
Fantasy features of an Apple tablet
Our Apple tablet hardware, software wishlist

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For now, though, I could make do with an optional keyboard. And it’s already here, both in a wired and wireless version. I just hope Apple allows me to use it.

To some it would seem incongruous for Apple to put out a keyboardless device that would have an optional keyboard (The Newton had one, which is maybe why Steve Jobs hated it). That said, there are a lot of folks who wouldn’t mind using a wireless Bluetooth keyboard to connect to their iPhones or iPod Touchs, but Apple has yet to offer the Bluetooth-keyboard profile that would allow you to do it. So why would it allow it with a larger, jumbo iPod Touch?

As the rumors and concept images continue to swirl, much of the debate around Apple’s rumored device has focused on the touch screen and the prospect of typing on a virtual keyboard, much like one does with the
iPhone and iPod Touch, which some users view as mini tablets. However, it’s hard to imagine that this would be the best experience for doing serious work, and I know lots of people who still struggle with the iPhone’s keyboard (my father owns an iPhone and it’s a little bit painful to watch him type on it).

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Apple)

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Can’t you see the Apple ads already?

The reason why Netbooks have been successful is that they’re cheap, and their form factor makes sense, especially for those looking to take a basic, lightweight computer out with them on the road–or just out to the patio. It’s a pretty simple equation and you’d think that Apple would just follow the Netbook trend and come out with something that didn’t break the mold but was sexier, a little zippier, and cost an extra $100-$200 in so-called Apple tax. What I’m talking about is a 10-inch $600-$700 Apple Netbook with a keyboard.

And one more thing: I’d venture to say that the keyboard (virtual or physical) and stylus won’t be the only way to navigate the device or input information. If you’ve been following what Apple’s been doing with voice commands on the Shuffle and iPhone/iPod Touch, it’s obviously been experimenting with voice operation as an interface. At some point, you’ll not only be able to playback tracks in iTunes (like you can now) with your voice, but you’ll be able to open and close applications, browse webpages, dictate email, and do even more.

To a degree, this is what Brooke Crothers argued in his piece, “Why an Apple tablet will succeed.” It was meant to be a counterpoint to Rafe’s article and featured some potential specs for a fantasy tablet of the near future. I appreciate Brooke’s point of view as well.

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what’s pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

For most people I’m guessing Trend Tracker will be something they play with a few times and forget, but there’s some real value here over Twitter’s own trend highlighting offerings. If you want to see when and where something originated, as well as how popular it was at any given time of day, this offers both sets of data and in a very easy to use format; you don’t even need to do any detective work in Twitter’s search engine to find that out.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it’s more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

But 24 hours doesn’t tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

(Credit:
CNET)

Related: Sites that help you find hot topics across the Web

The map view gives you an hourly playback of the popularity of multiple trends at once.

Trend Tracker can give you a visual analysis of when each trend became popular, as well as its decline.

To add to that, there’s also a map layer that shows you an animated view of where tweets in any particular trend originated. Again, in the case of “sleep” and “night” you could play back an entire day of activity and see a huge cluster of when the word or phrase gained its prominence.

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a “Pre Trend Watch” (emphasis mine) which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity–the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was the cyclical nature of trending. Words like “sleep” and “night” picked up speed and prominence depending on the time of day. Using Trend Tracker’s frequency graph, you’re able to look at the last 24 hours, and see what time of day they began to rise or fall in use–that’s not something you can see through Twitter proper.

(Credit:
CNET)

Translation: If your company is deemed “critical,” a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government’s role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is “not as prepared” as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. “We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs–from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records,” Rockefeller said.

Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for an on-the-record answer to these four questions that I asked her colleague on Wednesday. I’ll let you know if and when I get a response.

The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “As soon as you’re saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it’s going to be a really big issue,” he says.

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:

Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller’s aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.

A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president’s power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president’s authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a “government shutdown or takeover of the Internet” and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government’s response.

The Internet Security Alliance’s Clinton adds that his group is “supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective.”

“The language has changed but it doesn’t contain any real additional limits,” EFF’s Tien says. “It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)…The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There’s no provision for any administrative process or review. That’s where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it.”

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to “direct the national response to the cyber threat” if necessary for “the national defense and security.” The White House is supposed to engage in “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government. (”Cyber” is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

Rockefeller’s revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a “cybersecurity workforce plan” from every federal agency, a “dashboard” pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a “comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy” in six months–even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.