Brad’s Sketchpad

From last week:

On Monday, Miguel Helft and I profiled the digital fingerprinting companies helping Web 2.0 sites filter user submissions for copyrighted content. Google’s YouTube was seemingly dragging their feet on implementing the technology, but a few days later Google announced they would begin filtering YouTube.

In Wednesday’s paper, I profiled eBay’s marketplaces president John Donahoe.

And today, onetime pirate pariah BitTorrent joined the flood of companies offering Hollywood movies and TV shows for sale over the Internet.

This week, the FTC settled a dispute with parasitic adware firm Direct Revenue, whose software, surreptitiously installed, bedeviled so many computers a few years ago. The agreement requires the company to pay a $1.5 million fine and get explicit permission before downloading software onto someone’s PC, something it blatantly failed to do in its first few years of existence.

Commissioner John Leibowitz filed a dissent and makes a persuasive argument that the fine is not heavy enough, given the pain and frustration the company caused millions of Internet users.

A few years ago — before the class action lawsuit, the legal assault by Eliot Spitzer, and the action by the FTC — I investigated the secretive Direct Revenue for a piece that ran on Newsweek’s Web site. Somewhere in my files, I have CEO Joshua Abrams’ angry letter disputing the story. If I find it I’ll post it. In light of recent conclusions about the company’s nefarious behavior, I’m sure the letter now appears hilariously disingenuous.

Password’s don’t cut it anymore. But neither does a new security scheme called SiteKey, in which users are asked to recognize a single image each time they log into their bank’s Web site. In today’s paper, I write about a new study, by Harvard’s Rachna Dhamija and MIT’s Stuart Schechter, which found most users don’t respond when their image is absent.
On Saturday, I tackled Motorola’s recent problems.