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Magazine publisher Primedia has sold 10 percent of itself in order to begin its expansion into new media. Internet advertising and investment company CMGI acquired 5 percent in exchange for stock, while Liberty Media Group, AT&T's cable TV division, acquired 5 percent for cash. Liberty Media has also retained the option to buy up to 12.5 percent of a new Primedia subsidiary called Primedia Broadband Video. Primedia is still seeking another $125 to $150 through ongoing divestments of extraneous assets. Chairman and CEO Tom Rogers assured the investment world yesterday that this would be just the beginning of a thorough reshaping of Primedia into an integrated media company that leverages its content across all different platforms. CMGI is slated to help Primedia develop vertical content for both consumers and businesses on the web. Liberty meanwhile will help the company begin to develop broadband video and other as yet vague interactive applications based on Primedia content.
Jail may be in the
future for Lucent scamster
Fred Moldofsky, the securities day-trader
responsible for the sharp drop in Lucent Technologies’ stock last week,
could soon be facing ten years in jail. Last Wednesday Moldofsky drew up a
bogus Lucent press release warning that the firm’s second quarter
earnings would fall far short of projections. He posted the forgery on
Yahoo’s message board, and then followed up with dozens of other phony
posts corroborating the doom-saying press release. Investors took the
bait, and Lucent’s stock dropped 3.6 percent the next day. Meanwhile, Moldofsky
traded 6,000 shares of Lucent the same day. Moldofsky was arrested in
Houston, Texas yesterday on charges of security fraud. In addition to the
possible prison time, he faces a $1 million fine (while Lucent lost $7.1
billion in the one-day drop). Lucent assured stockholders the day after
that its second-quarter profits would indeed meet expectations.
Hackers hone their
craft at Israel conference
Some 350 hackers gathered in Israel this week
for a two-day conference to slog pizza and soda, trade tips, play some
geeky games and generally try to paint a smiley face over hackers’
sullied image. One featured participant was John Draper, credited with
inventing hacking in 1971 when he found that a toy whistle from a cereal
box produced the exact pitch necessary to secure a free line at payphones.
Draper’s handle is "Captain Crunch." Other highlights included
"Spot the Fed," a game that involved fingering one of the
undercover policemen reported to be in attendance (none were spotted). A
large portion of the conference was taken up with hacking dozens of
Israeli web sites—the sites were willingly provided by companies who
believed their sites were "hack-proof." As the results came
back, it turned out that about 28 percent of the Israeli internet is
vulnerable, which is roughly the same percentage as the rest of the world.
According to Draper, such "HackTheseSites" activities are
actually a service to the companies. He told the Associated Press, "A
hacker is a person who is developing programs to make them better. . . They aren’t the kind of people who break into computer systems. That’s
a cracker."
Judge declines to ban
'deep linking' of sites
In a decision that could have
far-reaching effects for web retailers, U. S. District Court Judge Harry
Hupp ruled yesterday that the practice of "deep-linking," that
is, a web site hyperlinking to the embedded content of another site, does
not violate the law. The decision favored the defendant in a suit brought
by Ticketmaster, seeking to block deep linking to its site by Tickets.com.
The problem for a company like Ticketmaster is that the outside links
generally lead directly to pages deep within its site, bypassing many
pages of advertising. The plaintiff alleged that Tickets was essentially
building its business on Ticketmaster’s back, an argument unconvincing
to Judge Hupp who compared deep linking with using a library’s card
catalog. This is the first deep linking case to actually make it through
legal proceedings; earlier suits by Ticketmaster against Microsoft and by
eBay against AuctionWatch were settled out of court.
