Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder, Says Internet Freedom Facing Greatest Threat Ever



LONDON, April 16 (Reuters) - The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the Internet's creation are facing their greatest-ever threat, the co-founder of Google Sergey Brin said in an interview published by Britain's Guardian newspaper on Monday.

Brin said the threat to freedom of the Internet came from a combination of factors, including increasing efforts by governments to control access and communication by their citizens.

Brin said attempts by the entertainment industry to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms, were also leading to greater restrictions on the Internet.

"There are very powerful forces that have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world," Brin was quoted as saying. "I am more worried than I have been in the past. It's scary."

He said he was concerned by efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the Internet.

Brin said the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.
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Diamonds as a Commodity

The diamond industry has an image of “hiding behind smoke and mirrors,” said Charles Wyndham, who runs a pricing company.


Could diamonds be the new gold?

A small number of investment professionals around the world are competing behind the scenes to turn the gem into a commodity that would be available to investors in the way that gold has been traded through funds on exchanges.
Trading in diamonds is limited in the United States to the retail market for engagement rings and other jewelry and the back-room bargaining among merchants in places like Manhattan’s diamond district on West 47th Street.
But financial industry players in New York, London, Switzerland and Israel say there is an opening to provide reliable public access for the growing universe of investors who have been willing to sink money into funds backed by exotic assets like palladium and silver. Those players have turned a gold-backed fund, the SPDR Gold Shares, into one of the world’s largest exchange-traded funds, with a market capitalization of about $70 billion. 
The Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing a proposal to create the first diamond-backed exchange-traded fund, which would be available to anyone with an online trading account. It would buy one-carat diamonds and store them in a vault in Antwerp, Belgium, providing daily values with an as-yet-unnamed index. The fund is backed by a New York company, IndexIQ, that has brought 14 other exchange-traded funds to market in the last five years.
In addition, Martin Rapaport, who founded a popular gauge of diamond pricing, said recently that he was preparing to release a “few” products this year that would be available to retail investors. He declined to describe them.
In perhaps the most developed plan, the largest publicly traded diamond company, Harry Winston, is working with a Swiss asset manager to create a $250 million fund that is set to begin buying half-carat to six-carat diamonds this year with money from institutional investors like hedge funds and pensions. The fund would own diamonds bought and sold in Harry Winston stores and sell shares to private investors. 
“Diamond is the last uncommoditized commodity, and so it’s drawing in many organizations,” said Edahn Golan, the editor in chief of IDEX Online, a provider of diamond industry data. “I assume that by the end of this year there will be a bunch of them out.”
Investment professionals say that retail investors should be very careful, given the difficulty of establishing consistent prices for diamonds of widely different cuts and quality, and the traditional secrecy of the industry. The diamond market has also been tarnished by accounts of stones mined in war-torn parts of Africa, though both the IndexIQ fund and the Harry Winston fund have committed to avoiding such so-called blood diamonds.
“There would be a huge learning curve for me to be comfortable trading something like this,” said Matt Zeman, a commodity trader at Kingsview Financial.  
The diamond industry can only dream of replicating the success of gold companies. Gold investments, rather than jewelry, have become the primary driver of growth in the industry, according to the World Gold Council, pushing annual production to around $100 billion, Citigroup analysts say. By comparison, the annual production of polished diamonds is about $18 billion, Citi said.

The allure of diamonds is that, like gold, they are easily authenticated and long lasting. But unlike gold, and oil, diamonds have not had much price volatility, in part because they have not been touched by large flows of speculative money, though that could change if the new efforts succeed.
“It makes sense that investors would have interest in diamond-backed funds,” said Joung Park, a commodities analyst at Morningstar.
This is not the first rush to bring diamonds to Wall Street. When inflation was soaring in the late 1970s, the search for stable stores of value led to a few legitimate, and many illegitimate, operations that lured retail investors into diamonds. One, started by the financial company Thomson McKinnon, sold shares privately and was wound down when interest rates plummeted, taking the value of diamonds with them.
The market long repelled many investment professionals because of the 80 percent to 90 percent market share of production held by De Beers, the global diamond giant. That began to ebb when De Beers relaxed its grip on the supply channels in 2000, and subsequently sold some of its mines and inventory, reducing its market share to 40 percent today, according to Citi.
“Before De Beers gave up its monopoly, the investment case was pretty difficult,” said Peter Laib, chairman of the Swiss firm Diamond Asset Advisors, which is working with Harry Winston on a diamond fund. “Why would I start a fund where the price is controlled by one company?”

The end of the monopoly still left perhaps the biggest barrier to investment: the lack of uniform standards for diamond pricing. Unlike gold, which is sold for essentially the same price in financial markets around the world, diamonds have been sold mostly through bazaarlike areas like the Manhattan district and the Antwerp Diamond Bourse, which advertises that a “binding handclasp fixes price, delivery and conditions.”
“The diamond industry suffers from an image which sadly is rather well deserved, which is hiding behind smoke and mirrors,” said Charles Wyndham, the London-based founder of Polished Prices, a diamond pricing company.
Many market participants argue that diamonds are not a commodity but unique items that need to be evaluated individually. But Wyndham, Rapaport and IDEX are competing to prove that wrong by creating standardized pricing. IDEX has an hourly updated index of asking prices from its online database, weighted with the 15 most popular varieties.
The IDEX index is not the best gauge, Mr. Wyndham argues, because it relies on asking prices rather than actual transaction prices, as stock exchanges do. He has built the Polished Prices index, which is available on Bloomberg terminals, and uses selling prices the company receives from 20 wholesalers. He said he was working with a “major European financial institution” that is seeking to win regulatory approval in Europe for yet another diamond fund that could be available to the public.
Polished Prices hosted a conference in 2007 with dozens of finance industry professionals who considered how to make diamonds a regulated investment. Mr. Wyndham’s partner, Richard Platt, said he thought then that a product would be available sooner.
“It’s been difficult, but we’re quite a long way down the road to getting there,” Mr. Platt said.
Mr. Wyndham and Mr. Rapaport are critical of the only fund that is available to ordinary investors, the Diamond Circle Capital Fund, which listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2008. It collected roughly $50 million from investors and used it to buy stones, each worth at least a million dollars. Mr. Wyndham said the fund managers did not work out a system for pricing and eventually selling its holdings. Shares have dropped to less than $4.20 this week from around $10 in 2008.
Andrew Dawson, the fund administrator, said it recently underwent a management change and now has a better strategy with the new managers. The fund working with Harry Winston has devised a novel way of dealing with the problem of pricing. The manager in Switzerland will pay for the inventory in Harry Winston stores. The value of the diamonds will be determined after a customer buys a piece of jewelry containing the stones and a replacement stone is purchased through Harry Winston’s supply chain. The fees for the fund will be similar to those of a hedge fund, with a 1.5 percent management fee and 20 percent of any increase in value.
The United States-based fund from IndexIQ advisers did not list its planned fee in the application it filed to the S.E.C. in March. Its other exchange-traded funds have fees around 1 percent annually and trade on the New York Stock Exchange’s Arca exchange. Its biggest fund replicates hedge fund strategies and has attracted $200 million in assets. The S.E.C. does not comment on pending applications.
All the new sponsors make the same argument for what makes diamonds attractive to investors: while the supply of new diamonds is not expected to rise, the demand from India and China is expected to increase steadily. Brian Chen, a mining analyst at Citigroup, said “the fundamentals look so good in terms of supply and demand.”
The Polished Prices index has fallen 2.2 percent this year, but risen 5.6 percent over the last year, and 56 percent since its inception in 2003.
But Ron Rowland, a mutual fund and exchange-traded fund adviser, and the founder of Capital Cities Asset Management, said that even if funds did begin, retail investors should approach with extreme caution.
“Stay away until you know exactly how it works, and can be sure it’s acting like you think it will,” he said. “It’s going to be a difficult market to create.”
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Why Medical Bills Are a Mystery

Rising health care costs are busting the federal budget as well as those of states, counties and municipalities. Policy makers and health care leaders have spent decades trying to figure out what to do about this.
Yet their solutions are failing because of a fundamental and largely unrecognized problem: We don’t know what it costs to deliver health care to individual patients, much less how those costs compare to the outcomes achieved.
When insurance companies or government bodies try to control costs, they usually make across-the-board reimbursement cuts that ultimately are unsustainable because they have no connection to the true costs of delivering care. Providers themselves do not measure their costs correctly. They assign costs to patients based on what they charge, not on the actual costs of the resources, like personnel and equipment, used to care for the patient. The result is that attempts to cut costs fail, and total health care costs just keep rising.
Regardless of what decision the Supreme Court reaches on the legality of the Affordable Care Act, measuring outcomes and costs is indispensable to driving improvements.
Because health care charges and reimbursements have become disconnected from actual costs, some procedures are reimbursed very generously, while others are priced below their actual cost or not reimbursed at all. This leads many providers to expand into well-reimbursed procedures, like knee and hip replacements or high-end imaging, producing huge excess capacity for these at the same time that shortages persist in poorly reimbursed but critical services like primary and preventive care.
The lack of cost and outcome information also prevents the forces of competition from working: Hospitals and doctors are reimbursed for performing lots of procedures and tests regardless of whether they are necessary to make their patients get better. Providers who excel and achieve better outcomes with fewer visits, procedures and complications are penalized by being paid less.
Our research and executive workshops show that many sites are already improving their measurements of patient outcomes. But they have done little to measure the actual costs of achieving those outcomes. We are currently working with several health care organizations, including MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Children’s Hospital Boston, Partners Healthcare in Boston and Schön Klinik in Germany, that are beginning to figure out how to measure costs. They use teams of clinicians and administrators to identify all the processes involved in care, from a patient’s first contact with a health care provider through his or her inpatient stay and outpatient follow-up care. The teams then identify the quantity and unit cost of each resource — clinical staff, equipment, supplies, devices and administrative support — used in each process and add these together to learn the total cost of a patient’s care.
The information helps them discover immediate and significant opportunities for improvements in care and reduced spending. MD Anderson, for example, has studied its evaluation process for new head and neck cancer patients. By substituting trained staff members for physicians, standardizing processes and improving information technology, it has been able to make care more efficient without any adverse effect on patient outcomes. It has made changes that reduced total costs by 36 percent, and freed employees to serve more patients without adding to costs.
A surgeon repairing cleft palates at Children’s Hospital Boston discovered that 40 percent of the total cost of an 18-month-care process was due to the time a child spent in the intensive care unit before and after surgery. By using a far less intensively staffed and equipped observation room, the hospital could achieve equivalent quality and safety at much lower costs.
Most health care providers have hundreds of these opportunities to use time, equipment and facilities more intelligently. These opportunities have been obscured by existing costing systems that have little connection to the processes actually performed.
With accurate information on outcomes and costs, providers can improve care and save money by eliminating things that don’t help the patient, like multiple check-ins and medical histories, tests that provide little new information and long waiting times. Many routine tasks are performed today by highly trained doctors and nurses. These tasks can be shifted to others, freeing the most skilled clinicians for far more productive work.
Health care providers with expensive and poorly utilized equipment, space and staff can see the benefits of consolidating services to improve utilization and reduce some existing capacity. They can also perform routine services in lower-cost locations, reserving expensive medical centers for complex care.
These opportunities will allow the health care needs of an aging population to be met with little need to increase spending. Understanding costs could be the single most powerful lever to transform the value of health care.  This would give payers and providers the data they need to improve patient care, and to stop arbitrary cuts and counterproductive cost shifting.
Robert S. Kaplan and Michael E. Porter are professors of accounting and strategy, respectively, at Harvard Business School.
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This Is How Crappy Steakhouses Fool Their Customers

We know you're obsessed with steak, so we thought you should be warned.

Time Magazine's Josh Ozersky has an awesome piece out called 'The Problem With The American Steakhouse' where he goes on a sophisticated rant on how we're getting screwed out of our ideal steakhouse experience.
From Time:
I don’t write this as a food pundit. I say it as a glutton and as an American. Steakhouses are not really restaurants, in the strictest sense: they are closer in spirit to strip clubs or spas, places to which people repair for rites of costly self-indulgence, Dionysian revels in which stressed businessmen or harried wives vent their hypertension.
That's colorful, but one of the truly awesome parts of this piece is when Ozersky talks about how steakhouses get away with this madness.
There are certain tricks of the trade to make so-so cuts look super:
So steakhouses find ways to trick you into thinking you are getting something precious. They bathe the meat in melted butter, which is good, but as much of a deceit as a padded bra; they buy steaks that have been jabbed with thousands of tiny needles to make them soft; they’ll use MSG or other tenderizers; they’ll call a steak “dry-aged” that has been in their refrigerator for three days (as opposed to a month in a real aging room.)

So keep your eye out everyone, we want you to eat well.

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Eric Justin Toth, Alleged Child Pornographer, Added To FBI's Most Wanted List


The FBI added an alleged child pornographer to its list of Ten Most Wanted fugitives.
Eric Justin Toth was 26 and a third-grade teacher in a Washington, D.C. private school in 2008 when authorities accused him of possession of kiddie porn.
Another teacher at Beauvoir, an elite school, discovered graphic photos and videos of students on a school camera issued to Toth, an FBI spokesperson told The Huffington Post. The school put Toth on administrative leave and contacted police. But he immediately went on the run, the FBI spokesperson said. He's also wanted in Maryland where he's accused of child porn production.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to Toth's capture. He traveled across the country after warrants were issued for his arrest nearly four years ago.
First, Toth drove to Indianapolis where he visited his parents, according to the FBI. They were unaware that he was suspected of any crime.
The FBI traced his movements to the Twin Cities where in August 2008 his car was found parked at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Agents allegedly found additional pornographic images of children in the car. Evidence also suggests that he visited Wisconsin and Illinois.
A tipster claimed he saw Toth living in a Phoenix homeless shelter in 2009, but the fugitive took off again before law enforcement could catch him. That was the last reported sighting of Toth.
Toth is 6’3”, weighs about 155 pounds and has brown hair and green eyes. He's worked as a camp counselor and tutor.
Toth is "well educated, charismatic and likable," an FBI spokesperson told Huff Post. He's a computer expert and may have advertised his services as a nanny or tutor. It's possible he used his deceptive personality to trick parents and get close to children again, the spokesperson said.
Toth, who's used the alias "David Bussone," takes a spot on the notorious most wanted list that became empty after Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan last May. The capture of alleged mobster James "Whitey" Bulger last June created another opening on the list that bureau officials said they would fill soon.
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Lady Gaga Tweets About Eating Disorders, Offends Followers

Yesterday, a controversial tweet joking about eating disorders from Lady Gaga -- the most popular celebrity on Twitter, with over 22 million followers -- gave rise to a slew of angry responses. Gaga wrote:
 
Lady Gaga
Just killed back to back spin classes. Eating a salad dreaming of a cheeseburger  
It was a surprising statement from Gaga, who has publicly opened up about her struggle with bulimia and urged young women to cultivate healthy body image. During an appearance at a young women's conference in Los Angeles in February, the singer admitted that she was bulimic in high school, and said that she was obsessed with being a "skinny little ballerina."
In response to the tweet, the National Eating Disorder Association staff Twitter account wrote: "Huh? This is the same person who recently implored girls to stop dieting?"
Some of Gaga's fans defended the tweet, saying that it was just a joke and was intended to be ironic. However, the responses were largely negative. For example, one of Gaga's followers tweeted:
 
-Aysha Falco
 why would you even promote a message like that? Disgusting that you'd joke about such a serious illness..
Whether or not the tweet was meant to be funny, eating disorders are not a joke -- in fact, they have the highest death rate of any mental illness. Another pop singer, Demi Lovato, took to Twitter in December to highlight the seriousness of the issue. After an eating disorder joke was made on the Disney Channel show "Shake It Up," Demi tweeted: "Dear Disney Channel, EATING DISORDERS ARE NOT SOMETHING TO JOKE ABOUT." Subsequently, the network apologized and the two episodes in question were pulled from the air.
Miley Cyrus has also taken to Twitter recently to address eating disorders -- but in this case, she was refuting rumors that she might have a problem. She wrote, "For everyone calling me anorexic I have a gluten and lactose allergy. It's not about weight it's about health." In another tweet, she encouraged her fans to go gluten-free for a week. And although many people enjoy good health on a gluten-free diet, it isn't right for everyone -- and critics have questionedCyrus's decision to dispense health advice to her fans.
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Will Spam Turn Mobile Users Off?


It has been said that 97 percent of text messages are read within four minutes. In fact, we know that many are viewed in a shorter window than that. If we’re not those people ourselves, we have likely experienced family members, friends, and others who rudely take themselves out of a conversation to respond to the bing or ding of their phones.
Beyond a lack of manners, what’s behind this behavior? Much of it has to do with the value placed on a text message. Unlike email, the vast majority of texts are either from people we know or solicited by us through membership in permission-based, mobile clubs developed by brands, politicians, sports teams, and others.
That is changing. According to a story in the New York Times, spam is becoming more pervasive on mobile devices. The Times said that in the United States, consumers received roughly 4.5 billion spam texts last year, more than double the 2.2 billion received in 2009, according to Ferris Research, a market research firm that tracks spam.
That is 4.5 million in a year spread out over 250 million text-enabled phones, according to the Times.
Does this problem compare to what we see in our email inboxes? Hardly.
Israeli Internet security developer Commtouch reports that we receive an average of about 4.5 million spam emails approximately every 90 minutes.
Just what are the implications of a doubling of spam on mobile devices?
• If we continue down this path, many mobile subscribers will consider texts an intrusion and ignore them
• Marketers who have succeeded in providing value to consumers who opt into mobile programs will suffer the consequences of a less attentive audience
• The mobile operators may see a drop in messaging revenue. Imagine how many will say no to the text option if the alternative is incessant and unwanted SMS
As the Times reported, mobile spam is illegal under two federal laws — the 2003 Can Spam Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which set up the Do Not Call Registry in 2003. Smartphone users can report numbers that spam comes from on both the Web sites of the F.T.C. and the Federal Communications Commission. The major wireless carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Bell Mobility and Verizon Wireless — all also offer ways to report the numbers on their Web sites and can block numbers.
It is up to the carriers to enforce the laws and quickly shut down the spammers whether they are smishing (illegally seeking personal information) or marketing outside the rules.
Anything less than vigilance will turn off consumers and the route to them.

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