Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes took a swipe at the reliability of blogs today by dissing a report that appeared on Silicon Valley Insider as not "journalism." Speaking at a Sanford Bernstein conference (webcast here), Bewkes denied the truth of the SAI report, which cited a source close to AOL as saying that Time Warner won't proceed with its previously announced separation of AOL's access business.
When asked about this report, Bewkes said "That's fun. That wasn't a news report. That was a blog." Even worse, Bewkes added that "we’re a journalism company…and we always try to position it as to whether we know or any basis or source for it."
Bewkes said he heard about this report while in the shower (which begs the question about how, precisely, Bewkes found out: was the SAI item reported by some audio service he could hear on a waterproof speaker? was he talking on the phone to his lieutenants while soaping up? was there there someone in there with him reading off the Internet?) and briefly wondered if it were true. "I was taking a shower and gee I thought what if it’s true."
SAI's Peter Kafka (not Henry Blodget, the author of the original item) took note of this insult. Writing about the Bernstein conference, Kafka said "Jeff took time to pee on our earlier report."
In another admission, Bewkes said that AOL probably overpaid for social networking service Bebo, for which it paid $850 million. "Which is not to say that this will work out to be a good idea. We may have overpaid as many critics have said."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:46 PM | Print | Comments (2)Wow. Wired's Kevin Poulson claims to have conducted an hour-long interview with two hackers, "Defiant" and "EBK," who are claiming responsibility for taking down Comcast's main website and email for over five hours on Thursday. The two claim to be juvenile deliquent, high-school drop-out teens (18 and 19 year-olds) who belong to an underground group called Kryogeniks.
Defiant and EBK say they exploited a flaw at the domain management console at Network Solutions to gain control over 200 Comcast domains, although Network Solutions disputes this claim. They are simultaneously euphoric over the publicity that their hacks created and frightened that they will soon be identified by authorities and arrested.
They also claim to have called Comcast's main technical contact to let him know that they had taken over administrative control of the domains and after the Comcast employee scoffed at them, they ramped up their effort by redirecting traffic to servers under their control. Both claim they hacked into the cable operator's site because of Comcast's "shitty" service and deny that Comcast's well-publicized P2P interference was a motivation behind the attack.
Obviously Wired's Poulson believes that both Defiant and EBK are responsible for the attacks and was directed to the two by another member of Kryogeniks. It's only a matter of days, if not hours, before we find out if Defiant and EBK are going to jail for a very long time.
If Poulson can find these two guys, you'd better believe that Comcast, and the FBI, can too. One commenter to Poulson's post even published the name, address, cell phone number and IP address for Defiant's father -- and it looks legit.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
