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The police visited the teen’s apartment. He had cut his arms, but done nothing too drastic. The police arranged for him to receive the appropriate care.

Coltrane proved sanity does exist somewhere out there. Perhaps because he is involved in a youth mentoring program, he had no doubts about what he should do. He contacted the police in Sacramento and gave them the teen’s cell phone number.

Perhaps some of you might remember the case of Abraham Biggs, the Florida teen who made a similar statement last November and went through with his suicide, while being egged on by many pleasant little worms, staring at their Webcams as if this was entertainment.

(Credit: CC Simon Whiston)

There. Finally a social networking feel-good story.

Coltrane, a 22-year-old from New Jersey, befriended a teenager from the Sacramento area on MySpace. About a month later, the teen revealed in a Webcam chat that he was cutting himself and intended to take his own life.

Not everyone can hope to meet someone like Jesse Coltrane online.

“The president is confident that we can protect our nation’s critical cyber infrastructure while at the same time adhering to the rule of law and safeguarding privacy rights and civil liberties,” said John Brennan, the president’s homeland security adviser.

Hathaway’s appointment comes as Obama plans to overhaul the National Security Council, expanding its membership and effectively centralizing more decision-making in the White House staff. That would vest more authority in a staff run by James L. Jones, a former Marine Corps commandant who warned at a speech in Munich over the weekend that terrorists could use “cyber-technologies” to cause catastrophic damage.

What remained unclear on Monday is the breadth of the review: Will it be inward-looking, designed to make an existing governmental apparatus run more efficiently? Or will it look outside the federal government too, and yield recommendations or regulations aimed at telling U.S. companies how to run their businesses? (Many companies on the receiving end of such a process may, of course, find it rather ill-advised.)

The White House announcement on Monday said Hathaway will conduct an “immediate Cyber Security Review.” Left unsaid, though, is that a “National Cyber Security Review” was already part of Homeland Security’s official plan–finalized in April 2007, nearly two years ago.

Obama selected Melissa Hathaway, who worked for the director of national intelligence in the Bush administration and was director of an multi-agency “Cyber Task Force,” to conduct the review with an eye to ensuring that cybersecurity efforts are well-integrated and competently managed.

During a panel discussion that CNET News wrote about last fall, Hathaway defended Homeland Security’s efforts to develop what it called a National Cyber Security Initiative, saying there was “unprecedented bipartisan support” for it.

Some tasks might benefit from centralization in a sprawling bureaucracy. But it soon became evident that cybersecurity was not one of them. By 2005, government auditors concluded that the department failed to live up to its cybersecurity responsibilities and may be “unprepared” for emergencies; as recently as last fall, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said his agency needed to develop a plan to respond to a “cybercrisis.”

The origin of the Feds’ cybersecurity headaches can be found in the process that led to the creation of Homeland Security nearly seven years ago. Politicians in Washington, D.C. decided to decided to glue together a medley of federal agencies to create a massive bureaucracy that would, as one of its new goals, provide a better focus on cybersecurity.

“She’s great,” James Lewis, a senior fellow at the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of Hathaway. “She was one of the people who was making things work in the Bush administration…It is getting a high level attention at the deputy level of the NSC, but I don’t think they’ve figured out what they want to do. I see it as kicking the can, with the potential to eventually bury the issue.”

That led some outside groups to argue that cybersecurity efforts should be taken over by the National Security Agency, which already is responsible for protecting government computers through its “information assurance” arm, or perhaps the White House staff.

“Over the past year cyber exploitation has grown more sophisticated, more targeted, and we expect these trends to continue,” she added. “Our cybersecurity approach to date has not kept up with the threats we’ve seen.”

In a move that could reshape the federal government’s cybersecurity efforts, President Obama on Monday said a former Booz Allen consultant would conduct an immediate two-month review of all related agency activities.

“The department will gather and focus all our efforts to face the challenge of cyberterrorism,” President Bush said when signing the 500-or-so-page bill into law in November 2002. “This department will be charged with encouraging research on new technologies that can detect these threats in time to prevent an attack.”

CNET’s Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.

(Credit:
NATO)

The announcement indicates that the White House’s National Security Council may wrest significant authority away from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which weathered withering criticism last fall for its lackluster efforts.

National Security Advisor Jim Jones, who may expand his department's cybersecurity portolio as a result of new 60-day review.

Divvyshot is making a group photo sharing site. The demo showed an impressively easy to use service that lets you quickly create a central location for group photos (for a wedding, a reunion, a group trip, or presumably a sporting or music event). Attendees can drag their photos to a desktop dropbox, or just e-mail them to a central location. Then everyone who was at the event can see all the photos, and download them all if they want in a big zip file. This solves a real-world problem and there’s a decent economy of potential partner sites (wedding organizers, cruise ships, travel coordinators) who could market the service.

Voxli is a super-simple voice chat product for games that works via a browser plug-in (with a push-to-talk hot key that punches through to whatever game you’re using). If you want to set up a team chat room, you just go to the site, name your room, get a URL, and send it to your teammates. Pricing will be $60 per account per year, and an account holder will be able to invite up to 200 people into a room. It’s in free beta right now. I think the proposed price is a bit high, but the potential market is very large.

Cloudkick is a management console for cloud services. At the moment, it will let you set up and control on-demand virtual servers from Amazon or Rackspace’s Slicehost. The presenter said 40 Y Combinator companies are using the tool to manage their servers. Theoretically, Cloudkick could make it easier for companies to move their apps among different hosting companies. The founders are considering working on an open-source API spec for managing cloud services to make it easier for companies like Cloudkick (and its customers) to control said services. As one of the company reps told me, a widely-used cloud service API would commoditize the services themselves, driving down prices. So what’s not to like?

The Y Combinator incubator hosted its ninth open demo meet-up today. Fifteen companies presented, most showing off not just strong technologies and concepts, but realistic business models. Here are the highlights of the six best companies (in my opinion), as well as two with good technologies but troubling business models.

Dan Gackle demos SkySheet.

I also want to highlight two companies with very attractive technologies, but whose business prospects I worry about:

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Echodio synchronizes iTunes libraries across computers. I want this. But I wonder how many people will be willing to pay for this service (which should be free and from Apple), even at the proposed low rate of $4.99 a year. The company is planning more interesting extensions to its music sync technology, though, including Boxee integration and a Web-based player for the music you own that you choose to sync through the service. I’d watch this company; I like the technology and think their business model will evolve.

Get your boutique chocolate fix from Foodoro.

Foodoro is launching an “Etsy of food:” a marketplace that helps consumers and boutique food sellers connect to each other. The market for food and for food gifts is strong, and supports a large community of small specialty food manufacturers. However, the traditional multi-tier distribution channels absorb a lot of the manufacturers’ revenues, as well as separating them from their end consumers. Foodoro, while it’s a middleman for the transaction part of the sale, does not ship food itself nor hide the customer from the vendor, enabling, the founders believe, better relationships where they count. The company also has a smart widget strategy: There are affiliate widgets that bloggers can put on their sites to promote the food items they like. They get a cut of the sales that Foodoro then manages, but again, Foodoro connects the manufacturer and the consumer directly for delivery of the items. Foodoro could potentially impact the traditional food catalog businesses.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CNET)

TheSixtyOne is a new music rating service. It’s Digg-like. Users vote tracks up or down by “hearting” them. But there’s a game element to the service too: You only get so many hearts a day, although you can increase your allotment by leveling up when enough other users like the songs you’ve previously hearted. You can also be rewarded for quests, such as rating a certain number of songs in a category that needs input. You can buy tracks for download, and purchased tracks appear in your profile page. It may sound convoluted, but the design and interface look highly functional and fast to use. I wanted to use the site to find music after I saw the demo.

Skysheet (site not live yet) is an online spreadsheet. Which means it’s a long-shot as a business (competitors include Google, Zoho, etc). But the demo showed a few very compelling features, such as the capability to reference (and embed) values from other spreadsheets just by using hyperlinks, impressive performance, and the capability to make a spreadsheet itself into a named function. I’m an old spreadsheet jockey, so I think this is very cool.

Probably the most popular demo company at the event was Wattvision (site not live yet), which is making a whole-house real-time energy-monitoring system. The key is its hardware: a gizmo you literally stick on to your electricity meter that watches the little wheel turn around. The data is transmitted to a computer in your home, or via Wi-Fi to your router and then back to the Wattvision servers, where it’s then packaged and delivered to you every 15 seconds, via a Web page or
iPhone app. You can see your momentary energy cost with this service, and that’s cool. Wattvision doesn’t give you granular data: it’s whole-house only. There are other issues with this service, but it looks like something that people will instantly understand and want–because you can see in a heartbeat that it will help you save money.

Google has not gotten into specifics about what went wrong, but from the Google Apps help forum it seems as though most of the affected users were running on the secure version of the mail client which takes advantage of https. This level of security encrypts data coming to and from the user’s machine. One workaround for affected users was to suspend their account, then re-initialize it, while switching back to the unencrypted version, however this method did not work for all account holders.

A server bug kept some Google Apps users from accessing their Google-hosted Web mail on Tuesday. The problem has since been fixed, but for a small segment of users the outage lasted for close to 22 hours.

Staunch critics of Google’s online office offerings may find this as another reason to be wary of relying too heavily on cloud-based business tools. While they can be cheaper and easier to roll-out than traditional IT solutions, an increasingly valid fear is uncontrollable downtime.

See also: Worst Web glitches of 2008.

Google has apologized for the outage and says it takes “issues like this very seriously.” For customers of Google Apps Premier Edition that could mean another compensated service extension like the one they got for last month’s system-wide two-hour outage. According to the Google Apps service level agreement, Google has to give extra days of service when a service becomes unavailable less than the 99.9 percent range that’s promised. For users who experienced off-time beyond Google’s stated 30-minute mark, this brings them into that territory.

A Google spokesperson told CNET News that the outage began sometime around 2 a.m. PST on Tuesday, and that service was restored for “nearly all affected users” within 30 minutes. For remaining accounts, the issue appeared to have been sorted out shortly after 12 a.m. PST on Wednesday.

(Credit:
Amazon.com)

Users have been angry at EA because the game’s DRM system appears to limit the number of activations per copy of the game to three.

But Amazon says there was no foul play at work.

“Utterly disgraceful,” wrote Amazon user Paul Tinsley. “This means that the Amazon review system has not value at all to its customers. Sad days indeed.”

(Credit: Flickr user TINZ)

And while Amazon customers reacted angrily to what they said was obviously Amazon’s caving in on a bad situation, the retailer itself said that the take-down was the result of nothing more onerous than a glitch.

Asked if perhaps Amazon had decided to put the reviews back up in anticipation of bad PR for taking them down, Hovey said, “Customers always have their opinions about all the products on our site, and we don’t censor them, whether they’re favorable or unfavorable.”

It’s not clear how users will respond now that the reviews are back.

On Friday, every single review for Spore for the game was gone.

By 2:10 p.m. PDT, the reviews were back up on the site.

After users of the new Electronic Arts video game, ‘Spore,’ revolted against its DRM restrictions by leaving hundreds of one-star reviews for the game on Amazon.com, the online retailer temporarily removed all reviews for the game, though it claims the move was nothing more than a ‘glitch.’

Although the actual reviews were removed, Amazon did leave up a discussion thread on the Spore page. And during the period while the reviews were down, some users angrily employed the thread to paste in reviews that had originally been left for the game.

More than 2,200 one-star reviews of the new Electronic Arts game Spore, left on Amazon.com as part of a well-publicized and coordinated user revolt against the game’s digital rights management restrictions, disappeared Friday.

For its part, EA said it was looking into the situation.

For example, “1.0 out of 5 stars Dumbed down experience and draconian DRM, September 7, 2008,” Amazon user Keri Gibson-tutt posted.

And as a way of striking back, some users had coordinated their efforts by leaving the more than 2,200 one-star reviews on Amazon.

Before Amazon.com took down the reviews, there were more than 2,200 one-star reviews for ‘Spore.’

“There’s just a glitch on the site that ended up wiping those reviews clean,” said Amazon.com spokesperson Tammy Hovey. “So we’re working on putting them back up. I don’t have any details (on what happened). But we’re working on it so all the customer reviews will be back up on the site.”

It’s a new mission for Albrecht, but will require many of the same attributes that made him a successful board member for Red Hat. My father also serves as a mission president in the LDS Church (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and I’ve seen first-hand the sort of work that LDS mission presidents do. It’s not easy, but Albrecht’s work for Red Hat has prepared him well.

But it was Albrecht’s ethical consistency that really factored into the decision to change the revenue recognition policy. Albrecht’s professional work has strongly emphasized ethics in accounting, which helped him to promote the need for change and hold to that change when the markets reacted.

I’ve talked with Szulik before about Albrecht and his influence at Red Hat. One experience in particular illustrates Albrecht’s imprint on Red Hat. Back in the summer of 2004, Red Hat announced a change in how it recognizes revenue, moving from a system by which it had been recognizing revenue in the month a subscription starts to a system by which the revenue is deferred to the month in which it ends. This may seem small, but it required Red Hat to restate its earnings and its stock took a nose dive in the aftermath. Albrecht was heavily involved in that decision.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

It was the right thing to do, but it was a hard thing to do. Albrecht, as a member of Red Hat’s Audit Committee, was heavily involved, so much so that he was named in a lawsuit against the company over the stock tumble, which cited his “specialized financial expertise” as a key reason to hold him accountable.

Albrecht has been good for Red Hat. Red Hat, in turn, has been good for him, and his experiences there will enable him to serve his new mission with fortitude, ethics, and honor. As a longtime friend of the family (I served on student council in high school with Albrecht’s son, Conan), I wish him well.

Steve Albrecht, a longstanding Red Hat board member, has resigned from Red Hat’s board effective June 30, 2009. The reason? Albrecht, originally tapped six years ago by Red Hat chairman Matthew Szulik, will serve as a mission president in Japan for the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), starting in early July.

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