Bits Blog: Snapchat Breach Exposes Weak Security

Airport Exposes Class Divisions in Silicon Valley

Google, which is responsible for many of the jets that will use the new $82 million center, is helping bring badly needed cash to Mineta San Jose International Airport, just as the tech industry is creating jobs and wealth in Silicon Valley. But the tech boom is also sharpening income inequality and fueling a housing boom that is squeezing families out of many Silicon Valley communities.

Whether it is the possibility of private jets’ disturbing the sleep of San Jose homeowners, or the transformation of Palo Alto’s last mobile home park into luxury apartments, local developments throughout Silicon Valley highlight how the tech boom is leaving many behind. Local officials worry about the trend, which experts say will only accelerate, and its effects on the valley’s work force and diversity.

“We’re very focused on being a progressive and fair community in terms of those issues,” Gregory Scharff, mayor of Palo Alto, said of efforts to provide affordable housing while recognizing the “national treasure” that is Silicon Valley. “We actually innovate and create huge wealth for the United States. If you look at the companies that have just come out of Palo Alto, I would make you a bet that it would be one of the largest G.N.P.’s — it could be a country.”

In the past, the tech industry created middle-class jobs and lifted the overall economy of Silicon Valley. But as tech companies have shifted manufacturing and midlevel jobs overseas over the years, highly paid workers have increasingly clustered here. Per-capita incomes have been rising even as median incomes have decreased for five years in a row, according to Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a private organization that co-publishes an annual report on the region.

“We’re getting more high earners, and they’re skewing the averages completely off,” said Russell Hancock, chief executive of Joint Venture. “We are becoming a community where our teachers, our police, our firefighters, our nurses, they can’t live with us. They have to come in from other places. Healthy communities have all these people living together.”

Sales figures for single-family homes in Santa Clara and San Mateo, the two main counties in Silicon Valley, show median prices have risen about 30 percent in the past year while the inventory of available homes has fallen by roughly half, according to an analysis of local multiple listing service data by the Silicon Valley Association of Realtors. The median prices for March — $735,000 in Santa Clara and $925,000 in San Mateo — only hint at the current market’s frenzy.

Each property now typically attracts between 10 and 30 offers, eventually selling from 5 percent to 25 percent above the asking price, said Moise Nahouraii, the owner of Referral Realty in Cupertino. Jeff Barnett, a former president of the association and a regional vice president at Alain Pinel Realtors, said 30 percent to 40 percent of sales were paid in cash.

“Last year, the market came up,” Mr. Barnett said. “This year, it’s on fire; it’s just unreal.”

In Palo Alto, one of the hottest markets, the longtime owner of the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park has moved to sell the property to a developer planning to build a complex with amenities that include a pool, a spa, a business center, a chef’s demonstration kitchen and a pet grooming station. A local ordinance would guarantee the park’s 400 residents — more than a quarter of whom are children and 85 percent are Hispanic — some compensation and possible relocation within Palo Alto.

But the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, a private group that provides free legal services on housing and other issues, is pressing the city to reject the conversion. With the waiting lists for affordable housing getting longer by the day, the group argues, the park’s residents will be forced to leave Palo Alto, away from jobs and schools.

One resident, Mary Kear, 55, grew up in Mountain View, where her father owned a hardware store and was a farmer, and where Google has its headquarters. Ms. Kear, who worked in sales for more than three decades and is now a part-time school custodian, said she had to move a dozen times over the years because of rising rents, eventually gravitating to the park eight years ago. She hoped the city would reject the conversion.

“But I’m also going to try to talk to the guy at Facebook,” she said in the living room of her tidy two-room trailer, adding that she had read that the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, had recently established a political action committee for immigration reform. “He’s trying to help immigrants, and immigrants are here.”

Bits Blog: LivingSocial Hack Exposes Data for 50 Million Customers

LivingSocial, the daily deals site, told its employees Friday that it had been breached, and said that data for 50 million users might have been compromised.

In a memo to employees, the company, based in Washington, said online criminals had gained access to user names, e-mail addresses and dates of birth for some users and encrypted passwords for 50 million people. The company’s databases that store user and merchant credit card and banking information were not compromised in the attack, it said.

livingsocial.com, via Associated Press The attack on Living Social is just the latest in a string of attacks on consumer Internet companies in recent months.

“We recently experienced a cyberattack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers,” the company told employees. “We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.”

Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for LivingSocial, confirmed that the attack might have compromised 50 million of its users, and said the company was resetting passwords and would be alerting customers by e-mail. Mr. Weinstein said it would contact customers in all the countries LivingSocial operates with the exception of Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, where its systems were not compromised.

The attack on Living Social is just the latest in a string of attacks on consumer Internet companies in recent months. Twitter, Facebook and Apple all stepped forward in February to say they had been the victims of what they described as a “sophisticated attack.” Evernote, the notetaking app, said last month that it had reset passwords for 50 million users after it was compromised by hackers.

Living Social did say it “hashed” passwords — which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm — and “salted” them, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack. Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auctionlike black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.