Ex-Programmer Pleads Not Guilty in Long Island Computer Hacking Case

For years he commuted from his home in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island, to his job as a software programmer at Spellman High Voltage Electronics Corporation, a manufacturer of industrial power supplies in nearby Hauppage. His specialty was known as enterprise resource planning.

But after Mr. Meneses was passed over for promotions, he was upset enough to announce his resignation, giving two weeks’ notice. Before his final day in January 2012, colleagues caught him copying files from his computer to a flash drive, the authorities said. They cut off his access to company servers.

Soon odd things started happening. Employees at Spellman began reporting that they were unable to process routine transactions and were receiving error messages. An applicant for his old position received an e-mail from an anonymous address, warning him, “Don’t accept any position.” And the company’s business calendar was changed by a month, throwing production and finance operations into disorder.

That account was laid out by federal prosecutors on Thursday, who said that Mr. Meneses, using stolen passwords and his high-level knowledge of the computer system, had hacked Spellman’s servers and in three weeks caused enough mayhem to cost his former employer more than $90,000. “The defendant engaged in a 21st-century campaign of cyber-vandalism and high-tech revenge,” said Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District. Mr. Meneses was arrested Thursday.

Investigators traced the e-mail account used to warn off the applicant for his old job to an Internet protocol address that belonged to Mr. Meneses’s new employer. They traced the changes to the company calendar to a hotel in Cary, N.C., a short distance from Mr. Meneses’s new job. Records from the hotel showed that he was staying there at the time of the online attack.

Mr. Meneses, 41, officially denied the allegations in Federal District Court in Central Islip on Thursday and was released on $50,000 bond. He faces up to 10 years in prison. A lawyer for Mr. Meneses, Tracey E. Gaffey, declined to comment.

Curt Schilling, Rhode Island and the Fall of 38 Studios

You have to imagine what it was like being Don Carcieri in the harsh winter of 2010. As Rhode Island’s governor, a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, he had come into office seven years earlier as a business executive turned politician, vowing to retool the state’s corroded economy.

But that winter, Rhode Island was on the precipice of economic ruin. Its unemployment rate was pushing up against 12 percent — fourth worst in the nation — and three of its cities were careening toward bankruptcy. Facing term limits, Mr. Carcieri had only months left to do something to arrest the steep decline.

And that’s when Don Carcieri ran into Curt Schilling, the revered former Boston Red Sox ace — the man who had famously bled through a sock while pitching his team to its first World Series title in 86 years. That March, Mr. Carcieri attended a fund-raiser for a prospective documentary at Mr. Schilling’s 25-acre estate in Medfield, Mass. The two men exchanged pleasantries in the living room before the talk turned abruptly to business.

“I said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ ” Mr. Carcieri recalled when I met him recently, at a Panera Bread in East Greenwich, R.I., his hometown. “And he said, ‘I’ve got this business, this company, creating video games.’ Which I knew nothing about — my grandkids know more about it than I do. But he was describing it. He said: ‘It’s a great little company, it’s growing,’ et cetera. And he was looking to grow it further.”

More to the point, Mr. Schilling let drop that he wasn’t getting much help in Massachusetts when it came to the financing he needed to expand, and he was frustrated. You can imagine the heralding trumpets that must have been blasting in Mr. Carcieri’s ears as he listened to Mr. Schilling dangle hundreds of jobs in front of him.

Curt Schilling, center, at an animation team meeting at 38 Studios, his game company, in early 2012. A few months later, 38 Studios sought bankruptcy.

Within a few weeks, Mr. Schilling, a novice in the gaming field, was wowing other local politicians with his outsize presence and his grand ambitions to build a Microsoft-like behemoth. And soon Rhode Island’s lawmakers were rushing to approve a deal to make the state Mr. Schilling’s angel investor. The tiny, struggling state issued $75 million in bonds so that Mr. Schilling’s company, called 38 Studios, could relocate to Providence and unleash the world’s next killer fantasy game.

Ideas that seem plausible in our darkest moments often seem plainly flawed in hindsight, and you can probably see where all this is going. A little more than two years after Mr. Carcieri first talked to Mr. Schilling about 38 Studios — so named for his baseball uniform number — the company went bankrupt, blowing a sizable hole in the state’s already strained finances. And now Mr. Schilling’s headquarters on Empire Street, the brick building just a few blocks from the Capitol that was supposed to prompt a high-tech urban renaissance, sits locked and abandoned, like some ugly monument to political folly.

Gov. Lincoln Chafee has called the state’s backing of the company “the worst investment that’s ever been made, I think, in the history of Rhode Island.”

Politicians are debating whether Rhode Island can afford to repay the bondholders, or whether it should simply default. Because the bonds are what’s known as moral obligation bonds, the state doesn’t technically have to repay them, but its credit rating could take a hit, and Mr. Carcieri’s successor as governor, Lincoln D. Chafee, has promised that the bondholders would be repaid. Mr. Chafee is also suing Mr. Schilling and his partners, along with a raft of former state officials, banks and law firms involved in the deal, and a criminal investigation is under way.

Even in a state that long served as New England’s Mafia headquarters — and a state whose best-known modern political figure, Buddy Cianci, the former Providence mayor, was sent to prison in a federal corruption case known as Operation Plunder Dome — the 38 Studios debacle has registered as a painful embarrassment. (When I called influential Rhode Islanders and told them I was writing about 38 Studios, virtually all of them, even if they had opposed the deal, answered with some version of, “Do you have to?”)

Rhode Islanders are used to being played by their politicians. What makes them cringe is the suspicion that virtually all their elected leaders might have been played by someone else.

A Beguiling Vision

Cornell NYC Tech, Planned for Roosevelt Island, Starts Up in Chelsea

The sparkling, sprawling new campus on Roosevelt Island filled with gee-whiz technology — still just ink on paper. The thousands of students and staff, the transformative effect on the city’s economy, the integration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology — those all remain in the future, too.

But just 13 months after being awarded the prize in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contest to create a new science school, Cornell NYC Tech got up and running. Eight students enrolled in January in what is being called the beta class, a one-year master’s program in computer science. And Cornell has made it clear that, in many ways, this is not the usual university program.

Not long ago, three young high-tech entrepreneurs sat with the students, talking about failure. They talked about questionable technical, financial or personnel decisions in start-up businesses they had created or worked in, about companies they had seen disintegrate, and about detours into projects they later discarded.

A question was asked about Andrew Mason, co-founder of Groupon, who had been fired a day earlier as the company’s chief executive.

“We should all be so lucky as to build a company that the investors care enough about to fire us,” Tim Novikoff, the C.E.O. of a small company making mobile phone software, said with a wave of his arm around the table, prompting laughter from the students and knowing nods from the Cornell Tech staff. A rail-thin man with the deep-set eyes of someone who could use a little more sleep, Mr. Novikoff is in his early 30s, making him the oldest of the three visitors.

“It’s a miracle if a start-up gets off the ground,” he said. “The last six months I’ve had no income, I have no health insurance. But I got to fly out to a C.E.O. conference and talk with Ashton Kutcher about mobile video for 10 minutes.”

The visitors urged the students to take risks but to expect, at least at first, a precarious existence, riddled with setbacks, that will require obsessiveness and a thick skin — and they made it sound like the grandest of adventures. None of them made the reference, but they could all have been citing Samuel Beckett’s maxim: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Scenes like this play out each week at Cornell Tech, part of an unorthodox curriculum designed to eschew the traditional detached, highly academic approach to learning. Instead, business, technology and real-world experience is baked into the coursework.

“There’s no parallel to that in any traditional computer science program I’m aware of,” said Dan Huttenlocher, dean of Cornell Tech. “We’re taking a page from business schools.”

The practicums are organized by Greg Pass, a Cornell alumnus who was the chief technology officer at Twitter and now is the chief entrepreneurial officer of the graduate school. They are held in an informal setting each Friday with entrepreneurs from the city’s blooming tech sector, who are often no more than a few steps ahead of where the students are.

Reinforcing the sense that the work produce practical results, the United States Commerce Department has stationed a patent officer on the premises to help with patent applications and commercial strategies — an arrangement that federal officials say is a first.

A business class is mandatory, in addition to the usual technical courses. And the students are required, in each semester, to work with mentors from the private sector to design and create new products. Two of the students, Alex Kopp and Andrew Li, are working with a Google engineer on open-source software that predicts the severity of weather events.

“In Ithaca, you take a bunch of classes and then you have your one master’s project — you work on it alone,” said Mr. Kopp, who transferred from a master’s program at Cornell’s main campus. “It typically doesn’t have a business aspect to it, or you might be working on something that a professor is doing. This has a very different feel to it.”

Information technology is the common thread through the eight degrees the school plans to offer. Three will be dual master’s degrees from Cornell and the Technion, based on three “hubs” rather than traditional departments. One hub program, “connective media,” has largely been mapped out — though professors warn that it is subject to change as technology changes — and will deal with designing the mobile, fragmented and endlessly malleable technology that makes everyone a media creator as well as consumer. The other hubs, still under development, are being called “healthier life” (systems to improve health care delivery as well as personal technology) and “built environment” (computing applied to the physical world around us, from robotic devices to smart building design to real-time traffic information).

Richard Pérez-Peña covers national higher education for The Times.

Bits Blog: The iPad Mini, Perfect for My Desert Island

Nick Bilton/The New York Times The iPad Mini fits in most jacket pockets.

If you’re still on the fence about whether you should buy the iPad Mini, I have a tip for you: you’re on the wrong fence.

At first, when I saw almost teeny little iPad I thought it was just another screen, another size, and another marketing ploy by Apple. But, it has quickly become my Desert Island Device.

Desert what device? Let me explain.

When I was younger my friends and I would sometimes sit around and discuss this difficult problem: If you had to take one device – yes, only one! – with you on a desert island, to live out your days, alone, which gadget would you bring? (We assumed, of course, that there is a power outlet on the island and a speedy and reliable Internet connection.)

For years it was my Nintendo Game Boy, then it became my computer, a Compaq PC. In 2007 my hypothetical Desert Island Device became the iPhone, and for years, it never changed. That is, until about two weeks ago when I started using the iPad Mini.

I was skeptical, to say the least when I saw this little gadget. As we all know, Apple sometimes gets a little excited about its latest wares. Every time the company puts out a new product it recycles the same trite statements about it. “It’s the fastest laptop we’ve ever made,” “It’s the best screen we’ve ever made,”or, more recently, “It’s the best iPad we’ve ever made.”

I often roll my eyes at these statements. Marketing ploys by the kings of marketing. Yet when it comes to the iPad Mini, I have to agree with Apple: It is, by far, the best iPad the company has ever made. Even more, it’s the best tablet and reading device anyone has ever made.

Why? Because it is truly portable, while maintaining its speed, and remaining in the iOS app ecosystem. (I used it for two weeks and my concerns about the screen’s quality are completely irrelevant.)

The first iPad, although revolutionary and a long list of other wonderful adjectives, was never really a portable device. It weighed 1.5-pounds, not much less than the 11-inch Macbook Air. Because of its heft, it made prolonged reading or game-play feel like doing reps at the gym. The second iPad, though slightly lighter, was still too big. I found myself leaving it at home because it felt more like a coffee table book than a portable device.

Not the iPad Mini. Because of its size, the iPad Mini, like paperback books or magazines that roll-up, can fit in most jacket pockets. As a result, just as I used to with print books, I now find myself throwing the iPad Mini in my pocket when I’m heading for lunch, coffee, or out for the evening.

So, for now, I have a new Desert Island Device: a 7.9-inch tablet. And yes, I’d even leave my smartphone at home in place of it.