Young Tech Sees Itself in Microsoft’s Ballmer

These days, it is Microsoft’s turn to fend off the upstarts as it struggles to compete in a computing world that is increasingly mobile and based in a “cloud” of Internet-connected computers to which many customers gain access at the same time. It’s all part of the inevitable life cycle for technology companies.

“Getting disrupted is the defining characteristic of this industry,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, an online data storage company. “You can even have a near monopoly like Microsoft did, and then everything gets redefined.”

Mr. Ballmer will not have to take Microsoft into the future; last Friday, he announced that he would retire within a year. But young executives like Mr. Levie are not gloating over Mr. Ballmer’s exit. They know well that one day — if they are lucky to be as successful as Mr. Ballmer — they could face the same problem.

“It just feeds my already-healthy sense of paranoia,” Mr. Levie said.

The rare tech company manages to thrive from one generation of technology to the next. Only a few of the big ones — I.B.M., Intel and Apple — have done it. And it is not yet clear if Microsoft has a clear path to joining that list of multigeneration kingpins.

Mr. Ballmer was closely identified with the personal computer revolution, and later with corporate software running on computer servers. Those innovations brought Microsoft the cash and talent to adapt to the early Internet with the Explorer browser, and diversify into online gaming.

What it could not buy Mr. Ballmer, the younger generation in tech says, was a clear vision of the future. Apple and Google have led development of smartphones and a long list of companies like Amazon.com have led the development of cloud computing. Microsoft, meanwhile, has often had to play catch-up.

“All technology aspires to be legacy,” said Scott Dietzen, chief executive of Pure Storage, a data storage start-up. “It’s that or obsolescence.”

“The most powerful factor,” he added, “is that the very best talent is drawn to doing something disruptive to the legacy, something new and fresh. And in this business the best are so much more productive than anyone else.”

During Mr. Ballmer’s tenure as chief executive at Microsoft, the company had considerable growth. Mr. Ballmer led the creation of the Windows Phone operating system, which received good reviews but has struggled to gain traction in the market, and Microsoft’s efforts in cloud computing. Also under his leadership, the company acquired Skype, an Internet communications service, for $8.5 billion, and paid $1.2 billion for Yammer, a social network for business.

But the breakthroughs, whether they were in Internet search, smartphones or Internet-based software, have usually happened somewhere other than Microsoft.

Mr. Levie, 28, grew up near Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Several of his schoolmates’ parents worked for Microsoft. Few of his generation, he said, followed their parents there. Among those who did, he said, few stayed.

“I think about being 40 or 50 and being disrupted,” said Mr. Levie, whose company was founded in 2005. “You can be a visionary, and have a great business model, but no tech company can avoid it. There is no quick way to transition into the next thing.”

The closest to a safeguard, he said, is to be “like Amazon: race to the bottom on prices ahead of your competition, keep profit margins low and make things tough for them.”

Mr. Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980, and its breakthrough software, Windows 3.0, was released in 1990. Its stock peaked in December 1999, shortly before Mr. Ballmer replaced Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and his close friend, as chief executive. Since then, Microsoft’s shares have fallen about 33 percent.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 26, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the start-up for which Mr. Ozzie recently raised $4 million. It is Talko, not Taiko.

Bits Blog: Trying to Reinvent Itself, Yahoo Searches for a New Look

Comic-Con: Divergent Positions Itself as the Next Hunger Games

Summit gave fans at today's San Diego Comic-Con their first look at Divergent, the futuristic action thriller based on the bestselling novel by Veronica Roth.

The author herself was on hand to present exclusive footage from the film and was joined on the panel by director Neil Burger and cast members Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Miles Teller, Maggie Q, Ansel Elgort, Mekhi Phifer, Ben Lamb, Ben Lloyd-Hughes and Christian Madsen.

Divergent is set in a futuristic world where society has been divided into five factions. As each person approaches adulthood, he or she must choose a faction and commit to it for the rest of their life. Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) chooses Dauntless -- the daring risk-takers who pursue bravery above all else. During the Dauntless initiation, Tris completes death-defying stunts and faces her inmost fears in spectacular simulations.

When she discovers she is a Divergent, someone who will never be able to fit into just one faction, she is warned that she must conceal this secret or risk her life. As Tris uncovers a looming war which threatens her family and the life of the mysterious Dauntless leader whom she has come to love, Tris must face her greatest test yet -- deciding whether revealing she is a Divergent will save her world -- or destroy it.

As the first Hall H panel to showcase exclusive footage this year, Divergent brought with it a brand new, never-before-seen sneak peek at the film -- just two days after the production wrapped. (Warning: Footage SPOILERS to follow.)

The footage opens on a sea of people running in a dystopian Chicago, attempting to catch a speeding train. We then see Woodley as Tris among the stampede as she manages to hop aboard with several others. The small group then jumps off the train to meet with a small gathering atop a high building. One authority figure announces to the group, "If you don't have the guts to jump, you don't belong in Dauntless."

This is when Tris steps forward to make "the jump." She walks up to the ledge of the building as the crowd watches in silence. After a deep breath, Tris leaps off the ledge and plummets into the chasm below -- but just at the last second, she's caught by a net in an underground shelter shrouded in darkness. She's greeted by James's Four, who tells Tris to pick her name. She replies, "My name is Tris." (Duh.)

Following that, the footage kicks into high gear with a training montage, as Tris learns, among other things, hand-to-hand combat and knife throwing. At the very end of the clip, Tris stands in front of one of the targets, and Four throws a dagger that just barely grazes her ear -- smash-cut to title.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the footage screened did have a distinct Hunger Games vibe -- very serious, slick action sequences, a bit of implied romance -- basically all the makings of another hormone-fueled YA movie adaptation. That said, it does look like there are going to be some pretty cool set pieces as well as a bit of drama for the younger set.

In addition to a Q&A after the clip screening, Roth shared a bit of new info on the third book in the Divergent trilogy, which she's currently writing. In this latest installment, the story will be told from two perspectives: Tris’s and Four's.

Divergent opens stateside March 21, 2014.

Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter, or MaxNicholson on IGN.

Attacks on Spamhaus Used Internet Against Itself

The short answer is: Not easily. The digital “fire hose” being wielded by the attackers to jam traffic on the Internet in recent weeks was made possible by both the best and worst aspects of the sprawling global computer network. The Internet is, by default, an open, loosely regulated platform for communication, but many of the servers that make its communication possible have been configured in such a way that they can be easily fooled.

The latest attacks, which appeared to have subsided by Wednesday, have demonstrated just how big a problem that can be.

On Tuesday, security engineers said that an anonymous group unhappy with Spamhaus, a volunteer organization that distributes a blacklist of spammers to e-mail providers, had retaliated with a cyberattack of vast proportions.

In what is called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, the assailants harnessed a powerful botnet — a network of thousands of infected computers being controlled remotely — to send attack traffic first to Spamhaus’s Web site and later to the Internet servers used by CloudFlare, a Silicon Valley company that Spamhaus hired to deflect its onslaught.

This kind of attack works because the botnet exploits Internet routing software and fools Internet servers into responding to requests for information sent simultaneously by a large group of computers. The Internet servers that answer the requests are tricked into sending blocks of data to the victims, in this case Spamhaus and CloudFlare.

The attack was amplified because each of the servers in this case was asked to send a relatively large block of information. The data stream grew from 10 billion bits per second last week to as much as 300 billion bits per second this week, the largest such attack ever reported, causing what CloudFlare estimated to be hundreds of millions of people to experience delays and error messages across the Web.

On Wednesday, CloudFlare described the highly technical game of cat-and-mouse between itself and Spamhaus’s opponents that has played out over the course of the last nine days. After the attackers discovered that they could not disable CloudFlare, which had been hired by Spamhaus to absorb its attack traffic, they changed their strategy.

They took aim at the networks that CloudFlare connected to and began to attack the computer servers that serve as the network’s foundation. These are specialized “peering” points at which Internet networks exchange traffic. The attackers took aim at organizations like the London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Hong Kong Internet exchanges, which route regional Internet traffic and are also used by sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo to pass traffic efficiently among one another.

Here, too, they were unable to stall the Internet completely, but they did slow it, particularly by focusing on the London exchange, known as LINX.

“From our perspective, the attacks had the largest effect on LINX,” said Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s chief executive, in a description posted on the company’s Web site on Wednesday. For a little over an hour on Saturday, he said, the traffic passing through the LINX infrastructure dropped significantly.

The attacks were episodic, stopping and starting and shifting targets over nine days through Tuesday morning. On Wednesday, Mr. Prince said that there some indications that the attackers were planning further actions, although he said he did not know if they would include DDoS attacks.

Veteran Internet engineers said the attack was made possible by a combination of defects, loopholes and sloppy configuration of Internet routing equipment. Indeed, a number of computer security specialists pointed out that the attacks would have been impossible if the world’s major Internet firms simply checked that outgoing data packets truly were being sent by their customers, rather than botnets. Unfortunately, a relatively small number of Internet companies actually perform this kind of check.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 30, 2013

An article on Thursday about a broad online attack said to have been waged by a group unhappy with the activities of the anti-spam organization Spamhaus rendered incorrectly, in one reference, part of the name of the organization that oversees the Internet domain name system. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, it is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, not the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.