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Pogue, Times Technology Columnist, Is Leaving for Yahoo

David Pogue, the technology writer for The New York Times, whose columns were among the most popular at the paper, said on Monday that he was leaving for Yahoo to start a consumer-focused technology site.

David Pogue, in 2009 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

In addition to his “State of the Art” column, where he has reviewed new technology products for 13 years, Mr. Pogue created weekly videos for The Times and wrote a blog, Pogue’s Posts, that won a Gerald Loeb award for Distinguished Business Journalism in 2010.

In a statement on his Tumblr site this morning Mr. Pogue wrote: “Thirteen years is a long time to stay in one place; we all thrive on new experiences.”

He then elaborated on his new mission at Yahoo. “I’ll be writing columns and blog posts each week, of course, and making my goofy videos,'’ he wrote. “But my team and I have much bigger plans, too, for all kinds of online and real-world creations.'’

Mr. Pogue always worked for other organizations besides The Times, and while at Yahoo he will continue to keep his outside assignments, which include technology correspondent for “CBS News Sunday Morning,” columnist for Scientific American and the host of a series on technology on the PBS program “Nova.”

Mr. Pogue’s departure comes as technology coverage has become increasingly prized by media companies. Only weeks ago, Walter Mossberg, a leading reviewer of new devices, and his partner Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, said they would be leaving The Wall Street Journal to start a technology writing and conference business with the backing of new partners.

In a memo to the newsroom, Dean Murphy, The Times’s business editor, and Suzanne Spector, the technology editor, wrote that Mr. Pogue’s columns were “a delight to read'’ and wished him well in his new job.

Books of The Times: ‘Big Data,’ by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

Does what? Uses “big data” analysis of the swelling flood of data that is being generated and stored about virtually every aspect of our lives to identify patterns of behavior and make correlations and predictive assessments.

Amazon uses customer data to give us recommendations based on our previous purchases. Google uses our search data and other information it collects to sell ads and to fuel a host of other services and products.

The National Security Agency, a news article in The Guardian revealed last week, is collecting the phone records of millions of American customers of Verizon — “indiscriminately and in bulk” and “regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing” — under a secret court order. Under another surveillance program called Prism, The Guardian and The Washington Post reported, the agency has been collecting data from e-mails, audio and video chats, photos, documents and logins, from leading Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple, to track foreign targets.

Why spread such a huge net in search of a handful of terrorist suspects? Why vacuum up data so indiscriminately? “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack,” Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to Leon E. Panetta, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and defense secretary, said on Friday.

In “Big Data,” their illuminating and very timely book, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and Kenneth Cukier, the data editor for The Economist, argue that the nature of surveillance has changed.

“In the spirit of Google or Facebook,” they write, “the new thinking is that people are the sum of their social relationships, online interactions and connections with content. In order to fully investigate an individual, analysts need to look at the widest possible penumbra of data that surrounds the person — not just whom they know, but whom those people know too, and so on.”

Mr. Cukier and Mr. Mayer-Schönberger argue that big data analytics are revolutionizing the way we see and process the world — they even compare its consequences to those of the Gutenberg printing press. And in this volume they give readers a fascinating — and sometimes alarming — survey of big data’s growing effect on just about everything: business, government, science and medicine, privacy and even on the way we think. Notions of causality, they say, will increasingly give way to correlation as we try to make sense of patterns.

Data is growing incredibly fast — by one account, it is more than doubling every two years — and the authors of this book argue that as storage costs plummet and algorithms improve, data-crunching techniques, once available only to spy agencies, research labs and gigantic companies, are becoming increasingly democratized.

Big data has given birth to an array of new companies and has helped existing companies boost customer service and find new synergies. Before a hurricane, Walmart learned, sales of Pop-Tarts increased, along with sales of flashlights, and so stores began stocking boxes of Pop-Tarts next to the hurricane supplies “to make life easier for customers” while boosting sales. UPS, the authors report, has fitted its trucks with sensors and GPS so that it can monitor employees, optimize route itineraries and know when to perform preventive vehicle maintenance.

Baseball teams like Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s (immortalized in Michael Lewis’s best-seller “Moneyball”) have embraced new number-crunching approaches to scouting players with remarkable success. The 2012 Obama campaign used sophisticated data analysis to build a formidable political machine for identifying supporters and getting out the vote. And New York City has used data analytics to find new efficiencies in everything from disaster response, to identifying stores selling bootleg cigarettes, to steering overburdened housing inspectors directly to buildings most in need of their attention. In the years to come, Mr. Mayer-Schönberger and Mr. Cukier contend, big data will increasingly become “part of the solution to pressing global problems like addressing climate change, eradicating disease and fostering good governance and economic development.”

There is, of course, a dark side to big data, and the authors provide an astute analysis of the dangers they foresee. Privacy has become much more difficult to protect, especially with old strategies — “individual notice and consent, opting out and anonymization” — losing effectiveness or becoming completely beside the point.

“The ability to capture personal data is often built deep into the tools we use every day, from Web sites to smartphone apps,” the authors write. And given the myriad ways data can be reused, repurposed and sold to other companies, it’s often impossible for users to give informed consent to “innovative secondary uses” that haven’t even been imagined when the data was first collected.

Times Site Is Attacked by Hackers

Archives at the New York Public Library cross-referenced with long-awaited 1940 data provide eye-opening results.

Stuck without a lyric in sight, a songwriter ponders the intricacies of a little bird’s brain.

Books of The Times: ‘Who Owns the Future?’ by Jaron Lanier

While working on “intriguing unannounced projects” for Microsoft Research — “a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft” and a speculative strategy for “repositioning earthquakes” — Mr. Lanier found time to follow up on his first book, “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010). That was a feisty, brilliant, predictive work, and the new volume is just as exciting. Mr. Lanier bucks a wave of more conventional diatribes on Big Data to deliver Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers. A self-proclaimed “humanist softie,” he is a witheringly caustic critic of big Web entities and their business models.

He’s talking to you, Facebook. (“What’s Facebook going to do when it grows up?”) And to you, Google. (“The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency.”) And to all the other tempting Siren Servers (as he calls them) that depend on accumulating and evaluating consumer data without acknowledging a monetary debt to the people mined for all this “free” information. One need not be a political ideologue, he says, to believe that people have quantifiable value and deserve to be recompensed for it.

It’s true that Mr. Lanier was once driving in Silicon Valley, listening to what he thought was some Internet start-up “trumpeting the latest scheme to take over the world,” when he realized he was hearing Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” (“If you select the right passages, Marx can read as being incredibly current.”)

He is no “lefty” (to use his word); he sees high-tech thievery as an apolitical problem. And he is too much of a maverick to align with anyone’s thinking, even his own. Whether it is a boast or a mea culpa, Mr. Lanier acknowledges: “I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book.” And “to my friends in the ‘open’ Internet movement, I have to ask: What did you think would happen?”

“Who Owns the Future?” reiterates some ideas in Mr. Lanier’s first book: that Web businesses exploit a peasant class, that users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are, that a thriving middle class is essential to keeping the Internet sustainable. When “ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes,” even that elite will eventually be undermined. Mr. Lanier compares his suggestions for reconfiguring this process to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” but the last thing he worries about is writerly grandiosity. “Understand that in the context of the community in which I function,” he says of Silicon Valley, “my presentation is practically self-deprecating.”

Mr. Lanier’s sharp, accessible style and opinions make “Who Owns the Future?” terrifically inviting. What is he calling for? Just “The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity.” He much prefers sweeping formulations to qualified ones, although, as he points out, “being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist.” This book may not provide many answers (“It is too early for me to solve every problem brought up by the approach I’m advocating here”), but it does articulate a desperate need for them.

“Who Owns the Future?” overlaps with “The New Digital Age,” Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s much more polished work of Web analysis. Their book focuses more on global issues, but disagrees with specific points.

“The New Digital Age” looks forward to self-driving trucks that can ease the strain on Teamsters; Mr. Lanier rambunctiously writes of “Napstering the Teamsters” out of work, and of how such technology could go terribly wrong. The books also disagree on whether surgeons’ work will be enhanced or diminished by robotics.

And where Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen see promise in technology’s effect on the Arab Spring, Mr. Lanier is sick of the back-patting about social networking. Revolutions can happen without it, too, he says.

Mr. Lanier may not have any personal animus against Mr. Schmidt. But he describes listening to him and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos discuss the future of books just as he, Mr. Lanier, was struggling to write his first one. This prompts an attack on how Siren Servers could undermine and impoverish the world of reading, just as they did music. (Mr. Lanier is also a musician. He specializes in the arcane and innovative, as might be expected.) More generally, and very quotably, he warns against being seduced by “dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste.”

Finally, “Who Owns the Future?” takes some of it biggest swipes at those who do presume to own the future: fans of the Singularity (the hypothetical imminent merger of biology and technology), Silicon Valley pioneers seeking “methusalization” (i.e., immortality), techie utopians of every stripe. Yes, Mr. Lanier happens to be one of them. But he is still capable of remembering when, in his boyhood, prognosticators foresaw Moon colonies and flying cars. Now they think about genomics and data. Mindful of that way-cool past, he says, “I miss the future.”

Boom Times in Paraguay Leave Many Behind

But just a few minutes away by car one recent morning, grandmothers waded through raw sewage in the labyrinthine slum of La Chacarita, scavenging copper wire and aluminum cans to sell at scrap yards.

“Tell me about this growth,” said Cecilia Aguirre, 60, grasping a plastic bag holding her day’s takings, worth about $4. Squinting under the hot sun, she said she worked every day to feed the four grandchildren who live in her home. Asked about Paraguay’s robust economy, she added, “I’ve heard of no such thing in my lifetime.”

Indeed, Paraguay’s economic boom, fueled by bountiful harvests of export commodities like soybeans and corn, exists only in pockets. In parts of Asunción, showrooms are selling out of Porsches and Audis, and cranes are putting the finishing touches on luxury towers like the Ícono, a 37-story skyscraper of SoHo-inspired lofts.

Yet much of the country, which has long figured among South America’s poorest and most unequal nations, remains left behind. More than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the central bank, and Paraguay ranks near the bottom among South American countries in reducing poverty over the last decade, according to the United Nations.

Social spending for antipoverty projects is minimal, largely because taxation is lacking. Paraguay did not even have an income tax until this year, but even though the new across-the-board rate is low, at 10 percent, few people are expected to pay it, as exemptions and loopholes abound. The result: the economic boom may be accentuating the festering inequality in one of Latin America’s most politically unstable nations.

“Nearly all of the growth is driven by highly mechanized agriculture, which generates few jobs for the population,” said Andrew Dickson, an expert on Paraguay’s development policies at the University of Birmingham in Britain. “With a government that finances itself largely through value-added taxes and taxes on imports, you have a situation rather like a low-income African country.”

Paraguay is a landlocked nation about the size of California, sandwiched between southern Brazil and northern Argentina, with a population of 6.5 million. About 77 percent of its arable land is controlled by 1 percent of the nation’s landowners, according to the last agricultural census, and land disputes simmer in various parts of the country.

Activists claim that for decades large tracts of land were illegally distributed by corrupt officials, leaving many land titles in question. In one particularly bloody clash last June, 11 peasants and six police officers were killed at a soy estate in Curuguaty, in eastern Paraguay.

Legislators seized on that episode as a way to oust Fernando Lugo, the former Roman Catholic bishop who was elected president in 2008, ending six decades of one-party rule. Mr. Lugo had initially been expected to focus on reducing inequality, but faced obstacles in doing so.

Paraguay’s new president is one of the nation’s wealthiest men, the tobacco magnate Horacio Cartes, who was elected Sunday after promoting conservative, business-friendly policies during his campaign. He recognized poverty as an issue but has been vague about any plans for reducing it beyond trying to create more jobs through private investment.

The government’s economists remain bullish about growth, arguing that Paraguay, devastated by a 19th-century war that wiped out most of its male population and ruled throughout much of the 20th century by Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, is emerging from decades of ostracism in the global economy.

Paraguay sold $500 million of bonds in January in international markets, a rare source of financing for a nation overlooked by many foreign bankers for decades. Inflation and unemployment remain low, at less than 2 percent and less than 6 percent, respectively, and the overall poverty rate has fallen to about 32 percent in 2011 from 44 percent in 2003, said Roland Horst, a board member at the central bank.

“We do have a peasant issue now and then,” Mr. Horst said in an interview. “But there is less tension than 10 years ago.” He said the government had been trying to reduce poverty, noting that a program of giving small cash stipends to people in extreme poverty, begun in 2005, now included more than 75,000 families. Other economists, however, dispute such sunny assessments, arguing that the economy remains subject to wide swings, surging this year thanks in part to favorable weather conditions for certain crops, after contracting slightly in 2012 when farmers struggled with a drought.

They also contend that Paraguay’s social welfare programs remain meager compared with antipoverty projects in neighboring countries, which have lifted tens of millions of people out of abject living conditions. They blame Paraguay’s relatively weak state, with tax collection corresponding to only about 18 percent of gross domestic product, a figure lower than that of African nations like Congo and Chad.

“The statistics showing historically low unemployment are a farce,” said Luis Rojas Villagra, an economist at the National University, who estimates that as much as half of Paraguay’s work force is unemployed or underemployed in jobs with degrading wages and working conditions.

“How is it possible to reconcile the fact that hundreds of people survive each day by sifting through garbage in the municipal dump of Asunción while Paraguayans are also the biggest per-capita spenders in Punta del Este?” said Mr. Rojas Villagra, referring to the Uruguayan resort city where rich Paraguayans vacation alongside moneyed Argentines and Brazilians.

Such contrasts persist across Paraguay’s economy. Pockets of luxury, for instance, are expanding near Ciudad del Este, the city on the Brazilian border renowned as a smuggler’s haven.

One development, the Paraná Country Club, includes mansions selling for more than $3 million, largely to soybean growers or business executives from Brazil who have opened factories in Paraguay, a migration of manufacturing that is starting to resemble that of companies from the United States opening factories in low-wage Mexican border cities.

“2013 is starting to look like an amazing year,” said Thelma Amaral, an architect who designs homes near Ciudad del Este.

But elsewhere, including the soybean regions at the root of the growth, examples abound of disparities and disputes, largely over land. A small leftist rebel group, the Paraguayan People’s Army, has been picking off security forces in remote areas. Last weekend, the group killed at least one police officer and wounded several others.

In December, gunmen shot dead Vidal Vega, a leader of the peasant movement involved in the deadly clash at Curuguaty. He had been expected to be a witness at the criminal trial intended to shed light on the massacre. The inquiry into his killing, as in similar cases of peasant leaders killed in Paraguay in recent years, has turned up few leads.

TIMESCAST: New Year’s in Times Square Goes Digital

December 26, 2012By Fritzie Andrade, Krishnan Vasudevan and David Gillen

TimesCast Media+Tech: Song apps to keep the party going. | A conversation with Allure’s 85-year-old plastic surgery editor, Joan Kron. | A look at the social media tied to the ball drop.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Setting AutoSave Times In Microsoft Office

How often does Microsoft Office 2012 automatically save the file I’m working on?

By default, Microsoft Office programs (which include Word, Excel, PowerPoint) are set to automatically save an open file every 10 minutes. This means that if the program crashes, the power goes out or you have some other unexpected event that disrupts your work, your file should still have all the changes you have made — except for the last 10 minutes of work. Your file may retain more recent changes if you manually saved it yourself by pressing Control+S on the keyboard or using the menu option.

If you work quickly and 10 minutes seems like too big a gap between autosaves, you can increase the frequency. To do so, click the File tab in Word 2010 or whichever Office program you are using. Click the Options icon on the left side of the screen and then click the Save icon on the next screen. In the “Save AutoRecover information every” area of the box, change the number of minutes from 10 to however often you want the program to automatically save the open file. Click the O.K. button. Frequent automatic saving may slow the program down a bit, but can cause less worry about crashes.

Microsoft has a video that demonstrates how to adjust the time between automatic saves, as well as how to use the AutoRecover feature to open an automatically saved file.

On Twitter, Sifting Through Falsehoods in Critical Times

Trouble is, not all of it was true.

Deliberate falsehoods, including images showing the Statue of Liberty engulfed in ominous clouds and sharks swimming through waterlogged suburban neighborhoods quickly spread through the service, as did word that power would be shut off for the entire city of New York and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded.

Twitter says it cannot possibly regulate the millions of messages on its service, and that a bit of misinformation and mischief is to be expected. But in recent years, the service has become an indispensable funnel of information in critical times for many people, especially for those who lose access to power or cable TV. For them, it can be a crucial lifeline.

Twitter has also become an invaluable tool for local government, news and relief organizations, which can monitor updates and dispatches from smartphone-wielding citizens.

“The limits of Twitter come into play during a situation like a hurricane,” said John Palfrey, co-author of “Born Digital,” an examination of Internet technology’s impact on society. “There’s great power in it, but also great power for deception.”

While people are learning to accept information posted to the social Web with a large grain of salt, they may not be able to distinguish between useful updates and fake ones during a crisis or disaster, which can become dangerous. Bad information might set off an irrational decision that could lead to panic, or worse, put them in harm’s way.

A search is on for promising technological solutions, but for the time being, it is up to users to police the service.

“Generally speaking, we don’t mediate or moderate and monitor the site and content on the site in an event, whether the debates or a natural disaster,” Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman, said in an interview. “Fact-checking Twitter is not scalable and not something we want to get involved with.”

Twitter does take steps to validate some of the information coursing through its service. It verifies the accounts of some prominent people by placing blue checkmarks next to those users’ names. It also suggests lists of reliable Twitter accounts and users to follow during big events, be they government officials or news reporters.

Ms. Horwitz compared Twitter to a self-cleaning oven, saying the company was pleased with how quickly vigilant at-home fact-checkers were able to establish which photographs and reports were not true.

Jack Stuef, a writer at BuzzFeed, exposed a Twitter user going by the moniker “ComfortablySmug,” who was deliberately spreading rumors and false reports late Monday night — one said the Coney Island Hospital was on fire — as the frenzy online was reaching its peak. Many of the rumors were unwittingly repeated and spread by others. (Twitter said it had no plans to suspend the account.)

A Web site, IsTwitterWrong, run by Tom Phillips, an international editor at MSN, collected and analyzed popular images floating around during the hurricane and tried to determine which were real and which were not.

Twitter should not be expected to moderate all messages on its site, Mr. Palfrey said, especially during a fast-paced, critical situation like a tremendous storm.

Twitter said it did not yet have official figures for the volume of messages during the height of the storm. Topsy, a third-party service that analyzes Twitter activity clustered around a specific topic, showed as many as 550,000 posts related to the storm.

Mr. Palfrey suggested that during a major event, Twitter could pick out certain posts containing valuable nuggets of information and promote them on its site and mobile application.

Relying on users to police the streams of information could be an effective solution, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard.

“Don’t forget that the whole idea of a retweet was invented by users before Twitter was blessed with that functionality,” he said. “The digital realm could resolve this and not break the law of physics by doing so.”

He suggested an annotation, like “xTweet,” to signal something as false, or even a bit of metadata that would flag a message as inaccurate, even after a posting is passed around by others.

“We could harness the viral power of Twitter to keep up with its breathless self,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 2, 2012

An article on Thursday about dealing with misinformation in Twitter posts misspelled the surname of a BuzzFeed writer who exposed a Twitter user who was spreading falsehoods. The BuzzFeed writer is Jack Stuef, not Steuf.

Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: More Movie Times

This week’s App Smart column was about apps that can help you find your way to the right movie theater to see the film you want to see at a time you want to see it.

The Flixster app.

Luckily there are a huge number of different apps that say they can help you find where to see a movie. One of the most popular is the Flixster app, free on both iOS and Android. Like its rival Fandango it tries to do almost everything to help you decide which movie to see and then to get you to a theater. This app can also sell you tickets to see movies at participating theaters, and packs in review data from Rotten Tomatoes. As a couple of bonus features it also lets you manage your Netflix queue and there’s an option to stream and download some full-length movies to your device.

Despite Flixster’s complex functionality, this app somehow still manages to preserve a relatively simple design. The app has also been regularly updated to keep it running smoothly and showing relevant data  –  most recently just a few weeks ago.

Also worth remembering is the fact that Apple is one of the better places online to find new movie trailers, and that for some time now Apple has offered the chance to find movie showtimes and theater info via its trailers Web page. Since this page is accessible by smartphone Web browser it may be just as useful as a dedicated movie showtimes app. Plus it comes with Apple’s clear and simple design.

The Landmark Theaters app.

You can also search the app stores for an app that matches your favorite movie theater company, as many of these maintain their own apps. Landmark, which shows a lot of indie films, has its own free app. Some of these companies are also country-specific, and may be the best place to find local data when touring. Visiting Britain., for example, you could check out the Odeon app (free on iTunes), which even includes times for this brand’s famous Leicester Square cinema. UCI’s free iOS app would probably serve you well if you’re in Italy, and so on.

Extra Quick Call

With the arrival of its new operating system Windows 8, Microsoft has updated its free Smartglass app with a list of new features. The app’s designed to work as a second screen companion to your Xbox 360, showing data on your games and TV shows and also letting you control your Xbox. The app is one of the earliest Windows 8 apps out there.

China Blocks Web Access to Times

The authorities were also blocking attempts to mention The Times or the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in posts on Sina Weibo, an extremely popular mini-blogging service in China that resembles Twitter.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman on duty in Beijing early Friday morning did not answer phone calls seeking comment.

China maintains the world’s most extensive and sophisticated system for Internet censorship, employing tens of thousands of people to monitor what is said, delete entries that contravene the country’s extensive and unpublished regulations and even write new entries that are favorable to the government.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow specializing in Internet free expression and privacy issues at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan group headquartered in Washington, said that the Chinese interruption of Internet access was typical of the response to information that offended leaders.

“This is what they do: they get mad, they block you,” she said.

The English-language and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times are hosted on servers outside mainland China.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Eileen Murphy, expressed disappointment that Internet access had been blocked and noted that the Chinese-language Web site had attracted “great interest” in China.

“We hope that full access is restored shortly, and we will ask the Chinese authorities to ensure that our readers in China can continue to enjoy New York Times journalism,” she said in a statement, adding, “We will continue to report and translate stories applying the same journalistic standards that are upheld across The New York Times.”

Former President Jiang Zemin of China ordered an end to blocking of The New York Times Web site after meeting with journalists from The Times in August 2001. The company’s Web sites, like those of most other foreign media organizations, have remained mostly free of blocking since then, with occasional, temporary exceptions.

By 7 a.m. Friday in China, access to both the English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times was blocked from all 31 cities in mainland China tested. The Times had posted the article in English at 4:34 p.m. on Thursday in New York (4:34 a.m. Friday in Beijing), and finished posting the article in Chinese three hours later after the translation of final edits to the English-language version.

Publication of the article about Mr. Wen and his family comes at a delicate time in Chinese politics, during a year in which factional rivalries and the personal lives of Chinese leaders have come into public view to a rare extent and drawn unprecedented international interest.

The Times’s statement called China “an increasingly open society, with increasingly sophisticated media,” adding, “The response to our site suggests that The Times can play an important role in the government’s efforts to raise the quality of journalism available to the Chinese people.”

The New York Times is not the first international organization to run into trouble with Chinese censors. Google decided to move its servers for the Chinese market in January 2010, to Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory outside the country’s censorship firewalls, after the company was unable to reach an agreement with the Chinese authorities to allow unrestricted searches of the Internet.

Bloomberg published an article on June 29 describing wealth accumulated by the family of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to become the country’s next top leader as general secretary of the Communist Party during the coming Party Congress.

Since then, Bloomberg’s operations have encountered a series of problems in mainland China, including the blocking of its Web site, which is in English.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Times, Obama And His Cyberself Differ on Tactics

Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school here, President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

Mr. Obama’s Twitter account is maintained by his campaign staff, which makes clear that only posts signed with the initials B.O. are actually written by him. That’s fairly obvious, given that on Thursday, in between pounding Mr. Romney for perceived discrepancies in the Bain story, “Barack Obama” tweeted: “Stickers! Get them here.”

But it underscores the vivid contrast between what Mr. Obama says, and what is often said in his name. The president did not address the questions about Bain Capital in his stump speech. In his first stop of the day, he even left out a line he has used about how Mr. Romney’s buyout firm was celebrated as a “pioneer” of outsourcing.

As a busy day of campaigning unfolded, however, Mr. Obama shrugged off his reluctance to talk about Mr. Romney and Bain. The line about Bain being an outsourcing pioneer reappeared later in a speech in Hampton. And in an interview with a local TV station, WJLA, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Romney ought to answer questions about his relationship with the firm after he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

“Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations,” he said.

The Romney campaign did not give Mr. Obama any quarter either. Mr. Romney welcomed the president to Virginia with an open letter in The Virginian-Pilot, in which he said, “Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service.”

Virginia, a once reliably Republican state that Mr. Obama became the first Democrat to win since 1964, looms as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2012. The president acknowledged its potentially decisive role, telling an overflow crowd in Hampton before his speech, “If and when we get Virginia, we will win this election.”

“Virginia, the reason I ran and the reason you supported me wasn’t just to get back to where we were in 2007,” the president said. “The reason we came together was to restore that promise for middle-class families, and all who are striving to get into the middle class. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Time to Talk Coaching

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

Help for Veterans

Mr. Obama has assiduously cultivated military veterans, giving tax credits to employers that hire returning veterans and extracting pledges from companies like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods to hire 100,000 veterans and their spouses. He also brought home the last soldiers from Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

The Romney campaign, however, is determined to sour any affection these voters have for Mr. Obama, warning that the automatic cuts in Pentagon spending that are part of the White House’s budget deal with Congress could undermine the military-dependent economy in Virginia, with its large bases and shipbuilding industry.

“Virginia is probably going to be more devastated than any state in the union by this,” said John F. Lehman Jr., a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Romney, on a call organized by the campaign. “The president just doesn’t understand defense. He just doesn’t understand how it works.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama stopped at a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe with three wives of servicemen. “I love the fact that this administration is focusing more on military families,” said one, Jennifer Farlin. “Prior to this, we felt lost.”

While the president is likely to make inroads with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader military vote seems destined to stay in the Republican column. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April and May, 58 percent of veterans said they favored Mitt Romney, while only 34 percent supported Mr. Obama.

Music to Suit the Crowd

As Mr. Obama’s campaign rallies settle into a routine, so, too, does his choice of music: a mix tape released by the campaign that runs the gamut from Arcade Fire to REO Speedwagon. The president usually takes the stage to U2’s hit “City of Blinding Lights,” as he did in 2008. The opportunities for creativity, such as they are, come at the end of his stump speech, when Mr. Obama shakes hands and poses for pictures.

Then, the campaign seems to tailor its music to local tastes. Mr. Obama greeted auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and veterans in Virginia Beach to the thumping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthem “We Take Care of Our Own.” In Cedar Rapids, the artsy city in Iowa where voters have known Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his first campaign in 2007, the soundtrack was U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing.”

In Sandusky, Ohio, the local organizers chose a tune not on the playlist: “Only in America,” the politically androgynous country hit by Brooks & Dunn that has been a standard for years at Republican and Democratic rallies.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Times, Obama And His Cyberself Differ on Tactics

Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school here, President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

Mr. Obama’s Twitter account is maintained by his campaign staff, which makes clear that only posts signed with the initials B.O. are actually written by him. That’s fairly obvious, given that on Thursday, in between pounding Mr. Romney for perceived discrepancies in the Bain story, “Barack Obama” tweeted: “Stickers! Get them here.”

But it underscores the vivid contrast between what Mr. Obama says, and what is often said in his name. The president did not address the questions about Bain Capital in his stump speech. In his first stop of the day, he even left out a line he has used about how Mr. Romney’s buyout firm was celebrated as a “pioneer” of outsourcing.

As a busy day of campaigning unfolded, however, Mr. Obama shrugged off his reluctance to talk about Mr. Romney and Bain. The line about Bain being an outsourcing pioneer reappeared later in a speech in Hampton. And in an interview with a local TV station, WJLA, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Romney ought to answer questions about his relationship with the firm after he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

“Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations,” he said.

The Romney campaign did not give Mr. Obama any quarter either. Mr. Romney welcomed the president to Virginia with an open letter in The Virginian-Pilot, in which he said, “Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service.”

Virginia, a once reliably Republican state that Mr. Obama became the first Democrat to win since 1964, looms as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2012. The president acknowledged its potentially decisive role, telling an overflow crowd in Hampton before his speech, “If and when we get Virginia, we will win this election.”

“Virginia, the reason I ran and the reason you supported me wasn’t just to get back to where we were in 2007,” the president said. “The reason we came together was to restore that promise for middle-class families, and all who are striving to get into the middle class. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Time to Talk Coaching

Mr. Obama’s advisers say he savors unscripted encounters with voters, and occasionally these moments can be revelatory.

Dropping in for a beer last week at Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio, the president found himself explaining to a table of curious school administrators why the White House was waiving states’ compliance with the No Child Left Behind law. Moments earlier, he had an intense exchange with Art Davis, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who complained about delays in processing disability claims for veterans.

But then there are encounters like his kitchen-table conversation with a Cedar Rapids couple, Jason and Ali McLaughlin. Though avidly promoted by the campaign, it got off to a desultory start, with Mr. McLaughlin and the president comparing notes about how they coach girls’ sports teams (“Now, they run plays!” Mr. Obama marveled about his daughter Sasha’s team). Neither said a word about middle-class tax cuts — the ostensible subject of the meeting — until after the reporters had been ushered out.

Help for Veterans

Mr. Obama has assiduously cultivated military veterans, giving tax credits to employers that hire returning veterans and extracting pledges from companies like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods to hire 100,000 veterans and their spouses. He also brought home the last soldiers from Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

The Romney campaign, however, is determined to sour any affection these voters have for Mr. Obama, warning that the automatic cuts in Pentagon spending that are part of the White House’s budget deal with Congress could undermine the military-dependent economy in Virginia, with its large bases and shipbuilding industry.

“Virginia is probably going to be more devastated than any state in the union by this,” said John F. Lehman Jr., a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Romney, on a call organized by the campaign. “The president just doesn’t understand defense. He just doesn’t understand how it works.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama stopped at a smoky Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here and had lunch at Rick’s Cafe with three wives of servicemen. “I love the fact that this administration is focusing more on military families,” said one, Jennifer Farlin. “Prior to this, we felt lost.”

While the president is likely to make inroads with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader military vote seems destined to stay in the Republican column. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April and May, 58 percent of veterans said they favored Mitt Romney, while only 34 percent supported Mr. Obama.

Music to Suit the Crowd

As Mr. Obama’s campaign rallies settle into a routine, so, too, does his choice of music: a mix tape released by the campaign that runs the gamut from Arcade Fire to REO Speedwagon. The president usually takes the stage to U2’s hit “City of Blinding Lights,” as he did in 2008. The opportunities for creativity, such as they are, come at the end of his stump speech, when Mr. Obama shakes hands and poses for pictures.

Then, the campaign seems to tailor its music to local tastes. Mr. Obama greeted auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and veterans in Virginia Beach to the thumping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthem “We Take Care of Our Own.” In Cedar Rapids, the artsy city in Iowa where voters have known Mr. Obama from the earliest days of his first campaign in 2007, the soundtrack was U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing.”

In Sandusky, Ohio, the local organizers chose a tune not on the playlist: “Only in America,” the politically androgynous country hit by Brooks & Dunn that has been a standard for years at Republican and Democratic rallies.