Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square.

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Jennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and a potential for more prison time on other counts.

In the years since, that temporary flush of wealth evaporated and Ms. Sultan, 38, developed an addiction to prescription painkillers.

On Friday, she sat handcuffed in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Manhattan. In exchange for a promise of a four-year prison sentence, she pleaded guilty to selling prescription painkillers and conspiring to sell a firearm.

She was arrested last July and accused of being part of a ring that sold prescription drugs and guns. Four others arrested with Ms. Sultan had already pleaded guilty. One, Nicholas Mina, a former New York City police officer, agreed to serve more than 15 years in prison as part of a plea bargain under which he admitted stealing guns from his colleagues’ precinct house lockers and selling them. Mr. Mina was also addicted to prescription painkillers.

Though Ms. Sultan’s lawyer said she had hoped for less than four years, she faced 15 years to life in prison on the top count against her and the potential for more prison time on other charges. She said little in court but smiled broadly several times as she spoke quietly with her lawyer, Frank Rothman.

“She was happy to be done with it, but she was not happy with the sentence,” Mr. Rothman said afterward.

Ms. Sultan grew up in West Long Branch, N.J., five miles north of Asbury Park, and graduated from New York University in 1996. She and her boyfriend at the time, Adam Cohen, worked at a company, Live Online, that was an early pioneer in live streaming events on the Internet.

After the sale of Live Online, efforts by Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen to start other technology companies failed. Ms. Sultan explored other interests, including acupuncture and holistic health.

Early last year, a city narcotics investigator discovered an advertisement Ms. Sultan had placed on Craigslist offering prescription painkillers for sale. She and Mr. Cohen were still living in the penthouse loft near Union Square that they bought after the sale of Live Online.

Five times from February through June, she sold pills to an undercover officer, according to her indictment. One sale took place at the Starbucks on Union Square. In another, she sold 183 oxycodone tablets to the officer for $4,400 at a Starbucks in the Flatiron district near the school where she was studying acupuncture.

A separate investigation into the ring that sold stolen guns and pain medication picked up Ms. Sultan sending a text message to the man accused of being the ringleader, Ivan Chavez, saying she wanted to sell him a .357 Magnum handgun for $850, according to a separate indictment obtained by the Manhattan district attorney.

Mr. Chavez was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen, who was not accused of participating in the drug and guns ring, filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Last August, the bankruptcy judge ordered them to vacate the loft to allow a bankruptcy trustee to sell it. The 5,600-square-foot loft is still listed for sale at just under $6 million.

She has been incarcerated since her arrest in July because she was unable to raise $85,000 for bail. With credit for good behavior and time served since her arrest, Ms. Sultan could be released from prison in about two years.

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Gadgetwise Blog: How to Beat Some Facebook Scammers

You’ve probably seen those wildly popular Facebook postings that entice you to share something — like a photo of a bear sneaking up on a man — with the instructions, “Press Like and type the number 1 and see what happens.” These posts often list hundreds of thousands of responses.

If you’ve tried it, here’s what you saw happen: nothing. Behind the scenes something is happening, though. With each click, a scammer gets a little closer to cashing in.

The most thorough explanation I’ve seen of how this deception works comes from Daylan Pearce, whose job title is Search Lead at Next Digital, described as Australia’s largest independent digital agency, in Melbourne.

Somewhat simplified, here’s how it works. There is a thriving business in selling Facebook pages. The idea is that a page builds an audience, then essentially sells that audience to someone else. It’s a practice Facebook opposes, but has limited control over.

If a company can buy that audience, its “edge rank” will increase. Edge rank — a term people like Mr. Pearce use, but which Facebook doesn’t officially acknowledge — measures how often someone’s posts show up in other people’s news feeds. “So,” Mr. Pearce said, “a page that has 50,000 likes will have greater exposure on people’s news feeds than a page with only 10,000.”

Edge rank is based on several factors, chief among them affinity, weight and decay, Mr. Pearce said. Affinity is largely based on the number of likes. Weight is based on what accompanies those likes. “A ‘like’ isn’t worth as much as a comment and a comment isn’t worth as much as a ‘share,’” he said.

Decay relates to the age of the post. More views, likes and shares over more time increases edge rank.

Facebook did not quarrel with the basics of Mr. Pearce’s explanation, but said it’s more complicated.

These scam posts are designed to do three things. Get you to like, comment and share the post. It’s a recipe to make it go viral, which takes care of decay.

To hook you, the posts make an intriguing promise, or ask you to support a worthy cause – “like this and share it if you know of someone who has suffered from cancer.”

While you can’t stop people from such postings, you can keep them off your page and reduce the potential profit. You lower their edge rank when you report or at least hide the post.

To do that, hold your cursor over the post and an arrow should appear in the upper right corner. Click it and a drop-down menu offers you the option of hiding or reporting the post.

The more often you report or hide these kinds of posts, the less often they will show up in your news feed.

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Bits Blog: Samsung Is Forming an Army in Barcelona

Samsung Electronics had no new phone to show at Mobile World Congress this week. But it was ubiquitous in Barcelona nonetheless.

The South Korean company’s presence was unavoidable even outside the conference. The walls of Barcelona’s metro stations were plastered with enormous posters showing Galaxy phones. Samsung even had a booth where people could try Galaxy devices right by the exit of the metro stop near the convention center.

Samsung, of course, had one of the biggest booths on the conference floor. Other companies, like Visa, were largely interested in discussing their new partnerships with Samsung.

One of the companies at the conference was NTT Docomo, the Japanese phone carrier. It gave a modest presentation about mobile wallets. After the briefing, a Samsung employee approached a Docomo executive and introduced himself. Another partnership, perhaps, in the works.

After a day of reporting I met an old colleague for dinner. He now works at a small start-up in San Francisco.

“What brings you to the show?” I asked.

“We have a collaboration with Samsung,” he said.

For years, many technology companies, analysts and journalists have argued that trade shows have become less relevant when it comes to showing new products. The consensus: There’s too much noise, and businesses can always use Twitter and Facebook or simply hold their own news conferences to avoid competing for attention with other companies. Therefore, less news comes out of these shows.

Apple was one of the most vocal to say it was done with trade shows. It pulled out of the Macworld Expo conference after 2009, saying its retail stores were like mini Macworlds all over the world where it could reach out to customers — so what was the point?

Google is taking a page from Apple. Its presence at this trade show was minimal — there was no Google booth, just a small round-table meeting with journalists where it had no news to share.

Apple, the most successful technology company in the world, knows that it doesn’t need to try hard to get other companies to work with it. So it stayed home this week (though at least a few folks from Cupertino were probably here in stealth, scoping out the competition). Samsung, which has been steadily creeping up on the industry leader, was forming an army in Barcelona, striking partnerships with companies big and small from all over the world, and proactively searching for even more to form alliances.

If you were No. 1, wouldn’t that make you feel a little nervous?

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Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo’s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

A company spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the statement, saying, “We don’t discuss internal matters.”

But based on information from several Yahoo employees, what that statement means is that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is in crisis mode, and she believes the policy is necessary to get Yahoo back into shape.

The employees spoke anonymously because they are not allowed to discuss internal matters.

The company also seems to be trying to distance itself from the broader national debate over workplace flexibility, and from criticism that the new policy is disruptive for employees who have family responsibilities outside work.

The work ethic at Yahoo among some workers has deteriorated over time, the Yahoo employees said, and requiring people to show up is a way to keep an eye on them and re-energize the troops. If some of the least productive workers leave as a result, the thinking goes, all the better.

Some employees have abused the former policy permitting work at home to the point of founding start-ups while being on salary at Yahoo, said the Yahoo employees and others who have worked at the company.

Several business analysts said that if work-at-home arrangements don’t work, it is generally a management problem.

Yahoo’s culture and employee morale have dissolved as it has fallen behind hotter tech companies. And, business analysts say, those are two things that are difficult to repair without having employees present in the same place.

Still, Ms. Mayer has said many times that one of her top priorities for the company is to recruit the most talented engineers and other employees. Even if requiring people to show up is the only way to repair Yahoo’s culture, it could result in losing valuable employees.

And even if Yahoo’s broader work-at-home policy needed revision, the internal memo announcing the new policy struck some as tone-deaf by implying that employees should avoid staying at home even once in a while when there are extenuating circumstances.

“For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” it said.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Measuring Your Health With Jawbone’s Up

The Up band, made by Jawbone, is an electronic bracelet that helps you log your activities, eating and rest, and it can record an awful lot of data. But the more detailed the data you want, the more work you’ll have to do to get it.

Up, costing $130, is the technological cousin of devices like the Striiv, Fitbit, and Fit Link, among others, which range in list price from $70 to $150. The idea is that measuring your activities, what you eat and how much you sleep will help you develop a healthier lifestyle and stick to it.

The Up band is available in seven colors and is worn loosely on the wrist. Initially it got in the way when I typed, but I got used to sliding it up my sleeve at the keyboard.

It has one feature not found in the others mentioned above — a vibration motor. You can set the band to remind you with a vibration to get up and walk around if you’ve been at the desk too long. Or set it as an alarm to buzz you awake in the morning.

The food logging also worked quite well for me, The bar-code scanner correctly recorded all of the food I tried  — often not the case with other devices — but as with any food log, if you want precision, you have to type in every ingredient in a meal. It can take longer to enter what you ate than to eat it.

Also, as with all these kinds of devices, it can recognize and count your steps, but unlike some of the others, the Up band cannot tell the difference between walking, running or going up stairs. Exercise like bicycling or weight lifting has to be manually entered.

To monitor your sleep, you have to remember to press a button that sets the band to sleep mode; I sometimes forgot to do this. You switch back when you wake, although after 25 or so steps, Up will change to wake mode itself.

The social component lets you post selected statistics to Facebook and Twitter, or share privately with other Up users you pick. The camaraderie (or competition) is a big help in achieving a goal.

Plug the band into an iPhone with the Up app to see colorful charts of your progress, share results and see suggestions based on your performance. The band lasts about 10 days on a charge and can even be worn in the shower, though not while swimming.

The Up band is not really for the devoted athlete, and it’s not quite as simple as some other devices, but for the modestly active who would like to be more so, the Up band can keep track when you make tracks.

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HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

WASHINGTON — More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest sellers of smartphones in the United States, had security flaws that could allow location tracking of users against their will and the theft of personal information stored on their phones, federal officials said Friday.

The Federal Trade Commission charged HTC with customizing the software on its Android- and Windows-based phones in ways that let third-party applications install software that could steal personal information, surreptitiously send text messages or enable the device’s microphone to record the user’s phone calls.

The action is the first attempt by the commission to police a manufacturer of mobile devices. As smartphones and tablets become a common way for consumers to shop, bank and chat online, personal information and privacy will need to be guarded.

HTC America, based in Bellevue, Wash., agreed to settle the civil suit with the commission by issuing software patches that close the security holes, and by creating a security program that will be monitored by an independent party for the next 20 years. The F.T.C. does not have the authority to assess fines in consumer protection cases.

“The company didn’t design its products with security in mind,” Lesley Fair, a senior lawyer in the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote in a blog post. “HTC didn’t test the software on its mobile devices for potential security vulnerabilities, didn’t follow commonly accepted secure coding practices and didn’t even respond when warned about the flaws in its devices.”

An HTC official said Friday that the company had already started to update its software and distribute it to users of some, but not all, of the affected phones.

“Working with our carrier partners, we have addressed the identified security vulnerabilities on the majority of devices in the U.S. released after December 2010,” Sally Julien, an HTC spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We’re working to roll out the remaining software updates now and recommend customers download them once available.”

“Privacy and security are important,” the statement added, “and we are committed to improving practices that help safeguard our customers’ devices and data.”

The trade commission charged that the security flaws resulted from HTC’s modifying the operating system software used on most of the affected phones. In the case of Android, created by Google, the system is designed to protect sensitive information and phone functions through what is known as a permission-based security model.

That requires a user, when installing an application that is not a standard part of the operating system, to be notified and to agree that the application could gain access to certain information or functions.

HTC, however, preinstalled certain apps on its phones in a way that, in addition to preventing consumers from removing them, disabled the permission-based model and allowed newly installed apps to have immediate access to personal data.

“The analogy isn’t exact,” wrote Ms. Fair of the F.T.C., “but it’s like giving a friend the combination to a safe only to find out he’s handing it over to anyone who asks.”

That security hole could, for example, let the rogue software secretly record users’ phone conversations or track their location.

Flaws in the security system could also give third-party apps access to phone numbers, contents of text messages, browsing history and information like credit card numbers and banking transactions. Those flaws also affected HTC phones that used Windows-based operating systems.

While HTC’s actions introduced numerous security vulnerabilities to its phones, a commission official said it was not clear how many users experienced illegal incursions into their phones and personal information.

The flaw in the company’s phones has been known since at least 2011. HTC acknowledged the problems at that time and developed software patches for at least some of the deficiencies that year.

But the problems were far from minor. The F.T.C. said that text-message toll fraud, in which a hacker causes a phone to send text messages to a number that charges the user for delivery of the message, “is one of the most common types of Android malware,” or malicious software.

HTC’s user manuals either said or implied that a user was protected against malware because of the permission-based security, the commission said.

The commission will collect public comments on the proposed remedies for 30 days, after which it will decide whether to formally carry out the order. If HTC subsequently violates the order’s restrictions and requirements, it faces civil penalties of up to $16,000 a violation.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

A picture with an earlier version of this article was published in error. The settlement between HTC and the F.T.C. involves phones running Windows Mobile; it did not involve the later operating system Windows 8, which the phone in the picture was running.

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Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

The two big casino states, Nevada and New Jersey, are racing into online gambling as a way of protecting their turf. They will in essence become laboratories for what is and is not feasible in Internet wagering.

Nevada legislators, who previously authorized online poker, hurriedly passed a new bill this week that allows the state to enter into deals with other states to essentially pool their gambling populations. “This is the day we usher Nevada into the next frontier of gaming,” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s governor, said on Thursday as he signed the bill.

In the year since online poker became a theoretical possibility in Nevada, no company has yet offered it. One problem: It’s too small a market, especially in a state where it is not exactly hard to gamble the old-fashioned way — by plunking your body down in a casino or, for that matter, just about anywhere else.

“We don’t have a universe of players,” Pete Ernaut, a Nevada political consultant, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “So for us, what we get to offer to a state like California or Texas is that we have the most mature regulatory infrastructure. We have the most mature financial, auditing and collection capabilities, much greater than some of those states, and they have the players.”

Meanwhile, New Jersey is also barreling ahead. Chris Christie, the governor, is likely to sign a revised bill permitting a variety of online gambling as soon as next week. All online ventures will be under the tight control of the Atlantic City casinos. Delaware, the smallest of the three states that are moving ahead with online gambling, also has ambitious plans.

In a harbinger of the new age, gamblers at the Borgata casino in Atlantic City will, as USA Today put it, “be able to lose their shirts without wearing one.” Gamblers staying in one of the casino’s 2,000 rooms can now place their bets right there without venturing onto the casino floor. From there it is only a small step to just staying home and gambling from the hammock.

Internet companies that make online games are watching all this with considerable interest. “Is 2013 going to be a game-changer?” asked Paul Thelen of Big Fish Studios, which began offering a gambling app in Britain last fall. “No. But in 2014, it starts getting interesting.”

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In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

HONG KONG — North Korea will finally allow Internet searches on mobile devices. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck — only foreigners will get this privilege.

Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by next Friday, according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in the North.

The North Korean police state is famously cloistered, a means for the government to keep news of the world from its impoverished people. Only the most elite North Koreans have been allowed access to the Internet, and even they are watched. And although many North Koreans are allowed to have cellphones, sanctioned phones cannot call outside the country.

Foreigners were only recently allowed to use cellphones in the country. Previously, most had to surrender their phones with customs agents.

But it is unlikely that the small opening will compromise the North’s tight control of its people; the relatively few foreigners who travel to North Korea — a group that includes tourists and occasional journalists — are assigned government minders.

The decision, announced Friday, to allow foreigners Internet access comes a month after Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang, the North’s capital. While there he prodded officials on allowing Internet access, noting how easy it would be to set up through the expanding 3G network of Koryolink, a joint venture of North Korean and Egyptian telecommunications corporations. Presumably, Mr. Schmidt’s appeal was directed at giving North Koreans such capability.

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters following his visit. “We made that alternative very, very clear.”

North Koreans will get some benefit from the 3G service, as they will be allowed to text and make video calls, The Associated Press said. They can also view newspaper reports — but the news service mentioned only one source: Rodong Sinmun, the North’s main Communist Party newspaper.

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Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

The two big casino states, Nevada and New Jersey, are racing into online gambling as a way of protecting their turf. They will in essence become laboratories for what is and is not feasible in Internet wagering.

Nevada legislators, who previously authorized online poker, hurriedly passed a new bill this week that allows the state to enter into deals with other states to essentially pool their gambling populations. “This is the day we usher Nevada into the next frontier of gaming,” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s governor, said on Thursday as he signed the bill.

In the year since online poker became a theoretical possibility in Nevada, no company has yet offered it. One problem: It’s too small a market, especially in a state where it is not exactly hard to gamble the old-fashioned way — by plunking your body down in a casino or, for that matter, just about anywhere else.

“We don’t have a universe of players,” Pete Ernaut, a Nevada political consultant, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “So for us, what we get to offer to a state like California or Texas is that we have the most mature regulatory infrastructure. We have the most mature financial, auditing and collection capabilities, much greater than some of those states, and they have the players.”

Meanwhile, New Jersey is also barreling ahead. Chris Christie, the governor, is likely to sign a revised bill permitting a variety of online gambling as soon as next week. All online ventures will be under the tight control of the Atlantic City casinos. Delaware, the smallest of the three states that are moving ahead with online gambling, also has ambitious plans.

In a harbinger of the new age, gamblers at the Borgata casino in Atlantic City will, as USA Today put it, “be able to lose their shirts without wearing one.” Gamblers staying in one of the casino’s 2,000 rooms can now place their bets right there without venturing onto the casino floor. From there it is only a small step to just staying home and gambling from the hammock.

Internet companies that make online games are watching all this with considerable interest. “Is 2013 going to be a game-changer?” asked Paul Thelen of Big Fish Studios, which began offering a gambling app in Britain last fall. “No. But in 2014, it starts getting interesting.”

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Tool Kit: Some Premium Headphones Amplify Celebrities Over Sound

If you are planning a $200 splurge on premium headphones — as millions of people are this year — who will give you the most for your money? Maybe a rapper like Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Nick Cannon or Ludacris?

Or will you get better sound with headphones branded by rockers like Motörhead or inspired by the reggae artist Bob Marley?

Maybe headphones associated with the sports stars Tim Tebow and Michael Phelps or the reality television star Nicole Polizzi, better known as Snooki, produce even better sound?

This is how headphones are marketed these days — affinity headphones, if you will. The sequins, rhinestones, feathers and faux leopard print on Ms. Polizzi’s $60 headphones attract buyers as much as their sound quality does. Headphones are in high demand. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates 79 million were sold last year, and it predicts 10 percent more than that will be sold this year. But the category of headphones costing more than $100 is growing even faster — 64 percent, according to market analysts at the NPD Group.

That is wonderful news for retailers who feel their profit margins squeezed on laptops, televisions and most other electronic products. “Retailers can make more on a high-end pair of headphones than they can make selling a smartphone in many instances,” said Ross Rubin of Reticle Research, a consumer electronics research firm.

Knowing what’s behind the marketing can help a consumer avoid the hype when choosing a product. Headphone designers estimate the cost of making a “fashion headset” selling for $200 is as low as $14. “I would have guessed $20 to $22,“ said Tim Hickman, whose California Headphone Company and Fanny Wang Headphone Company brands are made in China.

“When you look at a $300 Beats headphone, how much does it cost to tool the enclosure, how much does it cost to stamp the thing out?” said John Chen, director of sales for the audio manufacturer Grado Labs. “Stamping it out is pennies.”

“I wish that were true,” said Noel Lee, founder of Monster Products, which until December produced Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. “I’m going to say it’s in the $40 and up range to make a quality product.” (Monster also makes those $80 HDMI cables at electronics stores, the ones that cost much less at Monoprice.com.)

The growth in pricey headphones is yoked to the growth of tablets and phones. IPods and other media players come with basic earphones, but the expanded menu of music and video apps now available encourage people to replace those with higher-quality headphones.

“What is really pushing premium headphones is not just the growth in mobile smartphones and tablets, but video and music services like Netflix and Spotify, that make people want a better listening device,” said Benjamin Arnold, a consumer electronics industry analyst for NPD. “It’s serious consumption rather than 30-second YouTube clips.”

The rush into premium headphones was set off in 2008 by the Beats by Dr. Dre brand, which marketed headphones like Air Jordan basketball shoes. (HTC, the Taiwanese cellphone maker, was once the majority shareholder of the Beats venture and still owns a 25 percent interest.) Headphones had traditionally been sold on technical specs like frequency response, but Beats created appealing designs in an array of colors. It also tweaked the headphones with brain-rattling bass.

Monster lost the rights to make the Beats, but has introduced 12 of its own headphones, none with a celebrity name on the brand, although some have celebrity endorsers. NPD found that celebrity endorsement was extremely or very important to 30 percent of consumers, and was the top factor driving purchases of headphones costing more than $100. Consumers say they want sound quality, but brand counts heavily too.

“Basically good-enough sound is good enough if everything else is in line, like brand and color,” Mr. Arnold said. “You see young people walking around the mall with them around their necks. They aren’t even on their ears.”

Not all headphones work on the same economics as the fashion brands. Classic brands like AKG, Shure, Audio-Technica, Grado and Klipsch still market based on realistic sound and value. With no celebrity endorsers to share profits and a nearly unlimited shelf life, because the style doesn’t change with fashion, the marketing model is different.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 21, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the ownership stake of HTC, the Taiwanese cellphone maker, in the Beats venture. It is 25 percent, not a majority.

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F.C.C. Moves to Ease Wireless Congestion

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday took a step to relieve growing congestion on Wi-Fi networks in hotels, airports and homes, where Americans increasingly use multiple data-hungry tablets, smartphones and other devices for wireless communications.

The commission proposed making a large chunk of high-frequency airwaves, or spectrum, available for use by unlicensed devices, including Wi-Fi routers like those that many Americans use in their homes.

The agency’s five commissioners also expressed hopes that the new airwaves would unleash new innovations, just as unlicensed spectrum in the past has made possible such devices as cordless phones, garage door openers and television remote controls.

After a public comment period, the commissioners will try to issue final rules and regulations, a process that could take a year or more. But all of the commissioners expressed hope that the new airwaves could be put to use without unnecessary delay.

Possible roadblocks do exist, however, mainly because some of the airwaves proposed for the new applications are already in use by private organizations and government agencies, including the United States military.

Congress has mandated that the F.C.C. undertake the expansion of unlicensed spectrum, and the Obama administration has urged the freeing up or sharing of airwaves currently allocated to the federal government.

But various government agencies, including a division of the Commerce Department, have warned against allowing consumer uses to interfere with current applications.

Lawrence E. Strickling, assistant commerce secretary for communications and information, said in a letter to the commission that the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and NASA use parts of the same airwaves for communication between aircraft and ground stations. Those communications enable activities like drug interdiction, combat search and rescue, and border surveillance.

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said he was confident that the commission’s engineers would be able to work with the affected government and private entities to solve interference problems.

“It’s very important for the country that we all lean into this in a problem-solving way,” Mr. Genachowski said. “This is not a new challenge for the commission to address.”

While “it will require significant consultation with stakeholders” to avoid problems, he added, “consultation can’t be an excuse for inaction or delay.”

The commission also voted unanimously to approve a new regulation allowing consumers and companies to use approved and licensed signal boosters to amplify signals between wireless devices, like cellphones, and the wireless networks on which they operate.

Those boosters, millions of which are currently used in ungoverned applications, help consumers and businesses improve coverage where cell signals are weak. Boosters are also used by public safety departments to extend wireless access in tunnels, subways and garages.

The order, which takes effect March 1, creates two classes of signal boosters, for use by consumers and businesses, each with distinct requirements to minimize interference with wireless networks.

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Disruptions: Disruptions: 3-D Printing Is on the Fast Track

Will the future be printed in 3-D?

At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.

Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much sooner than anyone anticipated. These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.

Last week, President Obama cited this nascent technology during his State of the Union address — as if everyone already knew what the technology was.

He expressed hope that it was a way to rejuvenate American manufacturing. “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Mr. Obama said. He has pushed new technologies before, like solar and wind power, as remedies for our nation’s problems, and those attempts have only revived the debate about the limitations of government industrial policy.

But this one shows more promise. The question is, can the United States get a foothold in manufacturing one 3-D printer at a time?

Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell, said “3-D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical-applications.”

It won’t necessarily directly create manufacturing jobs, except perhaps for the printers themselves. Dr. Lipson, the co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing,” said that the technology “is not going to simply replace existing manufacturing anytime soon.” But he said he believed that it would give rise to new businesses. “The bigger opportunity in the U.S. is that it opens and creates new business models that are based on this idea of customization.”

In addition to the lab that the president mentioned, a federally financed manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio, schools are embracing the technology. The University of Virginia has been working to introduce 3-D printers into some programs from kindergarten through 12th grade in Charlottesville to prepare students for a new future in manufacturing.

“We have 3-D printers in classrooms, and in one example, we’re teaching kids how to design and print catapults that they then analyze for efficiency,” said Glen L. Bull, professor and co-director of the Center for Technology and Teacher Education. “We believe that every school in America could have a 3-D printer in the classroom in the next few years.”

The education system may want to speed things up. The time between predictions for 3-D printers and the reality of what they can accomplish is compressing rapidly.

For example, in 2010, researchers at the University of Southern California said that another decade would pass before we could build a home using a 3-D printer. Yet last week, Softkill Design, a London architecture collective, announced that it planned to make the first such home — which it will assemble in a single day — later this year. The home isn’t that pretty, and will look more like a calcified spider web than a cozy house, but it will show it can be done. The price of 3-D printers has also dropped sharply over the last two years, with machines that once cost $20,000, now at $1,000 or less. That’s partly because Chinese companies are driving down prices. Yes, China sees the opportunity in these things, even though the technology may undermine some of its manufacturing advantages.

“When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way,” Dr. Lipson said.

This leaves us with one more question about the future: When will these 3-D printers be able to make us flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs?

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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Rise of Drones in U.S. Spurs Efforts to Limit Uses

Colin Diltz/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press

A Seattle police officer, Jim Britt, with a drone in October. Seattle later banned use of the devices.

They can record video images and produce heat maps. They can be used to track fleeing criminals, stranded hikers — or just as easily, political protesters. And for strapped police departments, they are more affordable than helicopters.

Drones are becoming a darling of law enforcement authorities across the country. But they have given rise to fears of government surveillance, in many cases even before they take to the skies. And that has prompted local and state lawmakers from Seattle to Tallahassee to outline how they can be used by police or to ground them altogether.

Although surveillance technologies have become ubiquitous in American life, like license plate readers or cameras for catching speeders, drones have evoked unusual discomfort in the public consciousness.

“To me, it’s Big Brother in the sky,” said Dave Norris, a city councilman in Charlottesville, Va., which this month became the first city in the country to restrict the use of drones. “I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial about it, but these drones are coming, and we need to put some safeguards in place so they are not abused.”

In Charlottesville, police officers are prohibited from using in criminal cases any evidence obtained by drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. Never mind that the city police department does not have a drone, nor has it suggested buying one. The police are not barred from using drones for other efforts, like search and rescue.

Mr. Norris said the advent of new policing technologies poses new policy dilemmas for his city.

Charlottesville permits the police to install cameras temporarily in areas known for drug dealing, but it has rebuffed a police request to install cameras along its downtown shopping corridor. It has also chosen not to install cameras at traffic lights to intercept speeding cars, as is common elsewhere.

“Drones are capable of taking surveillance to a whole new level,” Mr. Norris said.

Last week, the Seattle Police Department agreed to return its two still-unused drones to the manufacturer after Mayor Michael McGinn answered public protests by banning their use. On Thursday, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors in Oakland, Calif., listened to the county sheriff’s proposal to use federal money to buy a four-pound drone to help his officers track suspected criminals — and then listened to raucous opposition from the antidrone lobby, including a group that uses the Twitter handle @N.O.M.B.Y., short for Not Over My Back Yard.

This week, members of Congress introduced a bill that would prohibit drones from conducting what it called “targeted surveillance” of individuals and property without a warrant.

A federal law enacted last year paved the way for drones to be used commercially and made it easier for government agencies to obtain them. The Department of Homeland Security offered grants to help local law enforcement buy them. Drone manufacturers began to market small, lightweight devices specifically for policing. Drones are already used to monitor movement on the United States’ borders and by a handful of police departments, and emergency services agencies around the country are just beginning to explore their uses.

The Federal Aviation Administration has received about 80 requests, including some from police and other government agencies, for clearance to fly drones, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which seeks to limit their use for police surveillance.

Law enforcement authorities say drones can be a cost-effective technology to help with a host of policing efforts, like locating bombs, finding lost children, monitoring weather and wildlife or assisting rescue workers in natural disasters.

“In this time of austerity, we are always looking for sensible and cost-effective methods to improve public safety,” said Capt. Tom Madigan of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. “We are not looking at military-grade Predator drones. They are not armed.”

For now, drones for civilian use run on relatively small batteries and fly short distances. In principle, various sensors, including cameras, can be attached to them. But there is no consensus in law on how the data collected can be used, shared or stored.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly part of the name of the federal department that offered grants to local law enforcement agencies to purchase drones. It is the Department of Homeland Security, not Services.

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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.

In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting the site, their computers were infected with malware. The company said that as soon as it discovered the malware, it cleaned up the infected machines and tipped off law enforcement.

“We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised,” Facebook said.

On Feb. 1, Twitter said hackers had breached its systems and potentially accessed the data of 250,000 Twitter users. The company suggested at that time that it was one of several companies and organizations to be have been similarly attacked.

Facebook has known about its own breach for at least a month, according to people close to the investigation, but it was unclear why the company waited this long to announce it. Fred Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.

Like Twitter, Facebook said it believed that it was one of several organizations that were targeted by the same group of attackers.

“Facebook was not alone in this attack,” the company said in its blog post. “It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”

The attacks add to the mounting evidence that hackers were able to use the security hole in Oracle’s Java software to steal information from a broad range of companies. Java, a widely used programming language, is installed on more than three billion devices. It has long been hounded by security problems.

Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. The vulnerability was particularly disconcerting because it let attackers download a malicious program onto its victims’ machines without any prompting. Users did not even have to click on a malicious link for their computers to be infected. The program simply downloaded itself.

After Oracle initially patched the security hole in January, the Department of Homeland Security said that the fix was not sufficient and recommended that, unless “absolutely necessary”, users should disable it on their computers completely. Oracle did not issue another fix until Feb. 1.

Social networks are a prime target for hackers, who look to use people’s personal data and social connections in what are known as “spearphishing” attacks. In this type of attack, a target is sent an e-mail, ostensibly from a connection, containing a malicious link or attachment. Once the link is clicked or attachment opened, attackers take control of a user’s computer. If the infected computer is inside a company’s system, the attackers are able to gain a foothold. In many cases, they then extract passwords and gain access to sensitive data.

Facebook said in its blog post that the updated patch addressed the vulnerability that allowed hackers to access its employees’ computers.

Hackers have been attacking organizations inside the United States at an alarming rate. The number of attacks reported by government agencies last year topped 48,500 — a ninefold jump from the 5,500 attacks reported in 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office.

In the last month alone, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all confirmed that they were targets of sophisticated hackers. But security experts say that these attacks are just the tip of the iceberg.

A common saying among security experts is that there are now only two types of American companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked.

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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.

In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting the site, their computers were infected with malware. The company said that as soon as it discovered the malware, it cleaned up the infected machines and tipped off law enforcement.

“We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised,” Facebook said.

On Feb. 1, Twitter said hackers had breached its systems and potentially accessed the data of 250,000 Twitter users. The company suggested at that time that it was one of several companies and organizations to be have been similarly attacked.

Facebook has known about its own breach for at least a month, according to people close to the investigation, but it was unclear why the company waited this long to announce it. Fred Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.

Like Twitter, Facebook said it believed that it was one of several organizations that were targeted by the same group of attackers.

“Facebook was not alone in this attack,” the company said in its blog post. “It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”

The attacks add to the mounting evidence that hackers were able to use the security hole in Oracle’s Java software to steal information from a broad range of companies. Java, a widely used programming language, is installed on more than three billion devices. It has long been hounded by security problems.

Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. The vulnerability was particularly disconcerting because it let attackers download a malicious program onto its victims’ machines without any prompting. Users did not even have to click on a malicious link for their computers to be infected. The program simply downloaded itself.

After Oracle initially patched the security hole in January, the Department of Homeland Security said that the fix was not sufficient and recommended that, unless “absolutely necessary”, users should disable it on their computers completely. Oracle did not issue another fix until Feb. 1.

Social networks are a prime target for hackers, who look to use people’s personal data and social connections in what are known as “spearphishing” attacks. In this type of attack, a target is sent an e-mail, ostensibly from a connection, containing a malicious link or attachment. Once the link is clicked or attachment opened, attackers take control of a user’s computer. If the infected computer is inside a company’s system, the attackers are able to gain a foothold. In many cases, they then extract passwords and gain access to sensitive data.

Facebook said in its blog post that the updated patch addressed the vulnerability that allowed hackers to access its employees’ computers.

Hackers have been attacking organizations inside the United States at an alarming rate. The number of attacks reported by government agencies last year topped 48,500 — a ninefold jump from the 5,500 attacks reported in 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office.

In the last month alone, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all confirmed that they were targets of sophisticated hackers. But security experts say that these attacks are just the tip of the iceberg.

A common saying among security experts is that there are now only two types of American companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked.

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Bits Blog: How Lightning Tightens Apple's Control Over Accessories

When the iPhone 5 was released in September with the new Lightning connection port, all those docks and accessories that longtime Apple customers had been collecting for years were suddenly obsolete. But Lightning-compatible accessories have been trickling in more slowly than the typical flood of Apple accessories that comes after a new iPhone release. Why?

One challenge, according to a person briefed on Apple’s plans who was not approved to discuss them publicly, is that the iPhone 5 is more fundamentally different from previous versions of the device than new models usually are  — introducing a different overall size and shape as well as an engineering change. At the same time, with Lightning, Apple has made it harder for companies to avoid working with its own licensing program. Both of these factors have slowed the production of accessories.

Mophie, an accessory maker, shared some insight into Lightning and the overall process of making an Apple accessory. (This week it introduced the Helium, its first iPhone 5 case with a backup battery.) When a hardware maker signs up with Apple’s MFi Program, for companies that make accessories for Apple products, it orders a Lightning connector component from Apple to use in designing the accessory. The connectors have serial numbers for each accessory maker, and they contain authentication chips that communicate with the phones. When the company submits its accessory to Apple for testing, Apple can recognize the serial number.

“If you took this apart and put it in another product and Apple got a hold of it, they’d be able to see it’s from Mophie’s batch of Lightning connectors,” said Ross Howe, vice president of marketing for Mophie.

The chip inside the Lightning connector can be reverse engineered — copied by another company — but it probably would not work as well as one that came from Apple, Mr. Howe said. Apple could also theoretically issue software updates that would disable Lightning products that did not use its chips, he said.

What’s the benefit for Apple? The proprietary chip makes it more difficult for accessory makers to produce cheap knockoff products that are compatible with Lightning, which could potentially tarnish the iPhone brand. Also, it pushes accessory makers to pay Apple the licensing fees to be part of the MFi program.

“That’s one thing Apple is good at: controlling the user experience from end to end,” Mr. Howe said. “If you’re buying something in an Apple store, it’s gone through all this rigorous testing.”

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Media Decoder Blog: Indian Music Service, Taking Page From Spotify, Goes Pro

Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.

But just as interesting, and in the long run perhaps as significant to competition, is the rise of services that serve regional markets intensely. One is Saavn, a Spotify-like streaming service that specializes in Indian music, and has garnered 10.5 million monthly users with advertising-supported free listening. This week it will announce that it has taken another page from Spotify’s book, by offering a premium version at $4 a month that eliminates the ads, lets users listen to songs offline and will eventually add other features like higher quality audio.

Saavn, which has offices in New York, India and Mountain View, Calif., has a catalog of 1.1 million songs in nine languages and is available in more than 200 countries, with about 70 percent of its consumption within India, said Rishi Malhotra, one of its founders. Like Spotify, iHeartRadio and other Western services, it is an official partner of Facebook. About 80 percent of its use is on mobile devices, Mr. Malhotra said, and when the premium service, Saavn Pro, is opened in March, it will at first be available only for Apple devices.

The pricing is significantly lower than Western services. “We wanted to make it globally acceptable,” said Mr. Malhotra, who is based in New York. “The $10 price point that you see from a lot of music services we use here is way out of reach from what would fly in India or a lot of other emerging markets.”

Saavn believes it can succeed in India not only through its catalog of Bollywood hits, but through technological touches that may be meaningful only to Indian listeners. One example is the ability to search for a Bollywood song based on the actor who lip-synchs it — often more memorable to fans than the “playback” singer who actually provided the voice.

If successful, Saavn Pro could give the company an advantage in India’s quickly developing digital music market, which already has a handful of streaming services, like Dhingana, as well as a strong presence in downloads from Nokia. Yet that market is still tiny for a country of India’s size and overall media spending. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, recorded music had only $141 million in trade (or wholesale) value in 2011. A recent report by Ernst & Young said that music and radio combined count for only 2.4 percent of India’s media and entertainment spending, which for 2011 it estimated at $18 billion.

Part of the reason for music’s small proportion of India’s media economy is that popular music in India is dominated by the film industry. But a greater reason is piracy; the federation estimates that 55 percent of Internet users in India go to unlicensed music services on a monthly basis. That is slowly starting to change, music executives say, as courts there crack down on infringement and legitimate digital services proliferate. Apple’s iTunes opened there in December, and Nokia says it sells 1.4 million songs a day at its download store in India.

And Indian record companies are approaching digital business without the baggage that has been complicating deals with Western labels and services for more than a decade, Mr. Malhotra added.

“The labels in India are not reluctant about digital,” he said. “It’s not like they are protecting against some established, older revenue stream. It’s all found revenue for them.”

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Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

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Bits Blog: Apple Chief Hints at Shareholder Rewards to Come

Investors want more cash from Apple.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, wasn’t ready to give it to them on Tuesday. But recent history and Mr. Cook’s tendency to foreshadow events before they occur strongly suggest he will reward them soon.

Speaking for the second consecutive year in at a Goldman Sachs technology investor conference, Mr. Cook said Apple’s management team and board were discussing how to return more of the company’s enormous stockpile of cash to shareholders.

If those words sound familiar, it’s because Mr. Cook said almost the same thing a year ago at the Goldman Sachs conference. A month later, the company announced a plan to return more than $45 billion to shareholders over three years in the form of dividends and share repurchases.

That plan only served to slow the swelling of Apple’s cash hoard, not to reduce it. Last year around this time, Apple had nearly $100 billion in cash. Now it has around $137 billion.

“We do have some cash,” Mr. Cook said at the Goldman conference on Tuesday, in a moment of deliberate understatement that set off chuckles from his audience.

Some investors — like the hedge-fund manager David Einhorn — are cranky that Apple’s cash is sitting around earning so little interest.

Mr. Cook said Apple had looked at making some big acquisitions but never seriously enough to follow through on the deals. With its cash, Apple could afford one Amazon or two Facebooks and still have billions in spare change.

Instead, Apple buys smaller companies, mostly for their talent or intellectual property, Mr. Cook said. He said Apple has averaged about one acquisition every other month for the last three years.

How to send more cash to shareholders is the tricky part. Much of Apple’s cash is generated overseas and can’t be paid out to shareholders without being subject to repatriation taxes. In a recent research note, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said  Apple could not meaningfully increase its return of cash to shareholders without paying the taxes or issuing debt.

While the latter option sounds nonsensical for a company with as much cash in the bank as Apple, a number of cash-rich technology companies, including Microsoft and Cisco, have issued debt, taking advantage of low interest rates. Mr. Sacconaghi suggested that the most attractive option for Apple shareholders would be for the company to borrow money, perhaps in the range of $50 billion to $100 billion, and use it to buy back stock or increase the dividend. He said increasing the return of cash was critical for Apple to attract a new class of dividend-hungry value investors as the company’s growth slows. Apple’s shares have declined about 33 percent since their high in September.

Mr. Cook called a lawsuit filed against the company by Mr. Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, a “silly sideshow.”

Mr. Einhorn has claimed that a change Apple is proposing to make to its corporate charter would limit the option of returning more cash to shareholders through the issuing of preferred stock. Apple has said that even with the charter change, it could issue preferred stock with shareholder approval.

Mr. Cook danced around the rumors that Apple would create an inexpensive iPhone for emerging markets, where income levels and a lack of subsidies by wireless carriers have put the company’s smartphone out of reach for many consumers. But he noted Apple’s history of coming up with creative new products, like the iPod shuffle and the iPad Mini, that appeal to budget-minded shoppers.

“The only thing we’ll never do is make a crappy product,” he said. “That’s the only religion we have.”

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Apple’s Cook Calls Hedge Fund Manager’s Lawsuit a ‘Sideshow’

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook said the board is carefully considering David Einhorn's proposal for the company to issue preferred stock and return more cash to investors, but he called a lawsuit brought by the star hedge fund manager against Apple a "silly sideshow."

Waving aside Einhorn's assertion that Apple is clinging to a "Depression-era" mentality, Cook said on Tuesday the board is in "very active discussions" on how to dole out more of its $137 billion hoard of cash and marketable securities.

Einhorn and his Greenlight Capital are suing Apple as part of a wider effort to get the iPhone maker to share more of its cash pile, one of the largest among technology companies. They are challenging "Proposal 2" in Apple's proxy statement, which would abolish a system for issuing preferred stock at its discretion.

The lawsuit, the first major challenge from an activist shareholder in years, calls on Apple to issue perpetual preferred shares that pay dividends to existing shareholders. Such a vehicle, the Einhorn says, would be superior to dividends or share buybacks.

Cook gave Einhorn credit for a novel idea, but the usually unflappable chief executive turned slightly impatient when discussing the lawsuit. He was also dismissive of Einhorn's media and legal blitz - which included the lawsuit as well as multiple television and media interviews.

"This is a waste of shareholder money and a distraction, and not a seminal issue for Apple. That said, I support Prop 2. I am personally going to vote for it," Cook told a packed hall at Goldman Sachs' annual technology industry conference in San Francisco.

The conflict over Prop 2 "is a silly sideshow," added Cook, who on Tuesday traded in his usual casual jeans attire for slacks and a dark suit jacket, in a nod to Wall Street. Cook said he thought it "bizarre that we would find ourselves being sued for doing something good for shareholders."

Einhorn's clash with Apple centers on a proposed change to its charter that would eliminate the company's ability to issue "blank check" preferred stock at its discretion. Apple, which said the change would not preclude future issuance of preferred shares, is recommending shareholders vote in favor at its annual meeting on February 27.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. district court in Manhattan, objects to the bundling of the charter change with two other corporate governance-related proposals in "Proposal 2."

The hedge fund manager, a well-known short-seller and Apple gadget fan, counters that striking the preferred-share mechanism from the charter would make it more difficult to issue such securities down the road.

Apple's share price has tumbled in recent months from a high of just over $700 last September. In late afternoon trade on Tuesday, the shares were down around 2.2 percent at $469.30.

DIMINISHING CLOUT

Investors were disappointed that Cook - who rarely makes lengthy public-speaking engagements - did not provide a "more substantial" view on returning cash.

"The only thing that would substantially move the stock would be him saying they were returning cash to shareholders or hinting at a new product," said a manager from a mid-size Dallas hedge fund that owns Apple shares.

"There was a small chance of that happening."

Apple stock is a mainstay of many fund managers' portfolios, with research firm eVestment estimating that 75 percent of U.S. large-cap growth managers had invested more than 5 percent of their portfolios in Apple as of the end of the third quarter of 2012.

But that also increases the pressure on Apple to give away a bigger portion of its cash hoard, which is rising as the share price declines and its outlook grows murkier.

Last March, Apple announced a quarterly cash dividend and a share buyback that would pay out $45 billion over three years. At the time, it was sitting on $98 billion in cash. It has so far returned $10 billion of that, but investors want more.

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Reviewing Three Brands of Tax Preparation Software

TAX preparation is moving to the cloud.

The makers of the better-known tax prep programs — TurboTax, H&R Block at Home and TaxAct — say that many customers, particularly younger ones, prefer Web-based programs to old-fashioned, desktop versions. Web-based programs — techies call this cloud computing — reside on remote servers that customers access via their browsers. They offer the convenience of working on a return from any Internet-connected computer and having that return stored on the software makers’ secure servers.

After spending several days running my family’s tax information through Web and desktop offerings, I learned that I’m old-school. For a decade, I’ve completed our return on my Mac desktop, and I prefer that. Desktop programs may be costlier and, in some ways, clunkier — you must buy them on CD or download them — but they also offer more flexibility.

A single purchase, for example, lets you prepare and file multiple returns, as you might want to do if you’re part of a same-sex couple or if you help family members or friends with their taxes. And you can more easily jump back and forth between the tax return and the interviews the programs use to gather information. That lets you check entries as you make them, as my wife, a C.P.A., insists upon. What you lose in convenience, you gain in control.

Each of the tax preparation programs, whether desktop or online, has strengths and shortcomings. TurboTax is the easiest to use, importing lots of financial information with just a few clicks. H&R Block promises the most reassuring help — its staff will represent you at no extra charge if you’re audited. TaxAct offers the best price. A look at each provider’s offerings shows where it excelled and stumbled in preparing my family’s 2012 return.

TurboTax

TurboTax’s maker, Intuit, has its roots in technology, not taxes, and its facility with bits and bytes shows in its wares. Its desktop and online programs make doing taxes as simple as such a time-eating task can be. If you end up cursing come tax time, the target will be the I.R.S., not your software.

I downloaded the desktop version of TurboTax Premier for $89.99 — though I learned later that I could have paid $10 less if I’d bought it on CD at my local Staples. The download took only a few seconds, as did the import of information from our 2011 return. All of the unchanged data from 2011 — names, addresses, federal ID numbers, even descriptions of business expenses — popped into the right places on the 2012 forms. Even the names of the charities we support carried over. The software also imported my wife’s W-2 and all of the information on our investments from Vanguard, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity. All I had to do was key in details for a few local banks and update the amounts we’d given to charity.

The online version of TurboTax, by contrast, didn’t import as much. My attempt to transfer our 2011 return failed, and an import from one of the fund companies went awry. I inherited an I.R.A., and the money is invested in about a half-dozen funds. Instead of creating an entry for a single 1099-R, the program created a half-dozen, which I had to combine.

Otherwise, the online program looked and worked much the same way as the desktop software. I didn’t have to pay to try it because TurboTax, like H&R Block and TaxAct, doesn’t require online users to pay until they file their returns. Had I filed with the online version of TurboTax Premier, I would have paid $49.99 for a single federal return — the price as it was discounted at the time. But TurboTax says it could rise to as much as $74.99, its list price, before April 15.

 

TurboTax upgraded its assistance features for this year’s tax filing season — a welcome improvement. In the past, I’d found some help links hard to locate and navigate. When I wanted to pose a question to a tax expert, I had to dig around. But not anymore. When I had a question about recording tax-exempt interest, I clicked on the help link, and TurboTax offered a choice between a call and an online chat. Within seconds, I was e-chatting with Marilyn G., and she pointed me to the right spot on the return. We were done in less than five minutes, and I paid nothing extra. I’ve had a tougher time buying jeans online. (All three companies also provide extensive tax-law explanations embedded in their programs.)

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