model, i would write up a column based on what i and my editor considered to be important, and i don't know whether it got 100,000 readers or a million readers or 20 readers, but we knew that we were doing something that we felt was important. today there is an incentive, and there are blogs, one of which i right for, forbes.com, famously pays each journalist, each freelance journalist by the click, by the view. >> by the view. >> so i have an incentive to get those eyeballs, not an incentive necessarily to write the most important stories in the world but incentive to get the views, so i actually fight that, but i'm aware that have incentive, but you're absolutely right. there is a big danger of people sort of doing what some people used to do in print. you opened up the paper to the sports section or the business section or the fashion section and completely skipped the front page. there's a reason why there are really important stories on the front page. "new york times," whether they are about sports, fashion or technology, somebody is making that decision. online it is very possible to skip right past that and very easy to skip right past that and to get an echo chamber, both in

terms of the interests you have. i only care about business, or the politics you care. i only care about democrats. i only care about republicans, and completely ignore the larger discussion, and that does worry me. >> vince, into our digital guard evan eden. >> here we go again. >> there's another snake, a snake that we haven't talked about, and we'll call it the cyber security snake. the snake that could disrupt all of our or a lot of our commerce, that can open floodgates on a dam, that could disrupt electricity. how much do you worry about in a? >> a lot. >> how vulnerable are we? >> i'm sorry? >> how vulnerable are we? >> we're probably less vulnerable than many people say, but we are more vulnerable than we should be. there are things that are happening right now to deal with that problem. there's a punch of technical things that we either can do or are doing to build a much more resilient and system resist aan

to some of the kinds of attacks and i'm very pleased about that. we put information up on the net that we probably shouldn't put up. people use that for identity theft, create accounts, steal money from the banks, et cetera or get into your own account and do bad things. that's partly our fault. we use passwords that are too easy to guess. believe it or not, there are people who use the word password for password because it's easy toe remember. >> any to share with us this evening. >> sorry, i'm not going to give you mine. there are techniques, one-time passwords created cryptographically for you and even if somebody sees it, they can't reuse it. things like that and other things that can make the system a lot more resilient, and that is a process that's ongoing. >> what do you worry about most in this? >> i think i worry the most right now about viruses, worms

and trojan horses that we ingest into our computers flouriour browsers because when you go to a web page what happens is you are downloading a file. >> right. >> which is going to be interpreted by the browser. when the worldwide web was first created, the only thing that you were downloading was text, imagery and some layout. >> right. >> so it was kind of like pulling a magazine page in, but in 2013, in addition to that, you're downloading programs that are going to be executed on your machine through the browser, whether they are writ known in java or java script or python or something else, and the problem is some of them are what we call malware, programs that when executed by the browser, store trojan horses and things in the operating system. >> and what can this do to us? what's the consequence? >> once your machine is compromised, it becomes what's called a zombie, and there's a botnet herder who has control

over the machine, kind of like leaving your car in the driveway with the keys in it. you don't know your machine has been infected, doesn't behave any differently as far as you're concerned, but someone can use that machine to generate spam, launch attacks, watch to see what bank accounts you are using. those are things that we need to defend against the most. >> arianna, what are you worried about? >> this is all greek to me. i'm very glad curtis brown of aol is in the audience because you can explain it all to me. how many understood what the very, very brilliant gentleman said here? >> that's pretty good. >> the bottom line is -- i could do it. the bottom line is you go online thinking perfectly innocently about this page you'll download, pad stuff comes into your computer, you lose control of your computer and somebody else can do something with it. >> google is dealing with that.

when we do an index of the worldwide web, we looked at that. >> i have to not lose control here but it's not easy and we have to start taking the audience's question. i want to recognize our question review team because this is a moderated conversation, after all. the people simm-- the people responsible selecting the question that i'm questions to get to our speakers. judy copeland, the city editor, and fran gayer, doug mcknight, reporter for kazu radio, jeff mitchell, a senior writer for the salinas californian and kate moser, the reporter for "the monterey county "herald"" so thanks to all of you for helping to select these questions. so new what do i want to do. let me go to the audience

questions. what do you think of newspaper and paid subscriptions, the way the "new york times" is doing it? will they serve to save journalism? >> what worries me about that if every newspaper has its own pay wall we'll be sitting there making payment after payment so what i'm looking for is some kind of a syndication program where i pay once, a reasonable fee, if i -- if i have to pay a fee, that covers all of the various publications. personally i -- i wished i didn't have to pay for the "new york times," but it's very valuable so i'm willing to do it, but at the end of the day, it's great to get "the huffington post" for free. hope i can continue. >> can you keep giving this stuff away for free, should you? >> absolutely. i think there are going to be very many different business models. if the "new york times" finds that having pay walls works for them, they are making a decision. instead of growing traffic to have a more certain revenue line through pay walls, and we have made a different decision which

is to grow traffic, and we've overtaken the "new york times." now even the "new york times" did not have pay walls. maybe we not would have been able to overtake them, so there are trade-offs. at the same time, a new revenue line is going to be through apps. you know, people are much more used now to paying for especially ipad apps. i mean, we have a new magazine app for the ipad that's coming out on june 14th which is absolutely gorgeous. it's beautifully designed. it takes -- you know, "the huffington post" now has 1,500 stories a day. >> 1,500 stories a day. it's very easy to miss a lot of them, even if you are in the editor-in-chief. >> even if you have that thing by your bedside and you wake up in the middle of the night. >> so we pick the best of the stories every week and like, you know, beautiful stones, we put them in a setting, and that's something for which we're going to be charging, but that's a different thing.

you know, the web is going to be free. if you want to have everything curated in a beautiful app once a week on thursday that you can take to bed and read over the weekend. >> take to bed? >> ariana told me not to take my devices to bed. >> you can make an exception for "the huffington post." >> could we just observe that the newspaper business originally was largely funded by advertising. the subscription fees were a smaller part of the revenue stream, and that has evaporated in many ways. it seems to me there are alternative models. one of them is subscriptions. another one is sponsorship, which is something that arianna i think is pursuing, but it's very important to recognize that subscription is not necessarily or even pay-per-view is not the only way of defraying some of the costs. and there's going to be exploration of that. >> here's a question to this

point. how do you get people to click on online ads? this is clearly google is successful, the person says, but the click through is actually not the secret sauce for google advertising revenue, is it? >> yes, it is. unless somebody clicks on an ad, we don't get any revenue. we don't charge for ads. >> but they are not randomly placed which is one of the reasons that it works. >> the whole point is we try to present ads that will be informationally useful to someone who will care about it. everyone i talk to says i never click on google ads. i said that's really interesting because google generates $40 billion a year in advertising revenue. >> my wife wants to know why she keeps getting ads for wrinkle cream. she's very upset about that. she swears she's not going to any place that would suggest that. one of the interesting models in ads, arianna, tell me about this, is personalized ads, that you -- you will start showing up in the ads that come to your computer. i know somebody who recently had

this very thing. an ad showed up -- >> that's really personalized. >> an ad showed up for a soccer team. his picture was in the ad that came to him from a soccer game he had attended. is this the future? >> i think going to be hundreds of different advertising futures. there is a -- there is a huge rethinking of advertising, and now that brands are beginning to get used to having real measurable results when it comes to the advertising, because, remember, for years they -- they had no clue whether buying the full page very expensive "vanity fair" ad would be good for them but nevertheless they bought it because they thought it would be good for them. 50% that was the famous saying of 50% in advertising was wasted and they didn't know which 50%, and now we can actually go and measure the results, this is all going to change. for me one of the most exciting

advertising revenue models, the one that we are going to be put a lot of our resources behind is sponsored sections. >> sponsored sections. >> first of all, let's take sponsored sections around cause. at "the huffington post" the big part of our downis encouraging people to make a difference. we have a dedicated section called impact that profiles people and not-for-profits, if they are doing something good, we encourage people to get involved. we at the same time have dedicated sections which are about the cause of a particular brand. as an example, johns johnson & johnson, their cause is maternal well-being around the world. so we have a section that they pay for which is sponsored called global motherhood, sponsored by johnson & johnson. it's transparent. it has news, blogs, a combination of everything around

this one issue. it can be a section on water which happens to be pepsi's cause, but at the same time a lot of brands now want to have a way to distribute the content, what they produce. even if it isn't about a cause, it can be about something that the brand cares about. >> larry, play media critic here for just a minute and tell fuss there's anything in this equation, big corporations sponsoring causes on big places like "the huffington post," causing you heartburn. >> since you ask, i think it is beholden on "the huffington post" to have a very, very clean wall between advertising and editorial. i trust you will. it is something that concerns me, the notion of a sponsored editorial because it does create this chilling effect i think in the writers if someone wanted to write a damning critique of johnson & johnson they might

think twice about contributing it to that section even if you would publish it so i do worry about a corporation response oregon an entire page. at the same time, companies have to figure out a way to stay in business. they need to be creative, and the whole notion of journalistic ethics is changing. whether it's changing for the better or not is an interesting question, but it has to adapt, and so i will look at this with an open mind, but i will also look at it with a bit of concern to make sure that you and your bloggers and your advertisers don't abuse this new model. >> but actually there's no way you can abuse this model because the key here is transparency. the key here is to make is very cheer that this is a sponsored section and to also make it clear that we have 66 sections and people can write about anything, and there's no way that anything would be censored because there is a sponsor. i think that is absolutely key,

and the key is for it to exist provided that there's transparency, because it's absolutely clear who is writing what. >> are you okay with that? >> as a journalist i like not knowing what was going to advertise. if i knew apple would be the company that advertised every time i wrote a technology article, i would have to make sure and work hard to make sure i didn't favor apple. it's a pressure i could do without. >> this question from the audience, an interesting up, simple but very interesting. can the internet ever fail and go down? >> so the answer is yes but not the whole thing all at once it. never has, not since we turned it on on january 1st, 1983. the net has never totally failed, but those of you who watched the egyptian revolution know that the internet was shut down in egypt the way it was

done was to shut off all of the underlying transmission capabilities for several days, and my prediction is that if that had gone on much longer, a lot of people would have figured out ways to use wi-fi and transborder transmission and satellite links and everything else to regenerate at least some amount of connectivity to recover from that so it's an extremely distributed and extremely resilient system and has never stopped since going on. >> how about china, china is working to create the great firewall, it's said, in many cases to restrict access of their citizens to this internet? >> they are not the only ones. there are 40 countries, including the united states, that have interfered with various kinds of ability to reach target destinations. >> what's your experience? >> "the huffington post" is censored in china. >> completely? >> completely. >> so what are you doing about

youtube? >> well, we have not done anything. i'm sure as you were saying, people who wanted to get around the censorship can get around in many ways. as we rex panding internationally, you know, "the huffington post" is now in the uk in, canada in, quebec, in france, we're launching in spain on juan 6th and going on to brazil, india, japan, et cetera, and, i mean, we would love to be in china but this is definitely a big issue. the issue of censorship. >> so you might be interested to know that the state department has sponsored technology to help people break their way through or to tunnel around the censorship. there's a system called tore which allows you to do that and there are others so there are ways to get out of this. it's just not that all the people online know how to do that yet. >> in egypt, by the way, people are used old-fashioned dial-up

models to dial internationally to get on the internet and people do find a way around it. >> how can the consumer evaluate the quote, unquote information that's on the note? >> that's a tough one. i think the consumers really need to have critical thinking skills, and i think we should be thinking that from kindergarten on up, so when you see something online, i don't care where it comes from, even if it has my byline on it. you should look at it with a certain degree of skepticism simply because we should look at everything that way. we should look for multiple sources and look for the credibility. for example, is it an organization who is normally trustable, but even if it is an organization one normally trusts, the "new york times," which is a very reputable -- >> lots of people don't trust the "new york times" today. >> lots of people don't trust it and a lot of people who do trust it have had specific situations where they have been let down. again, critical thinking. any time something seems too good to be true, it's too good to be true. had a recent case, the kony 2012, a wonderful well-meaning campaign about a warlord who was

killing people and is killing people in uganda, but the way in which that was presented turned out to be a bit misleading, perhaps not deliberately, and a lot of people had to rethink what appeared to be almost an apple pie type of a story, so everything you look at needs to be looked at with a certain degree of skepticism, but hopefully not too much cynicism, and i don't want a generation of cynics, but i do want a generation of people who say prove it to me and go out and look for multiple truths. >> that's easy to say but hard for the average citizen to do unless you're going to spend a lot of time. how is someone here who is checking on their device, as they are dashing for a plane, a train, a car, what have you, right, supposed to check 12 sources to make the story is right? >> how many times have you gotten an e-mail from somebody saying don't click on this thing, you know, because your machine will blow up or the post office is going to start charging for e-mail and blah, blah, blah. there's easy a website called

snopes and it's well worth spending a moment to go there, type in whatever the headline was of the e-mail that you got, and by and large, and if it's one of these silly crazy things they will tell you it's nonsense and isn't true. every once in a while it is, but most of the time it's not so it doesn't take very long thanks to good search engines to figure out whether you've got a piece of bogus information. >> all right. here's one. arianna, in your opinion should there be any expectation of privacy on the internet? >> so, again, this -- >> is this another snake? >> this is a combination of two things. first of all, training ourselves and our children about what to put online and our facebook accounts, what to tweet about and what not to. it takes a little training. with my daughters it took a while to realize that what they put on facebook is not private,

but it's private, mommy. it's just for my friends. no, it's not private. >> did you tell them the next time they apply for a job the prospective employer will be looking at their facebook page? >> right, exactly, so that takes a bit of training, but beyond, that as we know, there are many, many ways for information to be retrieved, for information to be used, for information to be sold, so we are entering a new world which is -- which is uncertainly. we don't really know where this is going to end. >> i'm curious. i'd like to turn to the audience and ask a little audience poll question here. when this issue of privacy and the internet is concerned, how many of you are actually worried about your privacy somehow being compromised online? >> everybody. we all are. >> so that is profound stuff. what do you say to them? >> one owns vags to make is we're living in a world that we've never lived in before. people can put information up on the net that you didn't have

anything to do with. you happened to be caught in somebody's picture. >> what can they do to protect themselves? >> they can't. that's the problem. you live in an environment where it's easy for anybody with a mobile to take your picture and put it up on the net and you won't know that's happened until somebo somebody said it happened to me. it happened to me in sao paolo. i get tapped on the shoulder and somebody says you're on youtube. i said, you know, what's that, what was that all about? it turned out somebody saw the helicopter landing, thought this was cool, videotaped it with his mobile and then as i'm getting out you hear him saying that's vince cerf and he puts it up on the net and now we know how vince cerf gets around. >> can i get a lift back to the hotel. >> unfortunately, it wasn't a black helicopter so it was all right. the point is that there's not much we can do in a world like

this where it's easy for any original material to get out on the net. >> it's true we can't control what other people post about us. in a way that's a good thing. i'm sure president obama would love to delete plenty of things people have said about him as would mitt romney and we don't want that to happen but we can control what we post about ourselves. a, we cannot post it. b, we can use the privacy controls knowing full well that they are not foolproof, that anything that's ever been seen by anybody can be cacheed and copied. there are privacy controls and people who worry about their privacy are often the very people who don't take the time to learn about the controls that are available, whether it's on facebook or google plus. >> you know this better than most. what do you worry about your privacy? >> i worry very little about my privacy, but the extent to which i do worry about my privacy it's what other companies and people are doing and could do, especially if an oppressive government ever goes after google or facebook, especially

google, because google has all my e-mail and used to have my health information until they dropped that service. there's a lot there, and i worry about what an oppressive government could force google to release about me. >> aryianaariana, do you worry your privacy? >> i understand the concerns of everybody. they are very legitimate, and i personally feel that in my -- in my internet world, i want this to be very aware of what's happening, in ways which we can circumvent efforts to invade people's privacy. i personally don't worry about it partly because i'm a fatalist, and i -- and i tend not -- i tend not to worry about things that are not in my immediate control. >> actually, can i go back to what larry was worried about. i'm somewhat less worried about what somebody posts about me and

pictures and things like that. i'm more worried about information of substance like my financial information. >> yeah. >> my medical information. >> yeah. >> being accidentally released because somebody left their laptop at the airport or they put it on a memory stick and they lost the memory stick. accidents and mistakes worry me more than anything else or maybe a business decision which is harmful because the business decides that information can be monetized and that can be a bad thing and i do worry about that. >> and hack attacks. what happened to all those sony network customers. >> back to national security for a minute. we were talking about this. listen to this quote. this comes from a pbs documentary, a fellow by the names of james christie, a computer crime investigator for the department of defense. here's what he said. during the cold war we knew who the bad guys were, and they had nuclear weapons. there was a finite group, and there was a deterrent, but now he says anybody can bay a computer for $200, $300, and they have internet connectivity

and these individuals can have a weapon of mass destruction sitting on the desk in their bedroom. i mean, if there's -- if he's right, we should be a little bit more worried than what you're all suggesting. >> i'm wondering what he meant by a weapons of mass destruction. did he mean a nuclear weapon, or did he mean a cyber weapon? >> i'm sure he meant a cyber weapon. >> well, first of all, it is not true that the nuclear threat is over, and it is not true that it was just a finite group. in fact, one of the problems now is that nuclear weapons are much easier to find, hide, transport, so i think that it's not exactly like we've dealt with a nuclear threat and now we're dealing with the cyber security. >> he's talking about a cyber threat. >> yeah, but my point is there are multiple global threats like that. i was just recently at the skull foundation conference in oxford and one of the things that was

said is that global threats, you know, there are major threats like there, whether it's the cyber security threat, the nuclear threat which remains, biological threat, different epidemics, you know. there's a whole spectrum of things. >> and there's a multi-billion dollar industry to try to protect against threats. if anybody is looking for something to major in, i just came back from the national cyber security association alliance conference and they say they will need like 100,000 cyber security professionals in the next few years so there's a huge industry of people who are going to be trying to deal with this. i'm not saying they are going to be perfect in solving the problem. it's a cat-and-mouse game. the bad guys get better and the good guys get better and hopefully we try to stay not too many steps behind them. >> i've got a question for you here just to be difficult. >> okay. >> fortunately i can blame this on somebody in the audience. no name here, so now with that

disclaimer. is it possible for google not to be evil? >> so the answer is yes and we're not. >> too intrusive, know too much about me? >> no. actually we don't care much about you. >> well, i don't care much about google either. >> in fact, what is of interest to us is not persons, it is patterns. we're interested in patterns because we use the patterns of behavior and the patterns we find in your e-mail and so on to try to figure out whether there's an ad that we can show you that you might click on. that's all that's going on. it's pure pattern matching. it's a computer. some people have this feeling that there are people at google, human beings, who are looking at your e-mail trying to figure out which ad to put on there. that's a computer algorithm which we're constantly adjusting

to try to learn what you react to well. i mean, if you don't click on anything, then we know that none of the ads that we put up were the right ones and our machine algorithm tries to figure out why it made that mistake, but this is about patterns, it's not about people. >> it's really interesting, larry, that someone would ask that question because google was seep as the great hero, the great wonderful new invention, but now it's starting to suffer from the giant peering corporation image. >> i remember. before it went public it was a company that everybody loved. google was evil from day one. i'm not so much worried about google being evil. i'm worried about what some future google management might do and wonder what some oppre oppressive government might do with google's data. google is trying to get us to click on ads. i think it's fairly straightforward what they are doing. >> arianna, one of the things that the panetta series has been doing over the course of the year is looking at the

revolutions of the 21st century, one of which has been business. connect the internet and business for me and for us for just a minute and play out that revolution. comsquare estimated that in the fourth quarter of last year there was about $50 billion worth of e-commerce that was conducted online, up 14%, and it's been up, up, up every year. clearly this is the future, or certainly that's part of it. what is the revolution as you see it that the internet has brought it our economy? >> well, first of all, we know from everybody's practices how much more shopping we do online, and we know from the success of amazon and how much a company can start selling one thing online, in amazon's case books, and continue and end up selling practically everything online. i was listening to jeff beesios at a microsoft confer