'Sexist' business logo lands Florida in hot water

Alex Johnson, Staff Writer , NBC News ? ? ? 27 min.

The state of Florida is learning the hard way that $380,000 can buy a lot of controversy.

That's how much the state paid to come up with its first branding logo designed to attract new business ? only to be met with accusations that the logo is sexist. The problem? That bright orange men's necktie in place of the letter "i" in "Florida."

"I don't think a man's necktie represents all that Florida's business community has to offer," Katherine Yanes, president of the Hillsborough Association for Women Lawyers, told The Tampa Tribune.

Similar sentiments lit up Florida news sites and Facebook after the logo was unveiled last week:

"Business needs to be all-inclusive and a 'tie' although it binds and is a bit clever, is now dividing," Emily McHugh, chief executive of Casauri, a women's accessories company in Fort Pierce, wrote on Facebook.

Susan Stackhouse, chief executive of Stellar Partners of Tampa, which runs retail concessions at airports, told the Tampa Bay Business Journal: "Isn't that special? It's clearly a strong visual that business and men go together."

Enterprise Florida, the public-private joint venture that commissioned the logo, didn't directly address the controversy in a statement, saying only:

"The brand reflects the state's existing business foundation, economic power, capabilities and resources, all of which make it a super state for business. More than just a logo or a tagline, the Florida business brand provides a common thread that will allow all of the state's economic development organizations to work together in showcasing Florida as a premier business destination."

Gray Swoope, president of Enterprise Florida, told NBC station WTLV of Jacksonville that the campaign conducted extensive research ? including thousands of interviews, surveys and focus groups ? before approving the logo, which is just a small part of the state's "Perfect Climate for Business" campaign.

Meanwhile, Ed Burghard, chief executive of the Burghard Group, a corporate branding firm based in Loveland, Ohio, and a former global brand designer for Procter & Gamble, had a different objection: It isn't a particularly effective logo.

Burghard agreed that the logo, while memorable, is "potentially off-putting" to women. But it's also too "generic," he wrote in an extensive analysis on the blog Strengthening Brand America.

"A generic brand statement as a tagline is a throw away, particularly when it is a blatant overstatement. In my opinion, 'The Perfect Climate For Business' provides no relevant point of difference for CEOs to associate with Florida," he wrote. "Positioning Florida as the perfect business climate is puffery."

Plus, it's just plain outdated in an age when many business ? particularly in steamy Florida ? are "rejecting ties as required dress code," he wrote.

"I don't know for a fact, but I strongly suspect most companies operating in Florida are business casual," Burghard wrote.

Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/sexist-business-logo-lands-florida-hot-water-1B8255394

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/FFsPTMD3hrs/super-bowl-blackout-caused-by-abnormality-that-opened-a-breaker

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Twitter, Washington Post targeted by hackers

FILE - In this Sept. 14, 2010 file photo, Twitter CEO Evan Williams makes a presentation about changes to the social network at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, In the latest online attack, Twitter says hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users, Friday, Feb. 1, 2013. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 14, 2010 file photo, Twitter CEO Evan Williams makes a presentation about changes to the social network at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, In the latest online attack, Twitter says hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users, Friday, Feb. 1, 2013. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Social media giant Twitter is among the latest U.S. companies to acknowledge that it is among a growing list of victims of Internet security attacks, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. And now, The Washington Post is joining the chorus, saying that it discovered that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack in 2011.

Twitter said a blog post on Friday it detected attempts to gain access to its user data earlier in the week. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But Twitter discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users they describe as 'a very small percentage of our users."

Nonetheless, the company reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising the affected users.

The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

On Friday, The Washington Post disclosed in an article published on its website that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack, which was discovered in 2011. The company's spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, didn't offer any details including the duration of the attack or the origins. But according to sources that the paper quoted, who it said spoke on condition of anonymity, the intruders gained access as early as 2008 or 2009.

The cyberattack was first reported by an independent cybersecurity blog on Friday.

"Like other companies in the news recently, we face cybersecurity threats," Coratti was quoted as saying. "We have a number of security measures in place to guard against cyberattacks on an ongoing basis."

According to Coratti's comments made to the newspaper, the company worked with security company Mandiant to "detect, investigate and remediate the situation promptly at the end of 2011."

Coratti couldn't be reached immediately for comment by The Associated Press.

China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.

"Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security," the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. "The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities."

Twitter's director of information security, Bob Lord, said in the blog that the attack "was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident."

"The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked," Lord said. "For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users."

One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee's home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords.

The relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren't on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company's servers, Soltani said.

Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.

That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist's movements.

"More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service," Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist's emails.

___

AP reporters Anne D'Innocenzio in New York, Raphael Satter in London and Didi Tang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-02-02-Twitter%20Hack/id-39fea970652c4879a853fe8a8cd8722c

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