LAS VEGAS – Fewer things seem out of place at the rough-hewn DefCon hacker convention than a swarm of kids.

For 18 years, hackers — and the computer security experts who track them — have gathered at DefCon, one of the largest and longest-running conferences of its kind, to share information about breaching and securing computers and other devices.

This year's DefCon featured what some hardcore attendees might consider to be a startling sight: children. For the first time, DefCon included discussions and tutorials for budding hackers, ages 8 to 16. Some 60 kids showed up.

Over two days, they met prominent hackers, Homeland Security officials and NSA security experts. They also listened to talks on the history of hacking and lectures on cryptography. Some of the convention's hotly contested competitions were geared toward children, as well. One contest covered lock-picking techniques to be used in the event they forget their locker combination. The kids were encouraged to find security vulnerabilities in popular technologies, from video games to computer hardware.

Children were required to have a parent with them. Many parents who brought their kids are longtime DefCon attendees who said they were excited about the bonding opportunity.

Rey Ayers, 42, an information security specialist for a utility company in the San Francisco Bay area, has attended DefCon for the past four years. He brought his son, Xavier, 14, who has been tinkering with computers for years and already has two information technology certifications.

Ayers said it was important to introduce his son to the hacker community, adding that they've talked extensively about the difference between ethical and unethical hacking.

"I see it in him — he feels like he belongs to a clan, to a group. I'm really proud," Rey Ayers said in an interview. "I can see he has the excitement in his eyes."

Xavier, his backpack decked out in new pins with hacker logos, said he's trying to follow in his dad's footsteps. The conference has given them new ideas to explore. The two look forward to finding vulnerabilities in wireless networks together when they get home to Vallejo, California. Xavier, who hacks mostly with his dad, said he hoped to meet some kids his age at the conference who might become his hacking pen pals.

"I feel like a community here — it's like I'm not the only kid," Xavier said.

The emergence of the DefCon kids' conference comes as hackers are making headlines around the world. Though the general public often associates hacking with criminality, the engineering culture of the technology mainstream has always embraced people who explore the boundaries of what can be done with computers and other gadgets. Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the co-founders of Apple Inc., have said they considered themselves "hackers" when they created the first Apple computers in the mid-1970s.

Recent hacker attacks, however, play into stereotypical definitions of hackers. On Saturday, for instance, the hacker group Anonymous broke into 70 U.S. law enforcement websites, illustrating the growing threat from criminal hackers.

DefCon and its more-polished relative, the Black Hat technical security convention, drew thousands of people here in Las Vegas. They came for the revelry and intense discussion of new vulnerabilities in devices ranging from mobile phones to insulin pumps and critical infrastructure.

Black Hat, which is an industry sponsored event and costs up to $2,500 to enter, had more than 6,000 attendees. Vendors and executives in suits were there to schmooze and strike deals until Black Hat ended on Thursday.

DefCon, which ended Sunday, costs $150 to enter. Organizers stopped counting the number of attendees after they sold 10,000 badges on the first day. Most attendees wore t-shirts and shorts. One popular annual pastime at DefCon involves trying to identify undercover federal agents. DefCon ended Sunday.

This year many attendees rallied around a hacker named "Barkode" who has a blood disease and needs an urgent bone marrow transplant. Volunteers running a blood drive on site offered free mohawks to all donors. Conference organizers said the drive was so successful that extra supplies were needed to handle the donations.

Wolfe and Behr Crouse of Conroe, Texas proudly sported mohawks. Wolfe, 11 and Behr, 8 outlined the family hacking hierarchy.

"He's the hacker, I'm the lockpicker. I get him in the building," Behr said.

So how long has he been a lockpicker? Less than a day, his mother laughed. He got the bug after picking locks with some success at DefCon.

The boys' parents, Rick and Kirsten, are both techies. They came to DefCon to introduce their boys to the culture. Rick has attended for the past three years. He said he wanted Wolfe and Behr to see the constructive applications of hacking.

"The technology itself isn't good or evil — it's what you do with it," Rick Crouse said.

Kirsten Crouse added that they wanted to show examples of math and science in action to convey the importance of doing well in school.

"It's an amazing opportunity for the kids to see what the options are out there," she said.

NEW YORK – Tech heavyweights Microsoft and Google are acting like a couple of feuding starlets in a public online spat over — wait for it — patents.

It's not the first time Microsoft and Google have gone at each other's throats, nor is it likely the last.

But with Twitter and blog posts, the dispute is playing out in public in a way that wasn't possible in 2005, when lawsuits over an employee Google hired from Microsoft revealed the bitter rivalry between the two.

Now, Google is accusing Microsoft, Apple and others of launching a "hostile organized campaign" against its Android operating system, which runs smartphones that compete with iPhones, BlackBerrys and Windows-based mobile devices.

At issue are thousands of patents from Novell Inc., a maker of computer-networking software, and Nortel Networks, a Canadian telecom gear maker that is bankrupt and is selling itself off in pieces. Last month, a consortium that includes Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. prevailed over Google Inc. with a $4.5 billion cash bid for the Nortel patents.

Google lost out after a strange bidding process that included what published reports said was an offer for a billion times the mathematical constant "pi."

"Their response seems to be to whine about the process," technology analyst Rob Enderle said.

Enderle was referring to a scathing blog post by Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who wrote on Wednesday that Microsoft was banding with others to acquire "bogus patents" to make sure Google can't get to them.

"They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices," Drummond wrote. "Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation."

Not so fast, says Microsoft, which brought the feud to Twitter. There, Microsoft's communications chief, Frank Shaw, posted an image of an email from Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, declining to join Microsoft in the consortium to bid for the patents.

The email was sent to Microsoft's own general counsel, Brad Smith, who also chimed in. Smith wrote to his 2,000-plus Twitter followers that "Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no."

Shaw offered a reason in another Twitter post: "Why? BECAUSE they wanted to buy something that they could use to assert against someone else."

Enderle says it's no secret that Microsoft and Google don't like each other.

Microsoft has banded with another Google rival, Facebook, to include data from the online social network in Microsoft's search engine, Bing. Google can't do that because Facebook erected barriers preventing Google's search engine from indexing all the data on its network.

And earlier this year, Microsoft complained about Google to the European Commission in its first formal antitrust complaint against a rival. Microsoft accused Google of abusing its dominance of online search and advertising.

Then there was the 2005 incident, in which, according to court documents, Microsoft's boisterous CEO, Steve Ballmer, threw a chair and vowed to "kill" Google in an obscenity-laced tirade over the online search leader's hiring of Kai-Fu Lee. Lee helped develop Microsoft's MSN Internet search technology, including desktop search software rivaling Google's. He left the company that July after Google offered him a $10 million compensation package. He has since left Google, too.

So far, the patent feud has lacked obscenities, at least in public.

But the verbal tirade continued Thursday when Drummond updated his blog post to say that Microsoft is trying to divert attention from the real issue and push a "false `gotcha!'" instead.

"Microsoft's objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners," he wrote.

Enderle says Google needs to grow up, and part of that process is that "they've got to get through the whining stage."

Google had the chance and refused to participate. Now, it is calling the process unfair, Enderle said, "which is something you can do as a little company but probably not when you yourself are a multinational."

Google did not immediately respond to a message for comment. Microsoft's Shaw didn't have a comment beyond what he tweeted.

TORONTO |
Mon Jul 25, 2011 9:39am EDT

HAVANA – A few dozen members of Cuba's small but growing Twitter community have met in real space for the first time. They got to put unfamiliar faces with familiar user names, and they commiserated about the woeful Internet access on an island that has the second-worst Web connectivity rate in the world.

Gathering at a downtown Havana pavilion Friday, Cuba's Twitterati wrote their online handles on name tags emblazoned with the Cuban flag and the hash tag used to organize the event, TwittHab. One by one they introduced themselves, told of their history with social media and compared numbers of followers.

"Many of us didn't know each other. This is about stepping out from behind the 'at' symbol," said "alondraM," who was only identifying herself by her username.

Next to her, "cuba1er.plan," a.k.a. Alejandro Cruz, said Cubans like him are increasingly using social media to share interests and information.

Their ranks are still relatively sparse because Cuba lags far behind the rest of the world in connectivity, besting only the Indian Ocean island chain of Mayotte, according to a report by the consulting firm Akamai Technologies Inc.

The decades-old U.S. economic embargo has left Cuba without a hardwired connection to the rest of the world, and the island relies on slow, costly satellite service. The Twitter users expressed hope things will soon speed up now that an undersea fiber-optic cable to Venezuela has arrived in Cuba. It could go online this month.

For now, plodding dial-up is about the only option — and even those accounts have historically been hard to get and prohibitively expensive for most Cubans. The government says it must use its limited bandwidth carefully and gives priority to usage with what it deems a social purpose.

Cuba's National Statistics Office reported last year that just 2.9 percent of islanders said they had direct Internet access, most through their schools and workplaces, though that number doesn't reflect the black market sale of minutes on dial-up accounts.

The real figure is more likely between 5 percent and 10 percent, said Ted Henken, a professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Baruch College in New York who has traveled to Cuba frequently and is writing a book on social media and civil society on the island.

It all creates unique challenges for tweeters in Cuba. For one thing, their local audience is relatively small. Also, cost and availability limit how much time they can spend connected. And while Twitter is popular in other nations among smartphone-toting technophiles, limitations here mean most Twitter interaction happens on computers.

When users here want to send a tweet from the field, they send a cellphone text message to an overseas number that converts and posts it, said Mario Leonart, a 36-year-old from Villa Clara known online as "maritovoz."

It's expensive: $4 for the initial setup, plus $1 per tweet. Send 20 tweets and you've already equaled Cuba's average official monthly salary.

Some get around that by hitting up followers abroad when they start to run low on funds, Henken said, citing the case of one tweeter he monitors.

"Like most Cubans he doesn't have a whole lot of money to be able to do this, but he tweets all the time," Henken said. "So he must have this feedback from people who follow him, because they put money in his account."

Nevertheless, Henken said, Twitter's immediacy and the fact that Cubans are learning to take it mobile are creating an incipient "new narrative" that at least has the potential to challenge state domination of information.

"Just like in the rest of the world, it can be used as a form of pushing back against the mainstream media — and, of course, in Cuba the mainstream media is the official government media," Henken said. "So it does act as a corrective on what's happening or gives another version of events."

For a little more than an hour Friday, the tweeters talked about strategies for staying connected and dreamed aloud about having Internet in their homes.

The event was organized by Leunam Rodriguez, a 26-year-old radio station employee who has been tweeting for just a few months.

Rodriguez, who doesn't fall into either the pro- or anti-government camps, pitched the meet-up as an apolitical gathering.

But when the venue was moved from a pizzeria to the Cuba Pavilion, Yoani Sanchez, known internationally for her blog writings opposing the government, complained that the meeting had been "kidnapped" by officialdom. Ultimately she skipped both the gathering and the handful of tweeters who met at the pizzeria.

Rodriguez denied that the site change was politically motivated.

"I've said that I don't belong to any organization. I'm just a Cuban," he said.

Henken said tweeting in Cuba will involve politics, no matter what individual tweeters might want.

"I think Twitter is political even when it's not political," he said. "The (Cuban) system is very monolithic; therefore even if you use Twitter to promote a sewing circle ... it's political because it is unfiltered."

LOS ANGELES – NBC lost more than $200 million the last time it showed the Winter Olympics, and it's bracing for similar losses in London next year.

So, plenty of people scoffed when the network bid $4.4 billion — nearly a billion more than runner-up Fox — for the U.S. rights to carry the four games through 2020.

Yet the price may prove right.

The growth of Internet video and opportunities under NBC's new owner, Comcast Corp., should help cut losses significantly and perhaps make the Olympics profitable after the London Games. There's also an intangible promotional benefit to NBC.

Consider this: Even at a loss, the Olympics generate huge audiences. About 185 million people saw some of the Olympics in Vancouver last year. The struggling broadcaster can promote new shows to those viewers as it tries to dig out of fourth place.

NBC didn't pay all that much for the Olympics, considering that TV rights fees for other major sports such as Pac-12 college basketball have been doubling or tripling. For the 2014 and 2016 games, it's paying about the same as it has been. For the final two games in the deal, NBC is paying just 19 percent more.

Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne called NBC's deal an "Olympic win at the right price."

He said NBC should be able to cut its Olympic losses in half after London, as long as viewership doesn't change and advertising rates keep improving.

Beyond that, NBC can create more ad opportunities by tapping sports channels added to the NBCUniversal family when Comcast took control in January. One is the Golf Channel — convenient for Comcast as golf joins the Olympics in 2016. Another is Versus, which Comcast is positioning as a competitor to ESPN, another Olympic bidder.

NBCUniversal will have about 20 channels and more than 40 websites to cover the games. By contrast, it used five channels and one website in 2010, when it was controlled by General Electric Co.

The Olympics coverage can also help Comcast get higher fees from other cable TV companies such as Time Warner Cable Inc. to carry those channels in their lineups.

"It does not take too much to move it across the finish line in terms of getting more in the black," said Matthew Harrigan, an analyst with Wunderlich Securities.

NBC should also benefit from sponsorship packages developed by the U.S. Olympic Committee two years ago when the advertising market looked grim.

One such package creates a direct connection between the USOC, NBC and the sponsors — in this case, Citigroup, TD Ameritrade and a home-improvement company that still hasn't been determined. As part of the deal, the sponsors are committed to buying ads on NBC, giving the network a head start in selling commercials.

Because NBC will get rights for at least nine more years, the USOC will be in a better position to make such long-term ad deals, USOC marketing chief Lisa Baird said.

One unknown is how fast Comcast can increase revenue from online viewing.

For the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, NBC ran an unprecedented 2,200 hours of coverage over the Internet. For some fans it still wasn't enough. The network was pilloried, for instance, for waiting more than half a day to televise the men's 100-meter final so it could show Usain Bolt's record-breaking run in prime time.

Starting with the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia, NBC plans to carry every single event live in some format or another. It will repackage the best events for U.S. television audiences when evening arrives.

Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group, told reporters last week that technology is changing so rapidly that the deal gives NBC the ability to exploit the games on every platform "now known or to be known or still to be conceived."

Comcast has been steadily rolling out its Xfinity TV software, which allows subscribers to watch shows on different devices and over the Web. Comcast will likely try to use that to make more money from the games.

Networks also have been increasing the amount of video ads accompanying online shows.

Analysts believe Comcast has plenty of time and the right combination of channels, websites and subscribers to start cutting its losses in 2014.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said he's confident the games will be profitable, helped by new technology and the long-term nature of the deal.

Even for a company that made $3.6 billion in net income last year, losing $200 million every few years is not a strategy for success.

The intangible value it gets for promoting NBC shows may have been a deciding factor in its bid.

NBC, for instance, can use the Summer Games to promote promising new dramas or comedies on its fall lineups. That's similar to the way CBS launched its reality show "Undercover Boss" to audiences immediately after the Super Bowl last year.

There's no good estimate on how much NBC shows might benefit from the promotional boost.

Its competitors had less reason to seek it out.

Almost every U.S. home already has The Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN. It's the market leader in getting fees from cable, satellite and other TV service providers.

The boost to Disney's ABC network wasn't deemed enough to justify paying more, according to a person with knowledge of the bid. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the network was not releasing details of the proposal.

News Corp.'s Fox, meanwhile, is already the leader in attracting viewers aged 18 to 49 — the group most sought by advertisers. That's partly because of its enduring hit, "American Idol."

Ahead of its takeover, Comcast promised government regulators that it would invest to rebuild NBC. Carrying the Olympics fits with that strategy.

"The Olympics are a ratings builder for all other TV shows," said sports agent Brant Feldman, managing partner of American Group Management. "NBC is a fourth-place network right now, but if you assume the programming is going to get better in the future, then the Olympics can be a jumping board to all that other viewership."

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AP National Writer Eddie Pells in Denver and Sports Writer Rachel Cohen in New York contributed to this report.