Mercedes's Nico Rosberg wins Monaco Grand Prix

By Davin Colten

 The Grand Prix of Monaco took place this Memorial Day weekend, and what a spectacular race it was. Nico Rosberg racing for Mercedes team, started in pole position, while his teammate Lewis Hamilton started in second, followed by Sebastian Vettel for Red Bull team in third, and his teammate Mark Webber started in fourth. This was the six race of the exciting 2013 Formula One racing season.

 A beautiful spring day in Monaco, captured by the elegance and avant-garde of the previous nights activities for the upcoming race, this grand prix is one of the best venues on the Formula 1 racing circuit. There is no other course like it. With gorgeous views of the ocean, surrounded by immaculate yachts, casinos, and wealth, the streets of Monte Carlo racetrack encompassed driving through a tunnel, and a hairpin turn that lowered speeds from over two hundred mph to below forty.

 Nico who is German, but grew up in Monaco, was racing in his hometown. The best venue to race on a racing circuit for a racecar driver is always in your hometown or for your country. The fans turn out just for you, to see you race, to support you, which is always a plus, but not every racer can take the added pressure. Nico was able not only to capture pole position during qualifying, but he kept the first position, leading the pack of racecars the entire race.

 He stayed in first place for all 78 laps, which is an incredible task for any racer to do. Usually there are lead changes during a race, especially when you have to pit, giving other racecar drivers the ability to either gain or lose a spot on the track, depending on whose pit crews are the fastest, but Nico was able to hold onto his lead, his crew team getting him in and out of the pits in under 3.5 seconds, and he was able to retain his first place position.

 Unfortunately, Nico’s teammate Lewis Hamilton slipped back into fourth place. Sebastian Vettel took advantage and moved into second position, while his teammate Webber moved into third. Having the Red Bull team come up behind you on the track, staring you down in your rear view mirrors for the length of the race, would be tough for any driver. With a few cautions and several crashes during the race, one crash in particular that even stopped the race for a brief time, Nico was able to hold onto his lead during all the restarts, even when he lost a considerable lead, even when the great Sebastian Vettel was right on his bumper, and won the Grand Prix of Monaco. Vettel came in second on the podium, and his teammate Webber came in third.

 A great race from beginning to end, Nico deserved this win. Getting better each season, getting better with each race, this particular grand prix victory was especially sweet for Nico Rosberg and his family. His father KeKe Rosberg won the Grand Prix of Monaco thirty years ago. Like father and son, two great generations of racecar drivers, Nico is following famously in his father’s footsteps to becoming a world-class racecar driver.

 Davin Colten’s newest novel, The Assassin Dominic Monroe, is an action packed espionage thriller. A spy and an innocent find themselves on the run from the world’s most deadly assassin. The story is set under the beautiful Mediterranean sun. Packed with intriguing characters, a Formula 1 racecar driver, a sexy assassin in stiletto heels, and this British spy drives a Lamborghini. The book is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and several other online bookstores throughout the world.

Yahoo acquires Tumblr in $1.1B deal

Yahoo is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet icon that had fallen behind the times.

The deal announced on Monday represents Mayer’s boldest move yet since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo’s latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo’s most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, California, company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.

Yahoo is paying all cash for Tumblr, dipping into some of its remaining stash from a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.

Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Tumblr, a service started six years by Mr. Karp, a high school dropout, now figures to play a pivotal role in Ms. Mayer’s attempt to reshape Yahoo. To take on the challenge, Ms. Mayer ended a highly successful 13-year career at Google, which she helped surpass Yahoo as the Internet’s most influential company. Since coming to Yahoo, Ms. Mayer has concentrated on improving employee morale, redesigning services and bringing in more engineering talent through a series of small acquisitions that have collectively cost less than $50 million.

If this deal pays off the way Ms. Mayer envisions, Tumbler could help Yahoo finally get its stock price to $33. That would be a major coup because many investors soured on Yahoo after a previous regime led by co-founder Jerry Yang squandered an opportunity five years ago to sell the entire company to Microsoft for $33 per share. The stock spent more than four years trading below $20 before the recent surge that lifted the price to $26.52 through last week.

The deal could backfire though if Yahoo’s effort to make more money alienates a Tumblr user base that so far has been subjected to hardly any advertising during the service’s six-year history.

“Yahoo has to manage this acquisition in a way that keeps Tumblr’s user base while trying to add advertising, which historically tends to turn off a lot of people,” said Forrester Research analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis.

Ms. Mayer is betting that Tumblr will provide Yahoo with a captivating hook to reel in more traffic and advertisers on smartphones and tablet computers. That rapidly growing market is expected to become even more important during the next decade as people increasingly consume digital content on mobile devices instead of laptop and desktop machines.

Besides offering one of the top mobile apps, Tumblr also runs one of the world’s busiest websites, featuring 75 million daily posts about everything from politics to pets. Advertising has been a missing ingredient so far as Tumblr, like many online services in their early stages, focused on building a loyal audience before turning its attention to making money.

Tumblr will remain based in New York and led by Mr. Karp, 26, who may now have a mentor in Ms. Mayer, 37. The startup has about 175 employees.

The deal also has some symbolic significance for Yahoo, an 18-year-old company that had spent much of the past decade aimlessly drifting under different management teams while Google Inc. overtook it in terms of size and influence. At the same time, newcomers such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter began to command the attention of people who found themselves spending less and less time on Yahoo.

Part of Yahoo’s problems stemmed from missed chances to improve its service and technology.

Yahoo flirted with potential acquisitions of Google and Facebook in those two companies’ early days, only to have the talks unravel because Yahoo wasn’t prepared to pay asking prices that were far below the current market values of Google ($300 billion) and Facebook ($63 billion). Yahoo also considered buying YouTube in 2006, only to be outbid by Google, which snapped up the world’s leading online service for $1.76 billion a price that now looks like a bargain.

Even when Yahoo did pull off deals, the company has been criticized for mismanaging a list of acquired services that includes photo-sharing Flickr, online help-wanted service HotJobs and content-sharing service Delawareicio.us. Yahoo ended up selling HotJobs and Delawareicio.us, but Ms. Mayer has been looking at ways to spruce up Flickr and blend its photos into more of Yahoo’s other services. Ms. Mayer is expected to discuss more changes for Flickr at an event in New York on Monday evening.

Tumblr could help Yahoo recapture some of its cachet with teens and adults in their early 20s, a demographic that has become tougher for Yahoo to reach in recent years as it fell behind the technological curve and struggled to develop compelling services.

While Facebook has turned into a mainstream social network where even grandparents now connect family and friends, Tumblr has become one of the places where the cool kids hang out.

Tumblr emerged has a trendy online hangout by providing a service that makes it easy to share blog posts, photos, video and other content in an enthralling mosaic. The service says it has amassed more than 50 billion posts from 108 million blogs. Tumblr users rely on a dashboard to pinpoint the kinds of blogs that they want to track and also have tools to pass along the posts that interest them.

That wealth of content could be interwoven into Yahoo’s other services that provide coverage of general news, sports, finance and entertainment. Tumblr also will fill Yahoo’s gaping void in the realm of social media. Yahoo so far has had to connect its services to Facebook and Twitter to give its users a social networking outlet.

Yahoo’s acquisition will deliver a jackpot to Mr. Karp, who dropped out of high school to concentrate on computer programming. He ended up being home schooled while taking classes in Japanese and working on gambling software. Later, he became a product executive at a parenting website called UrbanBaby. After CNet bought the site in 2006, Mr. Karp set up his own a development service called “Davidville” before deciding to create an outlet for personal expression an endeavour that hatched Tumblr.

Mr. Karp’s cut from the Yahoo deal is about $275 million. Most of the rest of the money will be paid to the venture capitalists that invested about $125 million into Tumblr. That list includes Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Union Square Ventures and Insight Venture Partners. 

Hackers find hole in Google Glass security

Charles Arthur

 Google Glass, the wearable computer being developed by the search giant, might be a threat to its owners’ privacy because it has no PIN or authentication system, hackers have discovered. 

Jay Freeman, a Santa Barbara-based programmer who specialises in cracking smartphone security for both iPhone and Android devices, discovered that Glass has a “root” capability which can be enabled by attaching it to a desktop computer and running some commands. 

Graphic: How Google Glass works

 

That would then give a hacker the ability to take control of the Glass’s output — meaning a hacker could monitor everything the owner was doing from a smartphone in their pocket. 

“Once the attacker has root on your Glass, they have much more power than if they had access to your phone or even your computer: they have control over a camera and a microphone that are attached to your head,” explains Mr. Freeman in a blogpost. 

“A bugged Glass doesn’t just watch your every move: it watches everything you are looking at (intentionally or furtively) and hears everything you do. The only thing it doesn’t know are your thoughts.” He points out that “it knows all your passwords, for example, as it can watch you type them. It even manages to monitor your usage of otherwise safe, old-fashioned technology: it watches you enter door codes, it takes pictures of your keys, and it records what you write using a pen and paper. Nothing is safe once your Glass has been hacked.” Even if the device shows a red light to show others when its video camera is on, a user probably wouldn’t notice it — because the light would be facing away from them. 

Mr. Freeman reckons that about 10 minutes would be enough for a hacker to install a “rooted” version of the software that Glass ships with. “Sadly, due to the way Glass is currently designed, it is particularly susceptible to the kinds of security issues that tend to plague Android devices,” he writes. 

“The one saving grace of Android’s track record on security is that most of the bugs people find in it cannot be exploited while the device is PIN-code locked. Google’s Glass, however, does not have any kind of PIN mechanism: when you turn it on, it is immediately usable.” Mr. Freeman got hold of one of the demonstration units of Glass, and quickly found that there is a “Debug Mode” which lets it connect to computers over a USB connection. That in turn lets anyone who has access to the device to install their own software if they use certain technical tricks. 

He recommends that Glass should have a protection system that functions when it is taken off by the owner, such as a biometric — either using patterns in the iris or voice — or a PIN. 

And for the privacy concerns, both that users have expressed and that Freeman has now opened up, he suggests there would at least be a simple one over worries about the camera: a plastic shield that could slide over the camera. “This makes it clear that ‘I’m not recording right now’,” he suggests.

Fernando Alonso won the Spanish Grand 2013

Fernando Alonso won the Spanish Grand Prix by nearly 10 seconds in a dominant performance in front of his jubilant home fans on Sunday to close the gap on championship leader Sebastian Vettel and get right back in the Formula One title race.

Finnish driver Kimi Raikkonen finished second for the third straight race, with Alonso's Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa in third spot as most drivers chose a four-stop strategy due to ongoing problem with Pirelli's fast-degrading tires. That issue remains a big concern as tires still shred far too easily despite pre-race modifications.

Staring from fifth place, Alonso won his second race this season, showing that Ferrari can challenge Red Bull for pure speed. Alonso was easily quicker than Vettel, with the three-time defending champion finishing 38.2 seconds behind in fourth ahead of teammate Mark Webber.

"In the four years with Ferrari this is the best (car) we've had," Alonso said. "I realized the race was in our pockets if we don't do mistakes."

He climbed on top of his Ferrari and waved a Spanish flag gleefully as he milked the applause from the fans, who broke out into chants of "Alonso, Alonso."

It was Alonso's second win in Barcelona - the first coming in 2006 – and his seventh career podium on the Circuit de Catalunya.

"It's very special winning at home and it doesn't matter how many times you repeat it," Alonso said. "Very long last laps because you want to finish as quickly as possible. Difficult qualifying as we were not too quick yesterday but we knew we had the pace on the long runs. We did it and everything worked perfect."

More importantly, the two-time former champion closed the gap on Vettel from 30 to 17 points, moving up to third overall. Raikkonen is only four points behind Vettel, who leads with 89 after five races.

"We have to just take what we can from every race," said Raikkonen, who was 9.3 seconds behind Alonso. "We just have to keep working as a team to achieve the biggest goal we can."

Massa's performance was arguably even better than Alonso's, as he started from ninth due to a grid penalty in qualifying.

"I was a little disappointed after qualifying, but the race was very good, we were very aggressive," Massa said. "I think we are in the right direction so I hope from now on we are fighting for the podium in every race."

Mercedes had a disappointing day after Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton started on the front grid. As has been the case this season, the Mercedes cars - which are fast in qualifying - again lacked race pace and durability as Rosberg finsihed sixth and Hamilton drifted way back to 12th and was a lap off the pace.

"We have just got a lot to do to catch up with the others, but we will get there," Hamilton said.

He made a terrible start as Vettel flew past him at the first corner and Alonso found a small gap to surge past Raikkonen on turn one and then past Hamilton on the outside of turn three to move quickly into third.

Rosberg held on at the front as Massa quickly climbed up from ninth to sixth and Grosjean went the other way.

Jenson Button's miserable weekend looked set to continue as he drifted down from 14th to 17th, although he salvaged some pride with a credible eighth-place finish, holding off a late surge from teammate Sergio Perez to finish behind Paul di Resta.

"Turn one was a mess so to finish eighth probably wasn't too bad," Button said. "But there is a lot of work still to do."

Grosjean had been optimistic heading into the race after securing his first podium of the season with third place in Bahrain. But the Frenchman's back wheels locked up early on and he had to pull out due to mechanical failure.

With fears over tire degradation prominent, drivers took early pit stops.

"At this rate, F1 is going to become a pit-stop contest with a few race laps thrown in," Jacques Villeneuve, the 1997 F1 champion, said during television commentary. The issue was highlighted when strips of rubber started flying off Jean-Eric Vergne's Toro Rosso less than 40 laps into the race. He retired late on.

With a third of the race gone, Ferrari's pace was unrelenting and Alonso led Vettel by four seconds before pitting for the second time.

Raikkonen won the season-opening Australian GP on a three-stop strategy but the Finn lost time the longer he stayed on the older tires. 

Caterham driver Giedo van der Garde's left rear wheel came off entirely and he also had to retire.

It was a busy afternoon in the pits as Sauber released Nico Hulkenberg too early and he bumped into the back of a Toro Rosso and with Pastor Maldonado - last year's surprise winner - pitting in the wrong place.

Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams won Madrid Masters

Rafael Nadal lifted his third title at the Madrid Masters on Sunday with a 6-2, 6-4 win over Stanislas Wawrinka to join Serena Williams as a multiple-time winner on the high-altitude Spanish clay. 

Serena won her second consecutive trophy at the pre-French Open event as her 6-1, 6-4 defeat of Maria Sharapova helped the American hold on to her World No. 1 ranking. 

Nadal was ruthless against Wawrinka, who came through to his second Masters 1000 final (2008 Rome) and will move back into the ATP top ten as a result of this week’s performance. But Nadal proved to be too strong on his favourite surface as the ‘King of Clay’ won his fifth title of the season after playing in his seventh consecutive final since coming back in February from seven months off with knee injuries. 

Nadal won the 55th trophy of his career and his 30th match in Madrid, which plays faster due to its 800m altitude. The Spaniard now owns 23 Masters 1000 trophies and goes into Rome and Paris in the coming weeks as heavy title favourite 

“Rafa has showed that he’s the most dangerous on clay,” said Wawrinka. “It has been really tough to beat him since he came back.” 

Nadal raced away to a 4-0 lead before the Swiss got on the scoreboard in a 30-minute opening set. The second was not quite a formality, with Wawrinka keeping pace until a Nadal break for 4-3 put the Spaniard in a winning position. 

Serena has not lost to World No. 2 Sharapova since 2004, winning their last dozen encounters while losing just four sets during the nine-year winning run. The 31-year-old American lifted her first trophy on classic red clay since the 2002 French Open, with her other six clay titles coming on green clay in the US or the controversial blue used in 2012 in Madrid. 

The results (Finals): Men: Rafael Nadal bt Stanislas Wawrinka 6-2, 6-4.

Women: Serena Williams bt Maria Sharapova 6-1, 6-4.