Truce in Gaza Is Close, Egyptian Officials Say

JERUSALEM — Diplomatic efforts accelerated on Tuesday to end the deadly confrontation between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, as the United States sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Middle East and Egypt’s president and his senior aides expressed confidence that a cease-fire was close. But by late evening there was no word on an agreement.

The diplomatic moves to end the nearly week-old crisis came on a day of some of the most intense violence yet, in what appeared to be efforts by the antagonists to get their last attacks done before a cease-fire goes into effect.

Israeli aerial and naval forces assaulted several Gaza targets in multiple strikes, including a suspected rocket-launching site near Al Shifa hospital, which killed more than a dozen people. Those deaths brought the total number of fatalities in Gaza so far to more than 124 — roughly half of them civilians, the Gaza Health Ministry said.

A delegation visiting from the Arab League canceled a news conference at the hospital because of the Israeli aerial assaults as wailing ambulances brought victims in, some of them decapitated.

Militants in Gaza fired a barrage of rockets into southern Israel, killing an Israeli soldier — the first military casualty on the Israeli side since the hostilities broke out last week. The Israel Defense Forces said the soldier, identified as Yosef Fartuk, 18, died from a rocket strike that hit an area near Gaza. Israeli officials said a civilian military contractor working near the Gaza border also was killed, bringing the total number of fatalities in Israel from the past week of rocket mayhem to five.

Other Palestinian rockets hit the southern Israeli cities of Beersheba and Ashdod, and longer-range rockets were fired at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but neither main city was struck and no casualties were reported. One Gaza rocket hit a building in the Israeli city of Rishon Lezion, just south of Tel Aviv, injuring one person and wrecking the top three floors.

Senior Egyptian officials in Cairo said Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs Gaza, were “very close” to a cease-fire agreement that could be announced within hours. “We have not received final approval but I hope to receive it any moment,” said Essam el-Haddad, President Mohamed Morsi’s top foreign affairs adviser.

Foreign diplomats who were briefed on the outlines of a tentative agreement said it had been structured in stages — first, an announcement of a cease-fire, followed by its implementation for 48 hours. That would allow time for Mrs. Clinton to involve herself in the process on the ground here and create a window for negotiators to agree on conditions for a longer-term cessation of hostilities.

By late evening, however, there was no word on an announcement, and Israeli television was saying the talks needed more time. In Cairo, Egyptian news reports quoted Hamas officials as blaming Israel for delaying a deal and an announcement was unlikely before Wednesday.

The announcement of Mrs. Clinton’s active role in efforts to defuse the crisis added a strong new dimension to the multinational push to avert a new Middle East war. Israel has amassed thousands of soldiers on the border with Gaza and has threatened to invade the crowded Palestinian enclave for the second time in four years to stop the persistent rockets that have been lobbed at Israel.

Mrs. Clinton, who accompanied President Obama on his three-country Asia trip, left Cambodia on her own plane immediately for the Israel, and upon arrival in the late evening went into immediate talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

She was scheduled later to visit the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders and finally to Cairo to consult with Egyptian officials.

Mr. Obama made a number of late-night phone calls from his Asian tour to the Middle East on Monday night that contributed to his conclusion that he had to become more engaged and that Mrs. Clinton might be able to accomplish something.

With Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, also in Israel on Tuesday, a senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israel had decided to give more time to diplomacy before starting a ground invasion into Gaza. But Israel has not withdrawn other options.

“I prefer a diplomatic solution,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement at the start of a meeting in Jerusalem with the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle. “I hope that we can get one, but if not, we have every right to defend ourselves with other means and we shall use them.

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem; Peter Baker from Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram from Gaza City, David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem and David E. Sanger from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the family name of the Israeli soldier who was killed in a Palestinian rocket attack on Tuesday. He is Yosef Fartuk, not Yosef Faruk. 

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Europe Seeks More Taxes From U.S. Multinationals

Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

Starbucks, which operates in Germany and throughout Europe, has faced criticism on taxes.

PARIS — Google reported sales of more than $4 billion in Britain last year. It paid less than $10 million in taxes.

Some tax collectors, lawmakers and competitors of Google in Europe say this is unfair.

As governments throughout the region seek to close gaping holes in their budgets, they are taking aim at United States multinational companies, especially Internet giants like Google and Amazon.com, which pay little or no taxes in Europe, despite generating billions of dollars in revenue on the Continent.

“Why on earth do you manipulate your accounts so that you get away with not paying corporation tax in the U.K.?” Margaret Hodge, a member of Parliament, asked representatives of Google, Amazon and Starbucks last week, during a heated committee hearing in London.

In France, tax collectors have gone further. Amazon says it has received a bill from France for taxes and penalties related to the “allocation of income between foreign jurisdictions” from 2006 through 2010. Other companies, including Google, are also reportedly in the French authorities’ sights.

“Even if the Internet is a zone of freedom, it shouldn’t be a lawless zone,” Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a spokeswoman for the French government, said last week. “Fiscal rules should be able to be applied to those activities as well.”

Google, Amazon, Starbucks and other American companies facing tax scrutiny say they are doing nothing wrong. They use complex accounting strategies to exploit national differences across Europe in corporate tax rates, which range from less than 10 percent to more than 30 percent, and loopholes that can reduce their effective European tax levies to almost nothing.

Google, for example, records most of its international revenue at its European headquarters in Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent. Across Europe, customers who buy advertising, Google’s primary source of revenue, sign contracts with the company’s subsidiary in Ireland, rather than with local branches.

Google ends up paying Irish taxes on only a fraction of the billions of euros that course through its Dublin office. That is because the company uses a variety of methods, including royalty payments to a unit in Bermuda, to reduce further the amount of money exposed to tax liability.

So, while Google told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it generated more than $4 billion in sales in Britain last year, it reported revenue of only £396 million, or $629 million, in its official filings there. The total, the company said, reflected the amount that Google’s British unit billed Google Ireland for promotional work, consulting and other activities. Google declared a profit of £31 million in Britain, resulting in a British tax bill of only £6 million.

“We pay the tax we are required to pay in every country in which we operate,” Matt Brittin, Google vice president for North and Central Europe, told the parliamentary panel.

Ms. Hodge, chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, acknowledged that she thought Google, Amazon and Starbucks were probably complying with the law. “We are not accusing you of being illegal, we are accusing you of being immoral,” she said.

In France, more than morality is at stake. In his testimony to the parliamentary panel, Andrew Cecil, director of public policy for Amazon in Europe, confirmed that the company had received a demand for $252 million from the French tax collection agency. He said Amazon was contesting the claim, which was originally disclosed in an American regulatory filing.

Amazon, which has European headquarters in Luxembourg, another small country with favorable tax conditions for multinational companies, reported 9.1 billion euros, or $11.6 billion, in revenue across Europe last year. It posted an after-tax profit of 20 million euros on those sales, and paid about 8 million euros in tax, Mr. Cecil said.

Mr. Cecil told the parliamentary committee that when customers across Europe bought books from Amazon, they were actually buying them from the Luxembourg-based Amazon entity, rather than their local subsidiaries. That response was met with incredulity by Ms. Hodge, who noted that when she ordered a book from the company, she used a British Web site, Amazon.co.uk, and the goods were delivered from a British warehouse via the British Royal Mail.

News reports in France note that French fiscal authorities are also seeking back taxes and penalties from Google, amounting to 1.7 billion euros. Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem told reporters that she could not comment on individual companies for privacy reasons. Google, in a statement, said the reports were premature.

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Bits Blog: Intel Chief Executive to Retire in May

8:21 p.m. |Update

SAN FRANCISCO — After almost 40 years at Intel, its chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, is retiring, just as the company struggles with a momentous challenge: computing’s big shift to mobile devices.

Mr. Otellini, 62, surprised the technology world Monday by announcing that he would retire as an officer and director of the chip company this May, three years before he hits Intel’s mandatory retirement age. The board said it would immediately begin a search for a successor.

During a tenure that began in May 2005, Mr. Otellini established a strong track record. He increased Intel’s revenue 57 percent, to $55 billion at the end of 2011, and slightly widened its gross profit margin. Along the way, Mr. Otellini had to settle an antitrust suit for $1.25 billion, persuaded Apple to put Intel chips in its computers and cut 20,000 workers. Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor maker, now employs 100,000 people.

But the company’s share price has fallen about 20 percent in Mr. Otellini’s time. That is because the world of personal computers and computer servers, which Intel dominated partly through a close relationship with Microsoft, now competes with a global explosion of smartphones and tablets, which connect to large data centers. While Intel has some presence in these areas, it faces many new competitors and challenges, both to its business and to its way of thinking about products.

The right successor to Mr. Otellini, said Andrew Bryant, Intel’s chairman, would preserve Intel’s engineering-driven culture but turn it into an organization that is better able to anticipate rapidly changing consumer tastes.

“We don’t see the PC category going away, but we see that the market has changed,” Mr. Bryant said. “We need to figure out what the market wants.”

Mr. Otellini could not be reached for comment. In a statement issued by Intel, he said that “after almost four decades with the company and eight years as C.E.O., it’s time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership.”

Last month Intel reported that its third-quarter net income fell 14.3 percent from a year earlier, to $3 billion, largely because of poor demand for PCs. The research firm IDC said that worldwide PC shipments fell 8.6 percent to 87.8 million units in the third quarter. Adding to the woes, Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, which Intel hoped would lift sales, was released in October to tepid reviews.

While they are both hurting from the PC plunge, Intel and Microsoft may be the best off of a troubled bunch. Last week, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s top competitor in chips for PCs, was forced to deny rumors that it was looking for a buyer. Its stock is down about 65 percent this year. Hewlett-Packard and Dell, both big PC makers, are also struggling.

Mr. Bryant said that Mr. Otellini had informed the board of his decision last Wednesday, citing a need for new leadership. He credited Mr. Otellini with putting Intel on track to produce chips that require less power. That is important both for battery-dependent smartphones and for data centers running hundreds of thousands of servers.

He also noted Mr. Otellini’s efforts in spearheading a category of lightweight laptop computers called ultrabooks, which have yet to take off in the market. Mr. Otellini also championed a wireless technology called WiMAX that never lived up to its billing.

Intel influences PC manufacturers in a number of ways. Besides designing and making the very core of their products, Intel also invests heavily in related fields; for example, through its venture arm it created a $300 million fund to promote ultrabooks. And it teaches its customers what they can do with each new generation of Intel chips, which in turn leads to new software development.

While Intel will look at both internal and external candidates, Mr. Bryant said, an internal candidate would probably prove a better fit, as that person would understand the culture. In its 45-year history, all of Intel’s five chief executives have been insiders.

Mr. Otellini’s departure is the third exit of a prominent executive from a major tech company in the last few weeks. In late October, Scott Forstall, who was the head of Apple’s mobile software development, was fired by Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive. Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows at Microsoft, left the company a week ago, just after the introduction of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet. His brash personality led to internal clashes, and he and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, agreed that it was time for him to go, according to a person briefed on the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly about it.

While both of those men were regarded as abrasive by those who worked with them, Mr. Otellini was not. A generally well-liked San Francisco native with an M.B.A. from Berkeley, Mr. Otellini was considered a break from Intel’s norm when he became chief because he was not formally trained in engineering.

But Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, drew a connection between the departures of the Microsoft and Intel executives.

“While Sinofsky and Otellini are gone for different reasons, underneath it similar forces are at work,” said. “Microsoft and Intel haven’t done a good job making PCs more compelling, and people are spending their dollars for electronics differently.”

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Recipes for Health: Apple Walnut Galette — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

A great rustic apple pie for Thanksgiving, this has very little butter in the pastry and a minimum of sweetening. It’s all about the apples.

1 dessert galette pastry (1/2 recipe)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

2 pounds slightly tart apples, like Braeburns, peeled, cored and cut in wedges (about 1/2 inch thick at the thickest point)

2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter

1/4 cup (50 grams) plus 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar or turbinado sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup lightly toasted walnuts, chopped

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (25 grams) almond powder

1 egg beaten with 1 teaspoon milk, for egg wash

1. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment. In a large bowl combine the lemon juice and apples and toss together.

2. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add the butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon of the cinnamon and the nutmeg, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the walnuts, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely.

3. Remove the pastry from the freezer and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Leave to thaw while the apples cool, but don’t keep it out of the freezer for too long. It’s easiest to handle if it’s cold and will thaw quickly. You just want it soft enough so that you can manipulate it.

4. Sprinkle the almond powder over the pastry, leaving a 2- to 3-inch border all around. Place the apples on top. Fold the edges of the dough in over the fruit, pleating the edges as you work your way around the fruit to form a free-form tart that is roughly 9 inches in diameter. Place in the freezer on the baking sheet for 45 minutes to an hour. This helps the galette maintain its shape.

5. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the galette from the freezer. Brush the exposed edge of the pastry with the egg wash. Combine the remaining tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and sprinkle over the fruit and the crust. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour, until the crust is nicely browned and the apples are sizzling. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 1 9-inch galette, serving 8

Advance preparation: You can assemble this through Step 4 and freeze it for up to a month. Once it is frozen, double-wrap it in plastic. You can also freeze the galette after baking. Thaw and warm in a 350-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes to recrisp the crust.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 11 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 50 milligrams cholesterol; 37 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 92 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Apple Walnut Galette — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

A great rustic apple pie for Thanksgiving, this has very little butter in the pastry and a minimum of sweetening. It’s all about the apples.

1 dessert galette pastry (1/2 recipe)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

2 pounds slightly tart apples, like Braeburns, peeled, cored and cut in wedges (about 1/2 inch thick at the thickest point)

2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter

1/4 cup (50 grams) plus 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar or turbinado sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup lightly toasted walnuts, chopped

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (25 grams) almond powder

1 egg beaten with 1 teaspoon milk, for egg wash

1. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment. In a large bowl combine the lemon juice and apples and toss together.

2. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add the butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon of the cinnamon and the nutmeg, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the walnuts, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely.

3. Remove the pastry from the freezer and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Leave to thaw while the apples cool, but don’t keep it out of the freezer for too long. It’s easiest to handle if it’s cold and will thaw quickly. You just want it soft enough so that you can manipulate it.

4. Sprinkle the almond powder over the pastry, leaving a 2- to 3-inch border all around. Place the apples on top. Fold the edges of the dough in over the fruit, pleating the edges as you work your way around the fruit to form a free-form tart that is roughly 9 inches in diameter. Place in the freezer on the baking sheet for 45 minutes to an hour. This helps the galette maintain its shape.

5. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the galette from the freezer. Brush the exposed edge of the pastry with the egg wash. Combine the remaining tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and sprinkle over the fruit and the crust. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour, until the crust is nicely browned and the apples are sizzling. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 1 9-inch galette, serving 8

Advance preparation: You can assemble this through Step 4 and freeze it for up to a month. Once it is frozen, double-wrap it in plastic. You can also freeze the galette after baking. Thaw and warm in a 350-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes to recrisp the crust.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 11 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 50 milligrams cholesterol; 37 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 92 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Hamas Leader Dares Israel to Invade Amid Gaza Airstrikes

GAZA CITY — The top leader of Hamas dared Israel on Monday to launch a ground invasion of Gaza and dismissed diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire in the six-day-old conflict, as the Israeli military conducted a new wave of deadly airstrikes on the besieged Palestinian enclave, including a second hit on a 15-story building that houses media outlets. A volley of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel included one that hit a vacant school.

Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, where the diplomatic efforts were under way, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, suggested that the Israeli infantry mobilization on the border with Gaza was a bluff on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

“If you wanted to launch it, you would have done it,” Mr. Meshal told reporters. He accused Israel of using the invasion threat as an attempt to “dictate its own terms and force us into silence.”

Rejecting Israel’s contention that Hamas had precipitated the conflict, Mr. Meshal said the burden was on the Israelis. “The demand of the people of Gaza is meeting their legimitate demands — for Israel to be restrained from its aggression, assassinations and invasions, and for the siege over Gaza to be ended,” he said.

The Hamas Health Ministry said Monday evening that a total of 102 people had been killed since Wednesday morning, when Israeli airstrikes began, following months of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. A spokeswoman for the Israeli military said she believed that a majority of these were militants, though it is difficult to know because Hamas’s own fighting brigade and the other factional groups are secretive.

The Hamas ministry said that the dead included 24 children, 10 women and 12 men over 50, who were presumably not involved in combat. Of the remaining 56, at least 36 are known militants. Hamas officials said 850 have been wounded, 260 of them children, 140 of them women and 55 men over 50.

Three people have been killed so far in Israel, all civilians, in a rocket strike that hit an apartment house in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday morning. The Israelis have said that at least 79 Israelis have been wounded and that Gaza rockets have reached as far north as Tel Aviv.

The latest Gaza casualties — 19 people reported killed since midnight local time — included Palestinians killed in strikes by warplanes and a drone attack on two men on a motorcycle, the Health Ministry said. Another Israeli drone attack killed the driver of a taxi hired by journalists and displaying “Press” signs, although it was not clear which journalists hired it, Palestinian officials said.

On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets. Israeli officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multiuse building where many local broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al Arabiya, had offices.

That attack, which struck a computer shop on the third floor, sparked a blaze that sent plumes of dark smoke creeping up the sides of the building. Video footage showed clouds of smoke billowing.

An Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here on Sunday, killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single family, in the deadliest single strike since the latest conflict began. Members of the family were buried Monday in a rite that turned into a gesture of defiance and became a rally supporting Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.

A militant leader said Tel Aviv, in the Israeli heartland, would be hit “over and over” and warned Israelis that their leaders were misleading them and would “take them to hell.”

Israel says its onslaught is designed to stop Hamas from launching the rockets, but, after an apparent lull overnight, more missiles hurtled toward targets in Israel, some of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. Of five rockets fired on Monday at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, four were intercepted but one smashed through the concrete roof at the entrance to an empty school. There were no reports of casualties. Other rockets rained on areas along the border with Gaza.

Later a second salvo struck Ashkelon. Several rockets were intercepted, but one crashed down onto a house, causing damage but no casualties. News reports said 75 rockets had been fired by midafternoon.

On Sunday, a new volley of Palestinian rockets totaled nearly 100 by nightfall, including two that soared toward Tel Aviv but were knocked out of the sky by Israeli defenses.

Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza City, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Ashkelon, Israel; Ethan Bronner, Myra Noveck and Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem; Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Israel; Peter Baker from Bangkok; and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

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You for Sale: Your Online Attention, Bought in an Instant by Advertisers

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Frank Addante, 36, chief executive of the Rubicon Project, says that 97 percent of American Internet users encounter its electronic ad sales system every month. And most aren’t even aware of it.

YOU can be sold in seconds.

Beverly Orr

“Online consumers are being bought and sold like chattel,” says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

No, wait: make that milliseconds.

The odds are that access to you — or at least the online you — is being bought and sold in less than the blink of an eye. On the Web, powerful algorithms are sizing you up, based on myriad data points: what you Google, the sites you visit, the ads you click. Then, in real time, the chance to show you an ad is auctioned to the highest bidder.

Not that you’d know it. These days in the hyperkinetic world of digital advertising, all of this happens automatically, and imperceptibly, to most consumers.

Ever wonder why that same ad for a car or a couch keeps popping up on your screen? Nearly always, the answer is real-time bidding, an electronic trading system that sells ad space on the Web pages people visit at the very moment they are visiting them. Think of these systems as a sort of Nasdaq stock market, only trading in audiences for online ads. Millions of bids flood in every second. And those bids — essentially what your eyeballs are worth to advertisers — could determine whether you see an ad for, say, a new Lexus or a used Ford, for sneakers or a popcorn maker.

One big player in this space is the Rubicon Project. Never heard of it? Consider this: Rubicon, based in Los Angeles, has actually eclipsed Google in one crucial area — the percentage of Internet users in the United States reached by display ads sold through its platform, according to comScore, a digital analytics company.

Rubicon is among a handful of technology companies that have quietly developed automated ad sales systems for Web site operators. The bidders are marketers seeking to identify their best prospects and pitch them before they move to the next Web page. It is a form of high-frequency trading — that souped-up business of algorithm-loving Wall Streeters. But in this case, the prize is the attention of ordinary people. And it all depends on data-mining to instantly evaluate the audiences available to see those online display ads, the ones that appear on Web sites next to or around content.

In industry parlance, each digital ad space is an impression. The value of an impression depends on several factors, like the size of the ad, the type of person who is available to see it and that person’s location.

“The first impression seen by a high-value person on the opening page of a major newspaper first thing in the morning has a different value than a user from China who is 12 and has been on the Web all day long playing games,” says Frank Addante, the founder and chief executive of Rubicon.

Yet for most of us, real-time bidding is invisible. About 97 percent of American Internet users interact with Rubicon’s system every month, Mr. Addante says, and most of them aren’t aware of it.

That worries some federal regulators and consumer advocates, who say that such electronic trading systems could unfairly stratify consumers, covertly offering better pricing to certain people while relegating others to inferior treatment. A computer-generated class system is one risk, they say, of an ad-driven Internet powered by surveillance.

“As you profile more and more people, you’ll start to segregate people into ‘the people you can get money out of’ and ‘the people you can’t get money out of,’ ” says Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil rights group in San Francisco, who formerly worked in digital ad data-mining. “That is one of the dangers we should be worried about.”

Of course, ad agencies and brands can tailor ads to Web users without real-time bidding. They can also buy ads without aiming them at narrow audience groups. But for marketers, the marriage of ad- and audience-buying is one of the benefits of real-time bidding.

Not so long ago, they simply bought ad spaces based on a site’s general demographics and then showed every visitor the same ad, a practice called “spray and pray.” Now marketers can aim just at their ideal customers — like football fans who earn more than $100,000 a year, or mothers in Denver in the market for an S.U.V. — showing them tailored ads at the exact moment they are available on a specific Web page.

“We are not buying content as a proxy for audience,” says Paul Alfieri, the vice president for marketing at Turn, a data management company and automated buy-side platform for marketers based in Redwood City, Calif. “We are just buying who the audience is.”

Still, for many consumer advocates, real-time bidding resembles nothing so much as a cattle auction.

“Online consumers are being bought and sold like chattel,” says Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer group in Washington that has filed a complaint about real-time bidding with the Federal Trade Commission. “It’s dehumanizing.”

FRANK ADDANTE is 36 years old and given to wearing black shirts with a white Rubicon logo on the front. Rubicon is the fifth company he has started or helped to found.

In 1996, in his dorm room at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he developed and introduced a search engine. He later helped found L90, a digital ad technology company that went public and was later acquired by DoubleClick. His fourth enterprise, StrongMail Systems, provides e-mail delivery infrastructure to large companies.

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Which Tablet to Buy Among Dozens Confuses Shoppers

Holiday shoppers with a tablet computer on their gift list this year might be forgiven for feeling a little panicked.

Look at the tablets available online or at a consumer electronics store and it can be dizzying to choose from among the dozens of slim rectangles with touch screens — each with various sizes, features, prices and applications.

Tablets were supposed to be a simple alternative to the bloated personal computer market. And when “tablet” was synonymous with “iPad,” that was true.

But this is the first holiday season in which the iPad faces competitors that have built up a solid footing in the market. Amazon and Google introduced tablets just in time for the shopping rush. As a result, many consumers and analysts say, the new market of keyboardless computers is quickly becoming as confusing as that of the old-school PC.

“What’s different about this holiday season is that consumers have not just more choice, but really good choices,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, who studies consumer computing trends at Forrester. “There have been many iPad wannabes but no real quality alternatives, and now there are several.”

While choice is a good thing for consumers, she said, it also makes shopping “confusing and complicated.”

For the companies that make tablets, the choice means everything. The stakes are much higher than the sale of individual devices. Each company is trying to snag lifelong customers for their other products — like music, apps, e-books, movies, Web search or word-processing software.

While Apple has dominated the market until now, selling more tablets than any other company, its perch is being threatened by the newcomers.

“Apple left a lot of room for rivals to grow,” said Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst.

By keeping its tablet prices so high, he said, Apple could lose its place as the biggest tablet seller, just as it did with smartphones when it lost the first-place position to Samsung, which makes less expensive phones using Google’s Android software. The iPad still dominates the market with a 50 percent share, according to third-quarter figures from the research firm IDC, but that is down from 60 percent a year ago. Samsung is in second place with an 18 percent share, Amazon is third with 9 percent, and Asus, which makes Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, is in fourth with 8.6 percent of the market.

But Google, which makes the vast majority of its revenue on Web ads, still lags in the tablet market, even though sales of its Nexus 7 tablet are approaching one million a month, according to Asus. About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company. Google would like more of that traffic, as well as more buyers for apps and media from its Google Play store, as would Amazon and Microsoft.

“The first decision you make is what ecosystem am I in, do I want the Android Play store and content or some other?” said Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president for engineering for Android. “So the importance of the ecosystem can’t be overstated.”

But the decisions after that are still complex.

Say, for example, that you want a tablet that runs Google’s Android operating system. There is the Nexus 7, a seven-inch tablet made by Asus, and the Nexus 10, a 10-inch tablet made by Samsung. Then there are the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, a 5.5-inch smartphone). And that’s not to mention the dozens of Android tablets made by Lenovo, Toshiba and others.

This year, Microsoft also has a tablet, called Surface. Amazon has the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, and Barnes & Noble has the Nook HD and HD+. Once shoppers choose one, they have more choices to make, like whether they want to pay $15 more for the privilege of not seeing ads on the Kindle Fire.

Even Apple, which has always prided itself on having simple product lines, now offers the new iPad, the older iPad 2 and the iPad Mini. If you factor in the various amounts of storage and the choice of cellular data or just Wi-Fi, there are essentially 14 iPad models to choose from.

Complicating the decision on hardware, different tablets connect to different online stores for apps, music and video. If you have built your music and app collection on Apple devices, an Android tablet may mean starting from scratch, and vice versa.

The proliferation of products is nothing new for a mature market, as anyone who has stood in front of a wall of televisions at Best Buy or in a parking lot of Priuses at a Toyota dealership knows.

But some consumer electronics companies that have given their customers too many options have run into trouble, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee. They include Motorola Mobility, which is trying to rescue its cellphone business by paring its lineup of 27 devices, and Research in Motion, which offers a perplexing matrix of BlackBerrys with confusing names, like the BlackBerry Torch 9810, 9850 and 9860.

Google in particular runs this risk, said Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner, because it gives away its Android operating system to any device manufacturer that wants to use it, resulting in an uncontrolled array of Android devices running different versions of the software. Some apps will work only with particular versions, making it difficult to know exactly what you are getting.

Google has tried to address this problem in recent months. It gave its line of Nexus products names corresponding to their screen size and began selling them in its Play store. (Google teams up with manufacturers to build the Nexus devices.) It began running ads for the tablets online, on billboards, in print and on television, which had been rare for the company, and assigned a public relations employee to focus on selling hardware to consumers.

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MaleSurvivor Conference Examines Sexual Abuse in Sports

It was the summer before high school, and Christopher Gavagan, then 13, was preparing to leave the safe familiarity of the friends he had known during his boyhood. With a plan to excel at ice hockey, he began training on inline skates, moving through his New York City neighborhood, up and down the streets until, he said, “I turned down the wrong street.”

Gavagan, now a filmmaker, was one of eight panelists who participated Friday in a discussion about young athletes who have been sexually assaulted or abused by their coaches. The panel was part of the MaleSurvivor 13th International Conference, held this year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The conference brought together men who have been sexually abused, as well as psychologists, social workers, academics and members of the legal community.

A dour procession of stories about sexual misconduct by coaches toward their male charges has come to light in recent months. Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was sentenced in October to 30 to 60 years in prison on 45 counts of child molesting. Sugar Ray Leonard wrote in his autobiography last year that he was sexually molested by an Olympic boxing coach. The N.H.L. players Theo Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy were sexually abused as teenagers by their hockey coach Graham James.

The prevalence of sexual abuse among all boys 17 and under has been variously estimated to be as low as 5 percent and as high as 16 percent. For some of the millions of children who participate in sports nationwide, and their parents, sexual assault in a sports context has its own dynamic.

“Sports is a place where parents send their boys to learn skills, to learn how to be teammates and how to work together — to make boys stronger and healthier,” said Dr. Howard Fradkin, author of “Joining Forces,” a book about how men can heal from sexual abuse. “It’s the place where we send our boys to grow up. The betrayal that occurs when abuse occurs in sports is damaging because it destroys the whole intent of what they started out to do.”

When Gavagan, now 38, turned down that fateful street, and stepped briefly into the house of a man recommended as a hockey coach by a couple of female acquaintances, what greeted him, he said, was “a young boy’s dream come true.”

The dream Gavagan glimpsed was embodied in the trophy room of the house.

“It was everything I wanted to be right there,” recalled Gavagan, who is working on a feature-length documentary on sexual abuse in youth sports, in which he interviews other sexual-abuse victims and his own attacker, against whom he has never pressed charges. In addition to the shiny relics that seemed to give testimony to the man’s coaching prowess, Gavagan said, the trophy room had pictures of hockey teams the man had coached and workout equipment — the physical tools promising the chance to get bigger and stronger.

“To a skinny 13-year-old, it was like winning the lottery,” Gavagan said.

Christopher Anderson, the executive director of MaleSurvivor, said sexual abuse — basically nonconsensual touching or sexual language — is devastating under any circumstance, but coach and player often have a special relationship.

“Especially as you progress higher and higher, the coach can become just as important in some ways to an athlete as the relationship with his parents might have,” Anderson said. “In some cases, it’s a substitute for parents.”

He added: “There’s also a fundamentally different power dynamic. When you’re a young star, the coach can literally make or break your career as an athlete.”

But caution has to extend beyond coaches who guide future Olympians, Gavagan said, noting that his coach was not of that caliber.

“The entire grooming process was so subtle,” Gavagan said. “It’s not like when I first went into his house that he tried to grope me.”

First, Gavagan said, the coach said it was all right to curse in that house. On another visit it was fine to have a beer, which led on another day to Playboy magazine and on subsequent days to harder pornography and harder liquor. It was six months before the coach laid an explicitly sexual hand on him, Gavagan said.

“I didn’t feel like a sudden red line had been crossed — the line had been blurred,” Gavagan said, explaining that he avoided his parents when he returned home with liquor on his breath by telling them he was exhausted and going straight to his room. (Unlike many sexual-abuse victims, Gavagan said his parents, with whom the coach had ingratiated himself, were supportive of their son, and his was a loving family. He said that if he had approached them about the coach, they would have listened.)

Another aspect of sexual abuse in sports is the environment, which emphasizes a kind of macho ethic.

“What is most different about abuse is the sports culture itself,” Fradkin said. “It is a culture that promotes teamwork and teaches boys to shrug it off. When a boy or man is abused, he risks being thrown off the team if he should speak the truth because he’ll be seen as being disloyal — and weak.”

At 17, after four years with his coach, Gavagan said he “aged out” of his coach’s target age.

“At the time I had no idea of how it would impact my life, but the unhealthy lessons about relations, trust and the truth set a time bomb that would detonate my relationships for the next 10 years,” Gavagan said.

As a word of caution, Anderson said the lesson for parents should not be that sports are dangerous.

“It should be that there are sometimes dangerous people who gravitate to sporting organizations and our safeguards aren’t good enough yet to adequately protect our children,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we should be pulling our kids from soccer and baseball and basketball. What it means is that parents need to be vigilant.”

He added: “They need to be proactive with athletic organizations to make sure that policies are in place — such as doing criminal background checks on staff and having a procedure where young athletes can complain about inappropriate behavior — that make sure children are protected.”

Read More..

MaleSurvivor Conference Examines Sexual Abuse in Sports

It was the summer before high school, and Christopher Gavagan, then 13, was preparing to leave the safe familiarity of the friends he had known during his boyhood. With a plan to excel at ice hockey, he began training on inline skates, moving through his New York City neighborhood, up and down the streets until, he said, “I turned down the wrong street.”

Gavagan, now a filmmaker, was one of eight panelists who participated Friday in a discussion about young athletes who have been sexually assaulted or abused by their coaches. The panel was part of the MaleSurvivor 13th International Conference, held this year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The conference brought together men who have been sexually abused, as well as psychologists, social workers, academics and members of the legal community.

A dour procession of stories about sexual misconduct by coaches toward their male charges has come to light in recent months. Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was sentenced in October to 30 to 60 years in prison on 45 counts of child molesting. Sugar Ray Leonard wrote in his autobiography last year that he was sexually molested by an Olympic boxing coach. The N.H.L. players Theo Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy were sexually abused as teenagers by their hockey coach Graham James.

The prevalence of sexual abuse among all boys 17 and under has been variously estimated to be as low as 5 percent and as high as 16 percent. For some of the millions of children who participate in sports nationwide, and their parents, sexual assault in a sports context has its own dynamic.

“Sports is a place where parents send their boys to learn skills, to learn how to be teammates and how to work together — to make boys stronger and healthier,” said Dr. Howard Fradkin, author of “Joining Forces,” a book about how men can heal from sexual abuse. “It’s the place where we send our boys to grow up. The betrayal that occurs when abuse occurs in sports is damaging because it destroys the whole intent of what they started out to do.”

When Gavagan, now 38, turned down that fateful street, and stepped briefly into the house of a man recommended as a hockey coach by a couple of female acquaintances, what greeted him, he said, was “a young boy’s dream come true.”

The dream Gavagan glimpsed was embodied in the trophy room of the house.

“It was everything I wanted to be right there,” recalled Gavagan, who is working on a feature-length documentary on sexual abuse in youth sports, in which he interviews other sexual-abuse victims and his own attacker, against whom he has never pressed charges. In addition to the shiny relics that seemed to give testimony to the man’s coaching prowess, Gavagan said, the trophy room had pictures of hockey teams the man had coached and workout equipment — the physical tools promising the chance to get bigger and stronger.

“To a skinny 13-year-old, it was like winning the lottery,” Gavagan said.

Christopher Anderson, the executive director of MaleSurvivor, said sexual abuse — basically nonconsensual touching or sexual language — is devastating under any circumstance, but coach and player often have a special relationship.

“Especially as you progress higher and higher, the coach can become just as important in some ways to an athlete as the relationship with his parents might have,” Anderson said. “In some cases, it’s a substitute for parents.”

He added: “There’s also a fundamentally different power dynamic. When you’re a young star, the coach can literally make or break your career as an athlete.”

But caution has to extend beyond coaches who guide future Olympians, Gavagan said, noting that his coach was not of that caliber.

“The entire grooming process was so subtle,” Gavagan said. “It’s not like when I first went into his house that he tried to grope me.”

First, Gavagan said, the coach said it was all right to curse in that house. On another visit it was fine to have a beer, which led on another day to Playboy magazine and on subsequent days to harder pornography and harder liquor. It was six months before the coach laid an explicitly sexual hand on him, Gavagan said.

“I didn’t feel like a sudden red line had been crossed — the line had been blurred,” Gavagan said, explaining that he avoided his parents when he returned home with liquor on his breath by telling them he was exhausted and going straight to his room. (Unlike many sexual-abuse victims, Gavagan said his parents, with whom the coach had ingratiated himself, were supportive of their son, and his was a loving family. He said that if he had approached them about the coach, they would have listened.)

Another aspect of sexual abuse in sports is the environment, which emphasizes a kind of macho ethic.

“What is most different about abuse is the sports culture itself,” Fradkin said. “It is a culture that promotes teamwork and teaches boys to shrug it off. When a boy or man is abused, he risks being thrown off the team if he should speak the truth because he’ll be seen as being disloyal — and weak.”

At 17, after four years with his coach, Gavagan said he “aged out” of his coach’s target age.

“At the time I had no idea of how it would impact my life, but the unhealthy lessons about relations, trust and the truth set a time bomb that would detonate my relationships for the next 10 years,” Gavagan said.

As a word of caution, Anderson said the lesson for parents should not be that sports are dangerous.

“It should be that there are sometimes dangerous people who gravitate to sporting organizations and our safeguards aren’t good enough yet to adequately protect our children,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we should be pulling our kids from soccer and baseball and basketball. What it means is that parents need to be vigilant.”

He added: “They need to be proactive with athletic organizations to make sure that policies are in place — such as doing criminal background checks on staff and having a procedure where young athletes can complain about inappropriate behavior — that make sure children are protected.”

Read More..