Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

The New York Times published an article in October about the wealth of the family of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in both English and Chinese

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

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Kerry is easily confirmed as secretary of State

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to confirm Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as secretary of State, filling a crucial national security spot in President Obama's second-term Cabinet.

Kerry, who ran for president as the Democratic nominee in 2004, will replace Hillary Rodham Clinton, who steps down as America's top diplomat Friday.

After the 94-3 vote, Kerry submitted a letter of resignation, effective Friday, to give up the Senate seat he has held since 1985. He will take the oath of office in a private ceremony.

In a White House statement, Obama praised Kerry as "a champion of American global leadership."

"John has earned the respect of leaders around the world and the confidence of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, and I am confident he will make an extraordinary secretary of State," Obama said.

Obama's nominee for secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has his confirmation hearing Thursday. Unlike Kerry, the former Republican senator from Nebraska is expected to face considerable opposition in the Senate.

Kerry failed to win only three Republican votes — from Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both of Texas, and Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma.

A spokesman for Cornyn said Kerry supported liberal positions that most Texans opposed. Cruz has criticized Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, as anti-military.

Earlier Tuesday, Kerry received the unanimous endorsement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a voice vote. He served on the committee for 28 years and was chairman for the last four.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking Republican on the committee, praised Kerry as a "realist" on foreign affairs issues, and said he had always been "open to discussion" with members of the other party.

Several Republican senators had promoted Kerry for the job as an alternative to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Rice withdrew her name from consideration amid mounting Republican criticism of her statements on TV talk shows after the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Kerry faces formidable challenges in his new job.

Obama's first administration made little headway at solving foreign policy problems in Iran, Syria, North Korea and elsewhere. Kerry also will deal with a White House that prefers to keep decisions on key issues of war and peace in its own hands.

During his confirmation hearing last week and other appearances, Kerry gave some signals of what he intends to emphasize.

He said he would begin an effort to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, a process that has been nearly dead since the Obama administration's opening initiative was abandoned two years ago.

Kerry also said he intended to work toward preventing global warming. The momentum of that effort also slowed in Obama's first term.

His resignation from the Senate starts the clock on a special election in Massachusetts to fill his seat until his term expires in January 2015. Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, is expected to call the election on June 25.

Patrick will name an interim senator to serve until voters go to the polls. Possible candidates include Victoria Reggie Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy; and former Rep. Barney Frank, who has publicly expressed interest in the temporary posting.

Former Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who lost an expensive 2012 reelection bid against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, has yet to signal whether he will run again. He is said to be considering a 2014 campaign for governor.

As Kerry moved toward his new role, Clinton did a final televised group interview with students and journalists at locations around the world. She was asked whether she intended to run for president in 2016.

"I right now am not inclined to do that," she said. Her immediate priority, she said, was "catching up on about 20 years of sleep deprivation."

paul.richter@latimes.com

michael.memoli@latimes.com

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BlackBerry 10 said to be inadequate for helping RIM overcome its ‘demons’

After hitting a seven-year low of $ 6.22 this past summer, shares of Research in Motion (RIMM) have rebounded and climbed more than 100% in the past six months. The company that was previously written off by Wall Street investors has seen a significant boost in recent months as anticipation grows for its BlackBerry 10 operating system. But while a number of analysts have voiced their support for RIM, not everyone is convinced.

[More from BGR: Apple’s 128GB iPad shows the world exactly what Apple does best]

Jan Dawson of Ovum explained, per Benzinga, that RIM continues to “face the twin demons of consumer-driven buying power and a chronic inability to appeal to mature market consumers,” and he believes BlackBerry 10 won’t change this. The analyst said that due to a strong user base of 79 million subscribers and profitability still in the black, the company will remain for years to come. He was quick to note, however, that its glory days are in the past and “it is only a matter of time before it reaches a natural end.”

[More from BGR: Apple unveils new 128GB iPad]

Dawson previously wrote that RIM’s strategy seems to be focused on building the best devices for current BlackBerry users “rather than something that will necessarily win converts from other platforms.”

“The points of differentiation RIM has focused on in teasers for the new platform confirm this – better multitasking, productivity, email, contacts and calendar applications and so on, rather than a better gaming, content consumption or social networking experience,” he said.

Shares of RIM are down more than 6% on Monday, a day before the company is set to unveil its BlackBerry 10 operating system.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Justin Timberlake’s new album ’20/20′ is due out in March

(Reuters) – Singer-turned-actor Justin Timberlake has set a March date for his comeback album – his first in more than six years.

RCA Records said on Tuesday “The 20/20 Experience,” the former N’Sync boy band member’s follow-up to 2006′s “FutureSex/LoveSounds” and only his third album ever, would be released on March 19.

In recent years, Timberlake, 31, has focused more on films and business ventures ranging from restaurants to a clothing line, and reviving social networking site Myspace, of which he is part owner. He remarked in a recent video that creating music involved “physical torture” for him.

“Suit & Tie,” the first single off his forthcoming album, fell short of sales expectations for its first week. The song, featuring rapper Jay-Z, sold 314,000 downloads last week. Industry experts had expected about 350,000 downloads.

Top menswear designer Tom Ford collaborated with Timberlake, designing suits worn in the “Suit & Tie” video as well as styling the production and the release’s artwork.

Timberlake will perform his first concert in five years during a private Super Bowl-weekend event in New Orleans on February 2 at an invitation-only concert.

Timberlake posted on Twitter about the forthcoming game, saying among other things: “This is gonna be a GREAT Super Bowl!” and “Oh wait … I don’t have tickets. Dammit! Anybody know anybody?? LOL!”

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Philip Barbara)

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Report Links Rodriguez and Others to Clinic and P.E.D.’s

Investigators for Major League Baseball created an improvised war room in the commissioner’s Park Avenue offices in Manhattan in recent months, mapping out potential evidence that would tie an anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla., to the possible use of performance-enhancing drugs by some of baseball’s more prominent players. 

But because the investigators cannot compel witnesses to talk, they could do nothing more than scrutinize the clinic. As a result, they found themselves standing by awkwardly on Tuesday as a weekly Miami newspaper reported that it had obtained medical records from the clinic that tied a half-dozen players — Alex Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, Gio Gonzalez, Bartolo Colon, Nelson Cruz and Yasmani Grandal — to the use of banned substances like human growth hormone.

The newspaper, Miami New Times, said it had received the records from a former employee of the clinic, which is now closed, and that it included handwritten notations listing various drugs that were allegedly distributed to various players. At least some of those documents were displayed online by the newspaper. However, the documents have not been independently authenticated and Rodriguez, the Yankees slugger, and Gonzalez, a standout pitcher for the Washington Nationals, both issued statements denying they had been patients at the clinic.

Anthony Bosch, the operator of the clinic, known as Biogenesis of America, also issued a statement of denial through his lawyer, saying the Miami New Times article was “filled with inaccuracies, innuendos and misstatements in fact.”

“Mr. Bosch vehemently denies the assertions that MLB players such as Alex Rodriguez and Gio Gonzalez were treated or associated with him,” the statement added.

But despite the denials, Major League Baseball, long suspicious of the clinic’s actions, will continue to proceed in the belief that the assertions in the article have merit. They have been particularly curious about Rodriguez, who admitted in 2009 that he used performance enhancers from 2001 to 2003, but who has denied in several meetings with baseball’s investigators that he has done so since. But what exactly baseball can do about Rodriguez, or any of the other players named, is unclear.

Because the potential evidence does not involve actual failed drug tests, baseball is back where it has been in the past, seeking to perhaps punish players without having the necessary evidence to do so. In the case of the Biogenesis clinic, baseball’s investigators did travel to Florida to meet with members of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, who were taking a close look at the facility.

But whether federal authorities would share with baseball any evidence they develop on the clinic is unclear. In other instances over the last decade, that has not occurred.

“If the feds are not going to prosecute this case it would be much better for us for them to give us some usable evidence like the documents so we can do our job and suspend the players,” said one baseball official. “We could be in discipline hell if that doesn’t happen.”

That official knows that baseball has had little success in suspending players for violating the drug testing program when the players have not actually tested positive. Of the roughly 40 players who have been suspended for violating the testing program since 2005, only a handful have been suspended based on evidence developed by baseball’s investigators or from medical records or court documents.

The most high profile instance of a suspension without a drug test occurred in 2005 when the relief pitcher Jason Grimsley was barred for 50 games after federal authorities unsealed court documents that showed that Grimsley admitted to a federal agent that he had used human growth hormone.

As for the Florida clinic, it has been on the radar of both baseball and federal government since at least 2009, when investigators uncovered evidence that the slugger Manny Ramirez had received a banned drug from the facility. Ramirez was ultimately suspended 50 games for that infraction.

Last summer, baseball’s investigators began to take another look at the clinic after Cabrera, then leading the National League in hitting as the left fielder for the San Francisco Giants, tested positive for elevated testosterone. In the course of that positive test, two people in baseball said, baseball’s investigators uncovered evidence that an employee for Cabrera’s agents, Sam and Seth Levinson, had hatched a cover-up scheme to deceive a baseball arbitrator and have the suspension for the positive drug test thrown out.

Angered, baseball officials began investigating the employee, Juan Nunez, and the Levinsons.

Steve Eder and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting from New York, and Lizette Alvarez from Miami.

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F.D.A. Approves Genetic Drug to Treat Rare Disease

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug Tuesday that not only treats a rare inherited disorder that causes extremely high cholesterol levels and heart attacks by age 30, but does so using a long-sought technology that can shut off specific genes that cause disease.

The drug, Kynamro, which was invented by Isis Pharmaceuticals and will be marketed by Sanofi’s Genzyme division, is unlikely to be a blockbuster. It has some worrisome side effects and there might be no more than a few hundred people in the United States with the disease, known as homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, or HoFH.

Still, Kynamro could become the first commercial success for the gene silencing technique, which is known as antisense, and which some experts say is finally poised to fulfill its promise after over two decades of research and numerous disappointments.

“What many people have been waiting for is validation where someone actually makes a profit and where patients actually benefit,” said Arthur M. Krieg, chief executive of RaNA Therapeutics, an antisense drug developer in Cambridge, Mass.

Isis, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif., has been pursuing antisense technology since the company’s founding in 1989, spending about $2 billion. It had one drug approved in 1998 for an infection associated with AIDS, but the drug did not sell well and some experts said it did not really use the gene-silencing mechanism.

Isis’s experience contrasts with that of Gilead Sciences, which was also founded in the late 1980s to pursue antisense technology. It gave up after several years — selling the patents it no longer needed to Isis — and went on to develop antiviral drugs using other techniques. It is now a biotech superstar with a market value of $59.8 billion, compared with $1.4 billion for Isis.

Stanley T. Crooke, the founder and chief executive of Isis since its inception, said the long period of development was not unusual for a new technology.

“I told people it would be at least 20 years and $2 billion before we knew if the technology would work,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “We think it’s a seminal day for the technology and the company.”

Isis or its partners are developing drugs to lower triglycerides, treat spinal muscular atrophy and reduce scarring from operations, among other things. The partners include Biogen Idec, Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

Two rival antisense companies, Sarepta Therapeutics and Prosensa are developing drugs for muscular dystrophy that have shown promise in early clinical trials.

Still, Dr. Cy Stein, a longtime antisense researcher, said it was too early to say that antisense had arrived. There have been false dawns in the field before.

Antisense drugs work essentially by shooting the messenger. The recipe to make a protein is carried from a gene in the nucleus into the body of a cell by a single strand of RNA, called messenger RNA.

Antisense drugs are small snippets of synthetic DNA or RNA that bind to that messenger RNA in a way that inactivates or destroys it.

In theory, an antisense drug can be made to shut down any gene, providing a means to develop a virtually unlimited number of drugs. But in practice, it has been difficult to deliver the drugs into cells with sufficient potency and lack of toxicity. Companies have developed ways to chemically modify the drugs to help in that regard.

Kynamro, known generically as mipomersen, inhibits action of a gene, apolipoprotein B, that is involved in the formation of particles that carry cholesterol in the blood.

If untreated, people with HoFH can have levels of LDL cholesterol, the so-called bad cholesterol, as high as 1,000 milligrams per deciliter. A level of 130 or less for LDL is generally considered desirable.

Statins work for these patients and have helped increase the typical life span to 33 years, from 18, but further cholesterol reduction is needed. Patients can also have their blood cleansed of cholesterol by being connected to a machine for a few hours once a week.

Patients in the main clinical trial of Kynamro started with LDL levels of around 400. After 26 weeks of treatment, those getting Kynamro had a mean decline in LDL cholesterol of 24.7 percent compared with a decline of 3.3 percent for those getting a placebo.

The label for Kynamro will carry a boxed warning about potential liver damage. Other side effects include injection-site reactions and flulike symptoms.

Kynamro will share the market with Juxtapid, a drug developed by Aegerion Pharmaceuticals that won approval last month.

In October, an F.D.A. advisory committee voted 13-to-2 in favor of approval of Juxtapid but only 9-to-6 in favor of Kynamro, largely because of concern about side effects. Juxtapid is a once-a-day pill, while Kynamro is injected once a week.

Genzyme has not announced the price for Kynamro but it might be similar to that of Juxtapid, which costs $235,000 to $295,000 a year, similar to some other drugs for extremely rare conditions.

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Bipartisan group sees change in politics on immigration reform

A bipartisan coalition of senators said Monday they have created a set of principles based upon which they hope lawmakers will pass immigration reform by summer.

WASHINGTON — Declaring that the politics of immigration  “have been turned upside down,” a bipartisan group of senators Monday outlined common principles for comprehensive immigration reform and expressed optimism that legislation granting legal status to most of the country's 11 million illegal immigrants could be realized by this summer.

One day before President Obama launches a campaign-style push for his vision of immigration reform, representatives of the so-called Group of Eight senators acknowledged previous false starts on the issue, and obstacles that probably lie ahead — particularly in determining how to increase the flow of legal immigration.

But, after an election in which the share of the nonwhite vote continued to grow and swung overwhelmingly toward Obama, the lawmakers said that the path forward was as clear as ever.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee and a past proponent of comprehensive reform, said the change in favor of taking action came down to one word: “Elections.”

PHOTOS: President Obama’s second inauguration

“The Republican Party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens. And we realize that there are many issues in which we think we are in agreement with our Hispanic citizens, but this is a preeminent issue with those citizens,” he said at a Capitol Hill news conference. 

“For the first time ever, there's more political risk in opposing immigration reform than in supporting it,” added Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

The Senate blueprint, drafted during weeks of closed-door meetings by leading senators from each party, is more conservative than Obama's proposal, which the president plans to unveil Tuesday in a speech in Las Vegas. But its provisions for legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants go further than measures that failed to advance in Congress in previous years — a reminder of how swiftly the politics of immigration have shifted since the November election.

The Senate proposal would allow most of those in the country illegally to obtain probationary legal status immediately by paying a fine and back taxes and passing a background check. That would make them eligible to work and live in the U.S. They could earn a green card — permanent residency — after the government certifies that the U.S.-Mexican border has become secure, but might face a lengthy process before becoming citizens.

Obama is expected to push for a faster citizenship process that would not be conditional on border security standards being met first. The structure of the citizenship process will probably be among the most hotly debated parts of any immigration plan.

PHOTOS: A look ahead at 2013’s political battles

Less controversial provisions would tighten requirements on employers to check the immigration status of new workers; increase the number of visas for high-skill jobs; provide green cards automatically to people who earn master's degrees or PhDs in science, technology or math at U.S. universities; and create an agricultural guest-worker program.

Schumer said lawmakers are aiming for full legislative language to be put forward by March, which will then work its way through the committee process. A vote in the Senate could come by late spring or summer, he said.

“We still have a long way to go, but this bipartisan blueprint is a major breakthrough,” he said.

Though their effort was running parallel to the president’s, Democratic Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois said he and Schumer spoke with Obama on Sunday and that the president “cheered us on.” McCain said Obama’s public campaign for it would be helpful to their cause.

Still, many conservatives on Capitol Hill remain skeptical about sweeping immigration legislation and could prove a major obstacle to any compromise.

“The last time we talked about this in 2007, it sounded very seductive. When we saw the details, it was clear it wouldn’t work,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said in an interview Monday. Sessions said he was particularly concerned that the Obama administration is not committed to securing the borders against future illegal immigration.

Similar criticism from Republican lawmakers doomed a 2007 immigration bill pushed by President George W. Bush and seniors Senate Democrats.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

Today, 22 GOP senators who opposed the 2007 plan remain in the Senate, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). By contrast, just two of the 12 Republicans who backed the compromise six years ago are still in Congress — McCain and South Carolina's Lindsey Graham.

Republican resistance to an immigration overhaul promises to be even more intense in the House, where many conservative lawmakers are leery of any proposal that would provide a mechanism for immigrants here illegally to gain citizenship, a key demand on the left.

“When you legalize those who are in the country illegally, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars, costs American workers thousands of jobs and encourages more illegal immigration,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “By granting amnesty, the Senate proposal actually compounds the problem by encouraging more illegal immigration.”

Staff writers Brian Bennett and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

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noam.levey@latimes.com

Twitter: @noamlevey

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Yahoo revenue rises on search advertising

(Reuters) – Yahoo Inc posted a 4 percent gain in net revenue to $ 1.22 billion in the fourth quarter, when an increase in search advertising sales offset weakness in the Web portal’s display ad business.

The company forecast net revenue — which excludes fees shared with partner websites — of $ 1.07 billion to $ 1.1 billion in the current quarter, trailing the $ 1.1 billion that Wall Street analysts expect on average.

Shares in Yahoo, which is trying to stave off declines across much of its business and revive growth, were up 1.5 percent in after hours trade. They had risen 4.5 percent before the revenue projections were disclosed on an analysts’ conference call.

“We got the revenue acceleration we were hoping for. Display was down, but search is doing better” said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley Caris.

“As long as in the near-term things are not bad, I think the stock will generally act positively while we wait for Marissa Mayer to deliver,” said Sinha.

The company said on Monday its fourth-quarter net income was $ 272.3 million, or 23 cents per share, versus $ 295.6 million, or 24 cents per share in the year-ago period.

Excluding certain items, Yahoo said it had earnings per share of 32 cents, versus the average analyst expectation of 28 cents according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Chief Executive Marissa Mayer is moving to revive the company’s fortunes after several years of declining revenue. Yahoo’s stock has risen roughly 30 percent since she became CEO, reaching its highest levels since 2008.

Yahoo said it repurchased $ 1.5 billion worth of shares during the fourth quarter. Shares in the company were up 1.5 percent at $ 20.61 in extended trading from a close of $ 20.31 on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

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The CW orders “The Hundred” drama pilot, two others

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The CW has gone post-apocalyptic with its pilot orders.

The network has placed an order for the drama pilot “The Hundred,” based on the upcoming book series by Kass Morgan (which has received an initial two-book order from Little, Brown).

The pilot will be set 97 years after a nuclear war has destroyed civilization, when a spaceship housing humanity’s lone survivors sends 100 juvenile delinquents back to Earth in hopes of possibly re-populating the planet.

Jason Rothenberg is writing as well as executive producing the project, which comes from Warner Bros. Television and Alloy Entertainment, with Alloy’s Leslie Morgenstein and Gina Girolamo also executive-producing.

The network has also ordered the sci-fi drama “Oxygen,” about a romance between a human girl and an alien boy.

“Passion and politics threaten the peace and an epic romance ignites between a human girl and an alien boy when he and eight others of his kind (The Orion 9) are integrated into a suburban high school ten years after they and hundreds of others landed on Earth and were immediately consigned to an internment camp where they’ve been imprisoned ever since,” a logline for the show explains.

Meredith Averill (“The Good Wife”) is writing and executive-producing “Oxygen,” which comes from CBS Television Studios, Ole Productions, Isla de Babel SL and 360 Powwow LLC.

Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, Scott Rosenberg, Richard Shepard, Bryan Furst, Sean Furst and Daniel Gutman are also executive producing.

Finally, “Reign” promises to tell the “previously unknown and untold story of Mary Queen of Scots,” detailing the secret history of survival at French Court “amidst fierce foes, dark forces, and a world of sexual intrigue.” Stephanie Sengupta (“Hawaii Five-0″) and Laurie McCarthy (“Ghost Whisperer”) are writing and executive producing the pilot, which is being produced by CBS Television Studios.

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Advertising: Playing Whac-a-Mole With Piracy Sites

OVER the years, the fight against online piracy has led to countless lawsuits by media companies and to escalating levels of law enforcement, all with mixed results.

Lately, though, new attention has turned to an aspect of online commerce that critics say finances online piracy: advertising.

Prodding from the White House and a recent academic report have put pressure on the online advertising industry to prevent ads — for jeans, say, or car insurance — from appearing on a page offering a free download of Season 2 of “Game of Thrones.” Yet these efforts have also been slow to produce results, in part because of the complexity of the online ad system.

This month, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab released a report that ranked 10 ad networks on the amount of business they do with sites suspected of engaging in piracy, with Google and Yahoo placing high on the list. Ad networks use advanced computer algorithms to place ads on Web sites. They can be run by agencies, publishers or others.

The implicit criticism of the report is that the operators of these networks know which sites traffic in copyright infringement and therefore could keep ads — and ad money — away from them if they wanted to.

“Brands make sure that their ads never show up on porn sites, so we’re basically saying, why not do the same with piracy sites?” said Jonathan Taplin, the director of the Innovation Lab, which is part of U.S.C.’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

But some of the ad networks cited by the report have disputed its methodology and meaning. And even its supporters complain that the online ad system — a chain of Web sites, ad servers, digital publishers and agency trading desks that buy and sell ads at a rapid pace — operates in a way that makes it difficult to know where to point the finger.

The researchers studied the fragments of computer code that were appended to the ads they found on sites suspected of piracy over a year. The sites were drawn from a report by Google listing sites that had received the most complaints from copyright holders.

Representatives of Google and OpenX, two of the largest companies on U.S.C.’s list, did not deny the prevalence of their codes. But they disputed its meaning, saying that their technology is widely used by third parties — like ad agency trading desks and advertisers — so the presence of their code did not necessarily implicate them in a transaction.

“To grossly overcalculate our network, you’re also grossly overcalculating how many of these sites we are funding,” said Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman. Mitch Stoltz, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was more aggressive, calling the U.S.C. report “a little bit of analysis resting on false premises.”

The report comes a year after the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a Congressional bill that would have given additional powers to federal law enforcement to prosecute copyright infringement. The bill was supported by the media and entertainment world, but activists and technology companies said it would violate due process and privacy.

Since then, the government has tried to press industry to regulate itself.

“We believe that effective enforcement must involve private sector stakeholder efforts,” Victoria Espinel, the United States intellectual property enforcement coordinator, said in a statement. “Voluntary best practices must be practical and effective, must respect privacy, due process, competition, free speech, and must protect legitimate uses of the Internet.”

A lack of progress toward self-regulation has frustrated media companies. They say the opacity of the online ad system makes it nearly impossible to hold any party responsible for the ads.

“The ecosystem for online ads is incredibly complicated,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America. “Everybody can point the finger at other people.”

One example is programmatic buying, a technique used by networks to place ads on sites based primarily on demographics. As a result, a brand may not know every site where its ad will appear.

One solution floated in the ad business is a blacklist of offending Web sites. Dick O’Brien, the executive vice president and director of government relations at the American Association of Advertising Agencies, a trade group, said this would be difficult. “If an organization like ours tries to create a list and organize a boycott, that opens us up to antitrust issues,” he said.

Advertising agencies, including OMD, a digital agency part of the Omnicom Media Group, one of the largest agencies in the world, said they were examining the report, but so far little significant action has been taken. Stephen Kline, the senior counsel for privacy and regulatory matters at the Omnicom Media Group, described the challenge for brands and agencies to identify piracy sites that appear as quickly as they disappear as “a little bit of Whac-a-Mole.”

As Mr. Taplin of the Innovation Lab sees it, Google has effectively provided a blacklist with its Transparency Report, which lists the sites that have received the most takedown requests from copyright owners. But these are only requests, not proof of illegal behavior.

The next edition of the U.S.C. report is due in mid-February. Mr. Taplin said it would name brands that advertise on pirate sites. In an interview, he said he was not ready to identify those brands, but he noted that insurance companies were among the biggest offenders.

Mr. Taplin said the report had not been done for any media company or organization, but, as a veteran of the music and film industries, he also made no secret of his sympathies with Big Content.

He told the story of his friend Levon Helm of the Band, who died last year. (Mr. Taplin was a producer of the band’s 1978 concert film, “The Last Waltz.”) Mr. Helm, he said, had to tour, despite having cancer, to make up for money he lost from royalties, in part because of piracy.

“That didn’t seem fair to me.”

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