Remember the Pennsylvania school district that was accused of remotely flipping on the webcams of students’ laptops? As if the civil suit filed on behalf of those students wasn’t going to be enough trouble for the Lower Merion representatives, now it seems the FBI wants to know just what’s going on, launching an investigation into the practice. For its part the district said that it remotely activated the cams 42 times, and that it only did so with the bestest of intentions: when trying to locate a missing laptop. It would also like to point out that only two employees had the power to flip the switch, and that they only captured images — never sound. Because, you know, surreptitiously watching your kids is so much less menacing when there’s no audio involved.
Google today said it is willing to hear a privacy group’s concerns about its Google Buzz social media platform, even after the group filed a complaint with the FTC over the controversial service. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed the complaint Tuesday in Washington, arguing that Buzz, which builds a network of friends for Gmail users from the contacts in their e-mail program, violates users’ privacy. “Our door is always open to organizations with suggestions about our products and services,” read an e-mail from a Google spokesperson. “We also welcome dialogue with EPIC and appreciate hearing directly from them about their concerns.” EPIC said in its complaint that the way Buzz was designed and deployed constitutes “unfair and deceptive trade practices,” which makes Buzz subject to review by the FTC. The complaint concerns Google’s move to “convert the private, personal information of Gmail subscribers into public information for the company’s social network service Google Buzz.
As Foursquare makes deals with major media companies, competitor Loopt is continuing to partner with with content companies to offer fresh news and reviews of restaurants, bars, businesses and events. Loopt’s mobile apps incorporates local content, deals and reviews about restaurants, bars and events from Zagat, Citysearch, Bing, and most recently Mobile Spinach. Today, Loopt is announcing a partnership with Tasting Table , daily epicurean email about restaurants, bars, wine stores and cookshops in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington D.C. Loopt users can find Tasting Table-approved restaurants and bars within Loopt Pulse on Loopt’s free mobile application. Tasting Table recommendations range from directions, menus, editorial insights, special offers, and more.
Antitrust lawyer and Open Book Alliance leader Gary Reback has been called the “antitrust champion” and the “protector of the marketplace” by the National Law Journal, and has been at the forefront of many of the most important antitrust cases of the last three decades. He is one of the most vocal opponents of the Google Books settlement. I interviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed. In the column below, Reback discusses Google Books and its ties to Google search. This Thursday leaders of the international publishing industry will watch with bated breath as a federal judge in New York hears arguments over whether to approve the Google Book Settlement.
As you may or may not have heard, the USTR has been accepting public comments for its Special 301 report, which comes out every year in an attempt to name and shame countries that the USTR does not believe does enough to protect US copyrights abroad. Typically, this process is driven very much by the entertainment industry, to the extent that even people in the US copyright office have been known to roll their eyes about the legitimacy of the report. A lot of people have been incorrectly claiming that these comments are about ACTA, but they’re not. The Special 301 report basically just tries to determine which countries the US should put more pressure on to “get with the program,” diplomatically speaking, when it comes to copyright issues. In the past, it’s been used to bully countries like Canada and Israel — both of which have strong copyright that is very much in compliance with international obligations.
If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy . According to the study, which compared click through rates to college education, the less educated your audience, the more likely they are to click through on an advertisement. While this may be good news for some, it certainly seems to spell doom for supporting intelligent content through advertising. Sponsor The two states with the lowest click rate were Massachusetts and Washington, while the state with the highest click-through rate was West Virginia. These correlate very strongly, according to Chitika’s blog post, with the education rates in those states.
Late last week, tech biz bloggers were shocked — and a few were cruelly happy — to read that TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington had fired 17-year-old intern, entrepreneur and Internet fameball Daniel Brusilovsky . Arrington said the teenage overachiever had accepted a computer from a company in exchange for coverage on TechCrunch. Brusilovsky also admitted, Arrington said, to asking a different startup for a MacBook Air, which led that company to complain to Arrington. Not only did Big Mike cut Brusilovsky from staff, he removed all of Daniel’s posts — I counted 70 of them in Google’s cache — and posted a candid and legally-vetted description of the events, titled “ An Apology to Our Readers .” So of course the hot topic of discussion among local journalists over the weekend was, is TechCrunch’s reputation shot now? TechCrunch isn’t a newspaper, so its staff aren’t bound by the well-established and very strict boundaries given to print news writers.
Six venues from baseball’s halcyon days will be offered as downloadable content for preorders of MLB 10: The Show, through GameStop and Amazon. Interestingly, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, perhaps the most pined-for, long-since-demolished stadium in baseball lore, is not on the list. Nor are more recent casualties such as Tiger Stadium or Comiskey Park, which would have plenty more fans with a living memory of the place than Shibe or the Polo Grounds. If you preorder in the store, you get a card with a DLC code the day you pick up the game; online orders will have the code emailed. These are the parks: • Crosley Field: Home of the Cincinnati Reds from 1912 to 1970.
The good folks at UK open government consultancy Delib have just released a short documentary about the United States’ first year since President Obama’s Open Government memorandum. The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, both on location in Washington DC and via Skype. Sponsor “On a visit to Washington to see our partners NAPA back in November,” writes Quigley on the Delib blog, “I thought it would be fun to interview a few of the Open Gov people I’d read about and worked with over the last 12 months… I discovered that Open Gov was bigger and more impactful that I first thought and decided to extend the ‘few interviews’ into a short film, and launch the film to mark the achievements of the Open Gov initiative on its one year anniversary.” Quigley’s interviewees ended up ranging in scope from the White House’s head of the Open Gov initiative, Beth Noveck, to Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media. To learn more about the interviews and process, check out Delib’s page on the film .
Whether it’s due to companies downsizing, former corporate workers receiving buyout packages or someone simply deciding that now is the right time, increasingly more individuals are deciding to go into business for themselves. And one of the early challenges these small business owners and entrepreneurs will face is establishing a professional image to help get their burgeoning business off the ground. Sure you can establish a home-based office, but what do you do when you need a more professional environment to meet with a prospective client or how do you deal with every day distractions like kids, barking dogs or television? “Securing professional office space doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition. There are cost-effective options like fully furnished, move-in ready offices that can help small business owners establish the professional presence they need to help legitimize their business,” said Guillermo Rotman, CEO, The Regus Group Americas.
Along with 3D, 2010 will be the year for mobile digital TV. Several companies are showing off Mobile DTV gear including Samsung’s pimped out Mobile DTV Moment smartphone (beta test begins in Washington, D.C., in March) and Philips portable DVD player with a built-in Mobile DTV tuner (PET-749, April, $180). But you’ll likely get Mobile DTV on your smartphone or laptop via a dongle or portable receiver before the integrated devices hit the market. For instance, a company called Tivit will start selling a WiFi Mobile DTV connectivity device that sends signal to iPhones, BlackBerrys and laptops of any kind via WiFi in March for around $100. You’ll need to load the appropriate free app on your device, which supplies your local channel guide.
What to read on your soon-to-come tablet computer? USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are among the hundred or so American publications available for free reading in an ad-free, newspaper-style format on gadgets that run either Android or iPhone operating systems through PressReader.com . PressReader carries more than 1,400 publications from around the world. There are conspicuous holes — no New York Times, no Wall Street Journal U.S. editions — but you can get WSJ Asia and WSJ Europe, plus the global version of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune .
Filed under: Government/Legal Remember that insane list filled with great cars that were reportedly crushed under the Cash-for-Clunkers program? We were wondering if and when the federal government would thoroughly audit dealers who cashed in products like a 2006 Cadillac STS, an Audi S6 or a 2008 Foose F-150. That still may or may not happen, but apparently isn’t the chief concern of Iowa Senator (R) Charles Grassley. The senator has reportedly asked Department of Transportation chief Ray LaHood to look for evidence of fraud in the C4C program’s $110 million administrative costs only. Grassley noted the exceptionally quick turnaround time of the program in his letter to LaHood and added “the DOT had only 30 days after the date the legislation was enacted into law to engage contractors and stand up the Program before the first rebates were issued.” Grassley added that the original clunkers program accounted for $50 million in administrative costs but no additional money was allocated when the government approved an additional $2 billion for the program.
Here’s a superficially curious, but fundamentally quite important, bit of legal wrangling for you. Reuters is reporting that the District of Columbia has filed suit against AT&T Corp for the recovery of unused balances on calling cards purchased from the telecom giant. Estimated at somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the overall value of the cards, the so-called breakage — leftover credit that customers neglect to use — has typically remained with the carrier as a sort of predictable bonus. The DC Attorney General, however, is seeking to have breakages treated as unclaimed property, which under district law means that after three years they must be returned to the state. Whichever side of the fence you sit on, the decision on this case will set a significant precedent for the future of such prepaid services.
There isn’t a mass exodus from Facebook over the privacy settings, but it is responding with messages like this sent to users to assuage their fears: “Worried about search engines? Your information is safe. There have been misleading rumors about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true…” Several thoughtful Web 2.0 users have blogged about their decision in the last week to leave Facebook and two different “suicide” sites exist. Sponsor This guest post was written by Kaliya Hamlin, also known as Identity Woman , who has been working on cultivating open standards for user-centric identity since 2004.
