Topics by slfisher

If you've ever had Google Maps literally send you up the river or down a sidewalk, you may have wondered whether the company ever actually sees the areas it maps. Now, it does, through an increasing number of volunteers who make corrections and add more detail to maps, according to …

A [URL="http://gawker.com/5367093/mcsteamy-v-gawker-media-llc/gallery/5"]lawsuit[/URL] over a website's [URL="http://gawker.com/5339221/danes-anatomy-mcsteamy-his-wife-and-a-fallen-beauty-queens-naked-threesome"]publication[/URL] of a celebrity threesome sex tape is provoking some [URL="http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/11/does-gawkers-publication-of-mcsteamy-sex-tape-constitute-fair-use315.html"]thoughtful discussion[/URL] about fair use. Not to mention giving PBS, [URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2009/11/what_a_celebrity_sex_tape_laws.html?sc=fb&cc=fp"]NPR[/URL], and the [URL="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/mcsteamy-vid-lawsuit-its-a-copyright-beef/"][I]New York Times[/I][/URL] the opportunity to talk about sex tapes. The tape consists of [I]Grey's Anatomy[/I] actor Eric Dane and his wife …

Calling social media sites a "productivity black hole," the UK IT services group Morse said that staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, according to the [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8325865.stm"]BBC[/URL]. More than half those surveyed said they used social networking sites …

Far from being made superfluous by the Internet, a [URL="http://www.ala.org/ala/research/initiatives/plftas/2008_2009/index.cfm"]recent study[/URL] by the American Library Association finds that the library is often the only source of free Internet access in a community. More than 71 percent of all libraries (and 79 percent of rural libraries) report they are the only …

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., according to an [URL="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/city-council-votes-to-adopt-google-email-system-for-30000-city-employees.html"]article[/URL] in the Los Angeles [I]Times[/I]. The contract is worth $7.25 million and covers 30,000 employees. In June, Washington, D.C. made a similar decision, signing a contract worth almost …

In addition to funding [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story231771.html"]broadband projects[/URL] in the states, particularly in rural areas, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, includes funds for [URL="http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press/2009/BTOP_mapping_090701.pdf"]collection of state-level broadband data[/URL], as well as state-wide broadband mapping and planning. The project, which will also help create …

The Associated Press [URL="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iuRIVBTLUvW7823FC-fcfhvkSxHgD9BHLF180"]reported[/URL] this weekend that the [URL="http://www.whitehouse.gov/"]official White House website[/URL] has been switched to using the open-source Drupal content management system Using open source will result in improved security -- because more programmers will be looking for errors in the software -- as well as more quickly and …

Twitter, Inc., has shut down 33 fake Twitter accounts created by Republicans using the names of Democratic state representatives, but fake websites using the Democrats' names are still up. The story was [URL="http://current.com/177fi4c"]reported[/URL] in the Hartford [I]Advocate[/I], an alternative newsweekly. State Republican Chairman Chris Healy told the paper that it …

A company that has been attempting to obtain licensing fees from adult companies, as well as other providers such as Internet radio stations and leading satellite and cable companies such Echostar, DirectTV, Time Warner Cable, and CSC Holdings, Inc., has had its [URL="http://www.eff.org/files/acacia-patent-invalidated.pdf"]patent thrown out[/URL] by the U.S. District Court …

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The deadline for …

The other day I was on Facebook and a chat window popped up from a college friend of mine. [I]Bob: Hey there. How are u doing? Sharon: ok. you? Bob: Am not too good. Im in some kind of deep mess right now Sharon: uh oh. what happened?[/I] What "Bob" …

The 2008 presidential election featured a new emphasis on using the Internet, ranging from raising money to [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story219553.html"]advertising[/URL] to getting support. It's still going on. Facebook, in particular, due to the ease in which people can set up affinity groups, is proving to be a new source of online activism, …

GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that was started by a federal worker, has been sold to GovDelivery Inc., a venture-backed government communications platform, with GovLoop founder Steve Ressler as its head of social networking. Terms of the sale were not [URL="http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090928_8720.php?oref=rss?zone=NGtoday"]disclosed[/URL]. The service currently has about 20,000 …

It's been known for a while that current and potential future [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2555.html"]employers[/URL] look at people's profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook. And it's also been known that people are using social networking sites to announce the status of their relationship -- or [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3874.html"]lack of one[/URL]. Now the two …

In its ongoing effort to become the coolest city in the U.S., the mayor of Portland, Oregon, is going to attempt [URL="http://portlandoregon.gov/auditor/index.cfm?c=50265&a=264719"]tomorrow night[/URL] to make it an "open source city," making its data as open as possible while respecting privacy, and buying open source applications when possible. If passed by …

A poll on whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated, which was posted to Facebook on Saturday, has been taken down after an investigation by the Secret Service, according to [URL="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113282766&sc=fb&cc=fp"]NPR.[/URL] The poll consisted of a single question: 'should obama be killed? [sic]' with the choices yes, maybe, if he …

In an attempt to build support for a bill that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress, the online gambling industry is running online ads noting that legal online gambling could raise $48 billion for the deficit-plagued U.S. government. "At a time when the …

Idaho, where I live, likes to brag when it makes lists such as "best places to live," "best places to start a business," etc. Now we've made another list: we're the most spammed. [URL="http://downloads.messagelabs.com/dotcom/MLI_2009Sep_Spam_US_FINAL.pdf"]According to MessageLabs[/URL], which was [URL="http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20081117_01"]acquired[/URL] by Symantec in November, the ten states with the highest percentage …

Remember [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story219413.html"]Terry Childs[/URL]? He was the network administrator for the city of San Francisco who -- claiming he was protecting the city government's computer system from incompetent coworkers -- changed the system's passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after being arrested. …

Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have learned that it is possible to predict which men in social networks are gay, even if they aren't out, based on who their friends are. It's the theory behind [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis"]traffic analysis[/URL], or the process of intercepting and examining messages to deduce …

If you've used Facebook for more than, oh, five minutes, you've seen a Facebook quiz. "What Greek dance are you?" "Which NFL coach are you?" "Which Diplomacy country should you play?" and so on. (I forget every quiz I see, and I'm up to more than 250 by now.) But …

What, you hadn't heard? "A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties," [URL="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/28/senate-president-emergency-control-internet/"]FOX News[/URL] said breathlessly. (Nice …

[URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4412.html"]As feared[/URL], the Administration has caved to telecom industry restrictions on mapping the availability of broadband Internet, making it less likely that $7 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, will actually help improve broadband access to people who …

Want to do a public records search on email messages from your state legislator? Chances are, you won't be able to, even with the recent move toward [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4592.html"]transparency in government[/URL]. Even states that do have an email retention policy in state government -- and many of them don't -- often …

The Twitter Platform Team is recommending to all Twitter developers that they make sure their applications support 64-bit integers because the popular service has almost reached the limit of 32-bit unsigned integers. "Twitter status ids are fast approaching the maximum 32-bit *unsigned* integer value (4,294,967,295)," [URL="http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/8f7f1b3cef846f98/0900170fa2f92e27?show_docid=0900170fa2f92e27&pli=1"]posted[/URL] Marcel Molina, identified as …

Convention and visitors bureaus -- perhaps more than 300 of them -- are increasingly using Twitter to help market their locations, and a [URL="http://www.aboutdci.com/dci/media/docs/CVB%20Twitter%20Report%20Final.pdf"]recent study[/URL] examined how they do that. Development Counsellors International, a New York-based tourism firm, said it looked at the convention and visitors bureaus representing the nation’s …

How transparent is too transparent? In an attempt to make it easier for ordinary people to see what their governments are spending their money on, more entities -- from city to federal -- are putting this information online, noting that it's a public record. But some government workers are uncomfortable …

A company has been awarded a patent for providing episodic media downloads, which essentially gives it a patent on all forms of podcasting. The company, VoloMedia, calls itself the "leading provider of advertising and reporting solutions for portable media, extending the reach of video and audio from the PC to …

A group of University of Washington students and professors has developed an application called Vanish that automatically makes data used with it disappear after eight to nine hours. The open-source software is [URL="http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/download.html"]downloadable[/URL] now, as well as information about how to use it and a research paper about its development, …

A recent panel sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation [URL="http://www.glaad.org/Page.aspx?pid=183"](GLAAD)[/URL] discussed the issue of gay characters in online games, some of which forbid them. Games produced by Bay Area-based Electronic Arts Inc., such as the Sims properties and Spore have no restrictions about revealing the fact one …

Some users discovered last week that Amazon has the capability to remove books from their Kindle electronic reading devices, even though they were bought, paid for, downloaded, and in the users' possession. Ironically, among the books with which this was discovered was George Orwell's [I]1984[/I], which postulated a society where …

It's said about writers that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But United Airlines has learned not to get into fights with musicians who have videocameras. As Dave Carroll, of the folk-rock group Sons of Maxwell, reports on his [URL="http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=306453459&blogId=498887803"]blog[/URL], it …

Yahoo! [URL="http://ycorpblog.com/2009/06/30/serving-up-greener-data-centers/"]announced[/URL] this week that it would build what it said what would be the greenest, most energy-efficient data center in the world, powered by Niagara Falls. Data centers are some of the heaviest users of electrical power there are, both to run the servers themselves and to cool them. …

If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal. On his [URL="http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/06/the_future_of_n.html"]blog[/URL], Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded. "Expanding copyright law to bar online access …

Raising privacy and civil liberties issues, job applicants to the city of Bozeman are not only required to list all their social media accounts, but their passwords as well. “Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs …

[I]"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [URL="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore"]John Gilmore[/URL], founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 1993.[/I] In the same way that people in Mumbai used Twitter last fall to [URL="http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/28/mumbai-twitter-sms-tech-internet-cx_bc_kn_1128mumbai.html"]publicize[/URL] news of terrorist attacks in that Indian city, Iranians are using Twitter to let the world …

Given that some courts have found that people can be [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3596.html"]charged[/URL] for violating the terms of service of a particular site, it's important to keep track of what the terms of service are so you don't inadvertently violate them. (Incidentally, some other [URL="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/mass-sjc-tosses-calixte-warrant"]courts[/URL] are finding that violating terms-of-service policies are …

Some people are complaining that the company hoping to map the availability of broadband Internet is too closely tied to the same major telecommunications and cable companies that stand to benefit from the more than $7 billion in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known …

Remember the 14 million missing email messages from the White House under President George W. Bush? [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3815.html"]Remember[/URL] the (albeit flawed) court order (issued days before President Barack Obama's inauguration) directing the Bush White House to figure out what happened to them? Never mind. A federal appeals court recently ruled that …

In what may be a first, a company has bought rights to a Facebook page -- in a bidding war, even. OraBrush, a company that makes tongue cleaners, has outbid Hershey's for the rights to the [URL="http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Kisses/35152599010?ref=s"]"Kisses"[/URL] public profile, according to the [URL="http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/05/27/orabrush-buys-11-million-kisses-fans-marketers-actively-bidding-for-facebook-pages/"]Inside Facebook[/URL] blog. Pricing was not disclosed. The …

Busy this weekend? President Barack Obama and his IT staff are [URL="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/05/21/Opening/"]asking for ideas[/URL] through June 3 to help make government more open. The call for ideas first went out on May 21. So far, there's [URL="http://opengov.ideascale.com/"]1171[/URL]. People can vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the ideas. "Then on …

As [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4304.html"]expected[/URL], Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, has introduced [URL="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.2267:"]legislation[/URL] that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress. The legislation would allow the Treasury Department to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American customers, according to the [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/us/politics/26cong.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimespolitics"]New York Times[/URL]. Under the current …

The continuing saga of Craigslist vs. the state attorneys general took another turn, with South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster [URL="http://www.scattorneygeneral.org/"]contending[/URL] that the continued presence of ads for "erotic services" on the site constituted a criminal violation for which Craigslist management was personally responsible, and with Craigslist management firing back …

People are continuing to find new and interesting things to do with Twitter. One is [URL="http://www.we-love-the.net/Stweet/"]Stweet[/URL], a combination of Twitter and Google Map's Streetview that uses georeferencing. Select a city from the picklist (or enter another city at the bottom of the screen) and it'll show you the most recent …

Along with a number of other changes brought forth by President Barack Obama’s administration, another one might be the re-legalization of online gambling -- particularly poker -- in the United States. Online gambling in the U.S. was made much more difficult, though not technically illegal, in 2006 by the Unlawful …

The [I]New York Times[/I] is [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/technology/internet/29google.html?_r=1"]reporting[/URL] that the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service. In 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed suit against Google, claiming that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted …

A mainstay of situation comedies is when one of the characters plays hooky at work to go do something else -- bowling, watching a ball game, going to the movies -- and gets caught. Never fails. Now there's a new wrinkle for them to try. [URL="http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE53N4HH20090424?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=22&sp=true"]Reuters[/URL] is reporting that a …

Craig Newmark, the San Francisco-based founder of the Craigslist want-ad site, is [URL="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/25/craig-newmark-im-not-plan_n_191350.html"]reportedly[/URL] refusing pressure to shut down his site's Erotic Services section in light of an alleged murder where the victim advertised there, according to a story in the Huffington Post. Philip Markoff, a Boston University medical student, is …

Though the swine flu just began hitting the news media on Friday or so, there's already a number of sites and ways to help you keep track of developments (and give you nightmares, frankly, but forewarned is forearmed). 1. A [URL="http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=p&msa=0&msid=106484775090296685271.0004681a37b713f6b5950&ll=30.977609,-98.789062&spn=53.686525,85.78125&z=4"]Google Map[/URL] of reported swine flu cases. It's not perfect …

Taser International, which makes electric stun guns, is [URL="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aR6xHcnBMn9M&refer=us"]suing[/URL] Linden Research Inc., the owner of the [URL="http://secondlife.com/"]Second Life[/URL] virtual environment, for selling unauthorized virtual versions of its product. The trademark infringement case claims that the online sales of virtual products are damaging the company’s reputation and hurting its sales. Second …