Posts by slfisher

After finding out that criminal attorneys and divorce lawyers are using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to find out information for and about clients, it shouldn't be any surprise that banks are doing the same thing.

"Companies like RapLeaf of San Francisco have been quietly gathering information you post publicly on sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace," according to a piece by Channel 7 KGO Television, in San Francisco. "RapLeaf has now created "social profiles" on 387 million unwitting consumers and sold them to lots of companies, including banks."

The piece went on to note that RapLeaf spokesman Joel Jewitt said banks use the information solely for marketing and not to determine your credit risk.

Using the same sort of traffic analysis that let an experimental Massachusetts Institute of Technology program figure out which men were gay, RapLeaf technology also looks at your friends, under the theory that groups of friends behave alike, though Jewitt assured the television station that deadbeat friends wouldn't be held against you.

However, the television station found only one lender -- The Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lender based in Redwood City, Calif. -- that said it used social media to help make its decisions. Bank of America would not comment, and Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Capital One all said they do not use social profiles for any purpose. In fact, by doing so, lenders could be running too high …

40 million people were without power in the eastern United States, more than 60 million cellphones were out of service, and Wall Street was closed for a week due to a terrorist cyberattack against the United States.

No, it didn't really happen. But it could.

Coverage of a simulated cyber attack on the United States, held yesterday by the Bipartisan Policy Center, will be aired on CNN on Saturday, February 20 and Sunday, February 21 at 8:00pm, 11:00pm and 2:00am ET each night under the title “We Were Warned: Cyber Shockwave."

"The simulation envisioned an attack that unfolds over a single day in July 2011," the Bipartisan Policy Center said. "When the Cabinet convenes to face this crisis, 20 million of the nation's smart phones have already stopped working. The attack, the result of a malware program that had been planted in phones months earlier through a popular “March Madness” basketball bracket application, disrupts mobile service for millions. The attack escalates, shutting down an electronic energy trading platform and crippling the power grid on the Eastern seaboard."

Participants included a number of present and past Congressional and Presidential advisors, playing their roles in real time, without knowing the scenario in advance, the Center said.

"Americans need to know that they should not expect to have their cellphone and other communications to be private -- not if the government is going to have to take aggressive action to tamp down the threat," said Jamie …

A police officer who posted to a Facebook page criticism of a political movement in which pro-gun advocates openly carry firearms in public has come under fire for claiming, in what he is now saying was a joke, that they should be shot.

East Palo Alto Detective Rod Tuason was responding to a friend's Facebook posting, who had suggested that "Open Carry Advocates need to start carrying in like Oakland, Richmond, East Palo Alto and not limit themselves to the hoity toity cities," according to a screenshot of the discussion on the firearm advocacy website Calguns.net.

"Sounds like you had someone practicing their 2nd amendment rights last night!" Tuason wrote. "Should've pulled the AR out and prone them all out! And if one of them makes a furtive movement … 2 weeks off!!!" This refers "to the modified duty, commonly known as desk duty, that typically follows any instance in which an officer is investigated for firing his weapon," explained a Fox News article on the controversy.

Tuason's posting was then picked up by the blog "Kevin Thomason's "Oaklander,"" titled "Random Musings by a Second Amendment Fan," at which point it went viral.

"East Palo Alto, CA Detective Roderick Tuason didn't realize that actual PRO-GUN people also read Facebook," Thomason posted. "Amazingly, he posted the following comment about law abiding gun owners on a friend's page. Basically, he's saying "prone them out" (on the ground), and if anyone …

YouTube is coming under criticism for continuing to keep online a ten-minute interview with Scott Roeder, who was convicted after a 37-minute deliberation of first-degree murder for killing Dr. George Tiller, whose Kansas clinic performed late-term abortions.

The interview is by phone but includes a scroll with the text. It was held on February 5 and posted four days ago, and had 3,551 hits at press time.

The interview was conducted by Dave Leach, "who also orchestrated the prison art fundraising action to help pay for Roeder's legal defence and authored a manual detailing how to damage abortion clinics," according to an article in the British newspaper The Guardian.

"YouTube, whose community guidelines purport to "take seriously" any content containing "predatory behaviour, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people's personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate," is providing free hosting services so that Roeder might disseminate his message of violent hatred," the Guardian continued.

The interview, identified as "Part 1," is to be part of a series, according to an article by the Associated Press.

While YouTube has not commented on the video, on February 10, the site instituted something called "safety mode," "an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube," according to the YouTube blog. With safety …

Legislators around the country are scrambling to look at their states' laws about lewd messages to minors after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a conviction, saying state law didn't support it because it didn't specify online messaging.

“The online conversations in this case, as they were not written with pen or pencil, cannot be considered `handwritten’ materials,’’ Justice Francis X. Spina wrote on behalf of the Supreme Judicial Court, in a unanimous decision. “If the Legislature wishes to include instant messaging or other electronically transmitted text in the definition, it is for the Legislature, not the court, to do so.’’

Many states have similar phrasing in their lewd messaging laws, so it is likely that this is a problem that goes beyond just Massachusetts.

Matt H. Zubiel had been charged with four counts of sending sexually explicit instant messages in February 2006 to a Plymouth County deputy sheriff posing as a girl online. Each count carried a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Ironically, noted the Boston Globe, the legislature had changed those laws four years ago to make the penalties harsher, but had not added language to include electronically transmitted messages.

The Massachusetts Governor, as well as the chair of the state legislature's judiciary committee, plans to file legislation next week to amend the law, local papers reported.

oh, thanks so much!

I'm informed the link to the copied photo no longer works.

Scrapping scissors and knitting needles at the ready, sellers on the handcrafting site www.etsy.com are up in arms over what they say are sites stealing their designs and images and then hiring other crafters to produce them.

Discussion on the topic started earlier today, with more than 600 postings at this writing.

In a real-to-life embodiment of John Naisbitt's "High Tech, High Touch," first publicized in his book Megatrends, Etsy -- a sort of eBay for the crafty -- has became a runaway success. The website, which bills itself as "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade," raised $27 million in startup funding two years ago.

While sites such as "Regretsy" have spoofed Etsy and certain items on it, the handcrafters claim that sites such as Trader Lou and A.H. Smith -- reportedly all registered to a Robert Frechette -- are going a step further and actually promoting Etsy pieces as their own.

"Here are the legitimate earrings, and here they are on the AH Smith site," reported one commenter.

Interestingly, artisans on the site are working together to find examples of duplications, alert the local and national media, contact Frechette, comment on the items and on his sites, do legal research, report the incidents to law enforcement, and so on -- another example of the power of the Internet mob as described by Clay …

Apparently Amazon has dropped the paper versions of Macmillan books as well as the electronic versions; I got conflicting information last night.

Authors of books published by Macmillan discovered early Saturday morning that all their electronic books been pulled from Amazon sales, and even wishlists, in a dispute between Amazon and their publisher over e-book pricing.

How the dispute is resolved will help determine the price of e-books in the future.

"Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15," reported the New York Times in its technology blog. "Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter."

Part of the dispute is related to the Apple iPad, using iBooks technology, the Times reported. "Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBooks store," the blog read. Apple will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books, the Times said in an earlier story.

In a published advertisement today, Macmillan CEO John Sargent said he had met with Amazon in Seattle on Thursday, and gave them a proposal for new terms of sale for e-books -- or, as an alternative, greatly reducing the number of titles it would sell with Amazon. "By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon [Friday] they informed me that they were taking all our books off the …

Perhaps taking the lead from Connecticut Republicans who set up fake Twitter accounts and websites for their Democratic opponents, other political campaigns are doing it, too.

In California, an intern for the campaign of Beth Krom for Congress noticed that the website of incumbent Representative John Campbell had a misspelled link: CampbellforCongres.com, with a missing s. "Krom's supporters bought the misspelled domain name and redirected it to Krom's website," explained NBC News.

Moreover, the link was unnoticed from mid-November until just the other day, when the OC Register's blog pointed it out.

On the other hand, Republican Rita Meyer, candidate for Governor in Wyoming, cut ties with a volunteer staffer who had performed a similar trick, according to the Associated Press. Opponent Matt Mead had the website meadforgovernor.com, and Meyer staffer Paul Montoya reportedly registered the URL mattmeadforgovernor.com and redirected it to Meyer's site.

According to the AP, Mead learned about it from supporters and confronted Meyer, who said she didn't know about it and wouldn't have done it because it would reflect badly on her campaign. The site was switched back to the legitimate Mead site on Wednesday.

Montoya, for his part, reportedly claimed it was meant to demonstrate the importance of securing pertinent domain names.

To protest a planned Internet filter in Australia, Australian websites and users are being encouraged this week to turn themselves black.

"The Federal Government wants to pass laws to force internet service providers to block banned material hosted on overseas servers," explained one Australian media source. "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says he intends to introduce the legislation in the first half of 2010."

The protest, known as the Great Australian Internet Blackout, says the measure wouldn't protect children or stop the flow of illegal content, would increase costs, and would put Australia on par with countries such as China and Iran for having restrictive Internet policies.

Users are being encouraged to block out their profile pictures, as well as their websites. Instructions on how to do that are given on the blackout site. In addition, people are urged to write their members of parliament. There is also a Facebook group with almost 5,000 members.

The group hopes to have 500 websites participate.

Well, there's one advantage to global warming: The Kodiak-Kenai Cable Company (KKCC) has announced plans to finance, design, build and operate an express undersea fiber optic cable connecting Asia and Europe, routed through the Arctic, according to an article in the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Construction of the $1.2 billion, 10,000-mile ArcticLink is expected to start in 2011 and be completed by 2013. It uses "a politically stable and secure route" through Japan, the United States, Canada, Greenland, the Arctic region, and the United Kingdom.

"The project will also utilize four, 40 gigabit per second sub sea fiber pairs, providing four times the existing capacity per wavelength for a combined system capacity of 6.4 terabits per second," the Kodiak Daily Mirror said. "It will also have record setting latencies of less than 90 milliseconds. That is nearly a 50 percent reduction compared to today’s preferred Asia-Europe route latency times."

However, while it will bring faster Internet to Unalaska and Prudhoe Bay, it won't improve service to other parts of western Alaska, said KUCB News. The Northern Fiber Optic Link project, another KKCC project that is aimed at bringing high speed Internet to all of the communities in western Alaska, is a separate project to be funded, if accepted, by the stimulus.

Interested in following the Obama presidency?

There's an app for that.

Timed for the State of the Union speech next week, TheWhiteHouse is a free application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch that lets users stream video, browse photos, and read text from President Barack Obama's White House.

According to the White House blog, this is just the first step for the WhiteHouse.gov mobile platform. "In the coming weeks, we’ll also launch mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, a mobile-ready version of WhiteHouse.gov that is optimized for any internet-enabled mobile device, including many other phones," the blog entry said.

While waiting for federal legislation legalizing online gambling -- a vote that could happen as early as next month -- individual states are looking to legalize online gambling as well.

States such as New Jersey, California, and Florida are considering legislation that would permit online gambling within their states -- and which would also put them in a position for being a center of interstate gambling as well, should it be legalized on a federal level. "[D]ifferent players [are] attempting to use the political process as essentially a land grab – to position the legislation to give them either a monopoly or special position if intrastate wagering should become legal," noted Anthony Cabot, partner and gaming group leader at Lewis & Roca, in his blog.

In addition, with many states in dire financial straits, a piece of the estimated $48 billion that legalized online gambling could make for the U.S. is tempting. Other states, such as Florida, are concerned that without legalization, citizens will be taken advantage of by unscrupulous operators.

However, some say that gambling within a state -- even one as large as California -- isn't likely to attract enough people to make it viable to offer as many games and as big tournaments as offshore sites such as PokerStars and Full Tilt, where most U.S. online poker users currently play, unless such sites are shut down at the …

Here's a similar story, about how someone being online gave them an alibi.

http://www.daniweb.com/news/post976061.html

Online legal experts are salivating over cookies.

Specifically, they are leaping to comment on the legal precedents involved over a lawsuit by Dr. Sanford Siegal, creator of the "Cookie Diet," and his company, Dr. Siegal's Direct Nutritionals, LLC, against celebrity, model, socialite, and actress Kim Kardashian over what they allege is libelous material in a Tweet.

“According to the complaint, Dr. Siegal's company sent diet samples to Kardashian's publicist last Spring after the company's CEO read an article claiming Kardashian, and other celebrities, had lost weight using the cookie diet,” noted David Obrien on the Citizen Media Law Project, which is monitoring the case. “The complaint states that neither Kardashian nor her publicist confirmed or denied the accuracy of the article, but acknowledged they received the samples. Subsequently, the company posted a hyperlink on its website, alongside other news articles written about the diet, to a subsequent article that again stated that Kardashian and other celebrities had lost weight using the cookie diet.

"On October 29, 2009, two tweets posted to Kardashian's Twitter account:
14(a). Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet is falsely promoting that I'm on this diet. NOT TRUE! I would never do this unhealthy diet! I do QuickTrim!
14(b). If this Dr. Siegal is lying about me being on this diet, what else are they lying about? Not cool!

"More than a month later, on December 11, 2009, Kardashian's legal team took aim at the …

The Federal Communications Commission asked Congress this week for a one-month extension to its Feb. 17 deadline for a report on a national broadband plan, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The agency said it needed more time to fully brief commissioners and key members of Congress, to get additional input from stakeholders, and to digest the exhaustive record.

"Broadly, the plan is expected to suggest that the U.S. overhauls its $7 billion annual federal phone-subsidy program to cover broadband lines and that FCC needs to reallocate some airwaves for wireless carriers to offer broadband instead," the Wall Street Journal described. "The plan also will offer ideas for how the U.S. can encourage more Americans to subscribe to broadband services."

The FCC issued a preliminary report earlier this year that called for "universal service," which should encompass broadband Internet access in the same way that it originally encompassed telephone access.

House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller have indicated that they are amenable to the request.

wow. well, better she found out before she married him, I guess.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the percentage of Latinos who use the Internet has jumped, and that a larger percentage of Latinos than blacks now use the Internet.

From 2006 to 2008, Internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points, from 54 percent to 64 percent. In comparison, the rates for whites rose four percentage points, from 72 percent to 76 percent, and the rates for blacks rose two percentage points, from 61 to 63 percent, during that time period, Pew said.

All three races showed a leveling off in home use among Internet users. In 2006, 92 percent of white Internet users had a home connection, compared with 94 percent in 2008. In 2006, 84 percent of African-American Internet users had a home connection, compared with 87 percent in 2008. In 2006, 79 percent of Latinos who were online had a home connection, compared with 81 percent in 2008.

However, whites were even more likely than blacks or Latinos to have a high-speed broadband connection at home. In 2006, 65 percent of white home Internet users had broadband, compared with 82 percent in 2008, a difference of 17 percentage points. In 2006, 63 percent of black home Internet users had broadband, compared with 78 percent in 2008, a difference of 15 percentage points. In 2006, 63 percent of Latinos with home internet access had a broadband connection, compared with 76 percent in 2008, a …

Facebook is now being blamed for up to 1 in 5 divorces, according to an analysis performed on an online database of divorce documents.

The website, called Divorce-Online, had Facebook mentioned 989 times out of 5,000 documents, according to Mark Keenan, managing director of the site.

The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats, Keenan said in an article in the Sun.

Facebook has changed how relationships and breakups are conducted for a while now, with divorce attorneys mining it for evidence and with people announcing the state of their relationship using it.

Other social media sites were also mentioned in divorce papers, but Facebook received more attention.

If you've ever wanted to read Sprague's Journal of Maine History, or Pioneers of Scioto County, but couldn't because they were too old, you're in luck. They're among nearly 60,000 books -- many too fragile to be safely handled -- that have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), the world’s largest library. You can read and download these books for free.

The project is called Digitizing American Imprints and consists of books published before 1923, because they are in the public domain in the United States after the expiration of their U.S. copyrights (which helps it avoid some of the copyright issues Google Books has had). Many of these books cover a period of Western settlement of the United States, starting in 1865, but they date as far back as 1707, covering the trial of two Presbyterian ministers in New York.

These and the other digitized books can be accessed through the Library’s catalog Web site and the Internet Archive (IA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free online digital library founded by Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle. The project was funded by a $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Using overhead cameras, 1000 books can be scanned per week. In addition, the Library of Congress is producing a report on best practices for dealing with brittle books and fold-out materials that it plans to make …

Almost exactly a year after Facebook users complained that the site was deleting pictures of them with their nursing babies, now they're complaining that they can't show pictures of their pregnant bellies, either.

The Facebook group "Allow pregnant women to display pictures of their baby bump!!!!" was formed on June 1 but started getting more publicity only in late December. It now has 173 members.

The founder of the group claims that Facebook deleted a non-sexual picture of her pregnant stomach, saying it was obscene. In comparison, however, the woman notes, pictures of non-pregnant women with crop tops that also display their stomach aren't deleted.

It's not entirely clear whether the group is serious or a spoof. Certainly it hasn't gotten nearly the attention of "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!" which has almost a quarter-million members.

In addition, it seems that the policy, if there is one, is unevenly applied; while some women do report having pregnancy pictures deleted (including the group's picture), other pictures remain.

Currently the "baby bump" page has four pictures, compared with more than 5,000 breastfeeding pictures.

The main Facebook page has no information about whether such a ban exists.

As increasing numbers of states are running into budgetary problems, some of them are starting to look at taxing Internet sales.

When the Internet first started becoming a commercial entity, Internet sales were exempted from sales taxes in order to help encourage new commercial companies to form on the Internet. But now, with Internet retail firmly established, legislators are starting to say such protections are no longer needed.

Currently, the law -- due to the 1992 Supreme Court ruling of Quill vs. North Dakota -- is that an online retailer has to pay taxes on sales only if it has a physical presence in a state. The argument by opponents of such taxes is that, without such a physical presence, it isn't using state services and so shouldn't have to pay state taxes.

(Technically, according to that same ruling, it is not the seller that owes taxes, but the buyer. However, states don't have an efficient mechanism for enforcing the collection of such taxes from the buyer, so they currently come from the seller.)

Moreover, some Internet retail companies, such as Amazon, have structured their companies in such a way as to avoid paying sales taxes as much as possible. "By creating wholly owned subsidiaries for the parts that are treated separately for tax matters, Amazon is under no obligation to collect sales tax," read a recent article in the New York Times. This legal technique is called “entity isolation,” said Michael …

You could call it Santa 6.0.

In what's becoming a regular product cycle, Google announced today the new features that Santa-tracking kids of all ages could expect starting on Christmas Eve at 2 am EST: primarily, support for the Google Earth plug-in, meaning that users will be able to watch Santa from within a browser rather than having to run the Google Earth software.

"Last year, users were prompted to install Google Earth, download the .kmz file, then open the .kmz in Google Earth. For some less-than-technically-savvy users, this 3-part process was confusing and difficult," explained the Google Geo Developers Blog. "Using the Plug-in is much easier; if users have the lightweight client (aka, the Plug-in) installed, all they have to do is visit the NORAD Tracks Santa Google Earth page, and they'll see Santa in 3D."

As with last year, other ways to track Santa include a Twitter feed (@noradsanta) and on mobile phones using Google Maps.

So how did a missile defense system begin tracking Santa in the first place?

It's actually a very sweet story. "The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number," explains the NORAD Santa website. "Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief's operations "hotline." The Director of Operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff …

Hewlett-Packard is scrambling to respond to an issue brought up by a Dec. 10 YouTube video demonstrating that the facial tracking software used in some of its laptops doesn't recognize black people.

HP responded to the issue yesterday in its blog, and it's starting to go viral today.

In the light-hearted but pointed video, black "Desi" and white "Wanda" show how the software tracks Wanda but not Desi, even though they're in the same room, at the same angle, with the same lighting. The tracking works when Wanda enters the frame, and stops working when Desi enters.

A mortified HP blamed the problem on insufficient contrast between the eyes and the skin of the upper cheek and nose. "We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting," HP said, referring people to information about optimum lighting for facial-tracking software.

Meanwhile, the company is pledging to work on the problem with its partners.

The federal government today made the first awards aimed toward improving broadband access in the U.S.

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 applications for the first round was earlier this year.

At an event at Impulse Manufacturing in Dawsonville, Georgia, with Governor Sonny Perdue (R-GA), Vice President Joe Biden announced an initial $183 million investment in eighteen broadband projects benefiting seventeen states, which has already been matched by more than $46 million in public and private sector capital, the White House said.

The following Middle Mile awards were made through the Department of Commerce:

• GEORGIA: North Georgia Network Cooperative, Inc., $33.5 million grant with an additional $8.8 million in matching funds to deploy a 260-mile regional fiber-optic ring to deliver gigabit broadband in the North Georgia foothills.
• MAINE: Biddeford Internet Corp. (d.b.a. GWI), $25.4 million grant with an additional $6.4 million in matching funds to build a 1,100-mile open access fiber-optic network extending to the most rural and disadvantaged areas of the state of Maine, from the Saint John Valley in the north, to the rocky coastline of downeast Maine, to the mountainous regions of western Maine.
• NEW YORK: ION Hold Co., LLC, $39.7 million grant with an additional $9.9 …

An increasing number of cities in the United States and Canada are releasing data to developers to use in applications.

While regions have released geographic information system (GIS) data for some time, such data required complicated software to use. Cities are now releasing all kinds of data, some of them as simple as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

In October, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom required that City departments make all non-confidential datasets under their authority available on DataSF.org. Dozens are available, ranging from city surveys, election statements and ballot measures, and performance measures, as well as a great deal of GIS data.

New York has a similar program called the New York Data Mine, while the District of Columbia's is called the Data Catalog. Portland announced such an initiative in September.

In Canada, Toronto has also made a great deal of city data available, while Vancouver has announced its intention to do so.

Such initiatives enable developers -- not just for computers, but also for smart phones such as the iPhone -- to say "there's an app for that" regarding all sorts of city services, including mashups between them. New York is having a contest to develop interesting applications, while San Francisco has posted a showcase of interesting apps online.

The other advantage, notes the New York Times in an article about the phenomenon, is …

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against a number of government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies for using social networking sites for investigations, data-collection, and surveillance.

The EFF is working with the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. The Samuelson Clinic made more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of EFF to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies, asking for information about how the government collects and uses social media information. Several agencies did not respond, which led to the lawsuit.

Agencies named in the lawsuit include the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Stories cited by the EFF in the lawsuit included law enforcement searches in social media sites for evidence of underage drinking, the release of court records, a man arrested for alerting protesters to FBI agencies via Twitter, and a person accused of bank fraud who posted information on Facebook about living it up in Mexico.

Keeping the Internet safe for satire, the World Intellectual Property Organization ruled that the domain name glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com was not a violation of the conservative political commentator's intellectual property.

The WIPO ruling "dismissed Beck's argument that Internet users could be confused by the domain name and its accompanying Web site," noted an NPR article. "'Even a 'moron in a hurry,'" read the decision, quoting Eiland-Hall's attorney, "would not likely conclude that Complainant sponsored, endorsed or was affiliated with the website addressed by the disputed domain name.""

Indeed, in an excellent example of the Streisand Effect, Beck's September lawsuit actually brought more attention to the website, noted the site's founder, Isaac Eiland-Hall, in a letter to Beck upon the WIPO's decision.

"It bears observing that by bringing the WIPO complaint, you took what was merely one small critique meme, in a seas of internet memes, and turned it into a super-meme," Eiland-Hall said. "Then, in pressing forward (by not withdrawing the complaint and instead filing additional briefs), you turned the super-meme into an object lesson in First Amendment principles."

The point of the website -- riffing upon an August, 2008, joke that was itself a reference to a joke about comedian Bob Saget -- was to mock Beck's rhetorical style by accusing him of something that, as former president Lyndon Johnson would have said, the b*****d hadn't denied.

Upon making his …

I was pretty sure I wasn't the only person who cooked Thanksgiving dinner in front of, not a propped-up cookbook, but a laptop.

It turns out the New York Times agrees. In fact, the paper did an analysis of search terms by region and by time, to see what conclusions could be drawn.

First of all, many more people are using the Internet than they used to. In fact, the day or two before Thanksgiving is cooking sites' equivalent of Black Friday for cybershopping sites; for example, Allrecipes.com builds server capacity for the day before Thanksgiving, then uses only half of it the rest of the year. Similarly, Google searches for Thanksgiving recipes have climbed steadily, doubling from 2007 to 2008, the article indicated.

Even the venerable Butterball hotline has switched to Twitter.

Second, people search for different types of recipes depending on the time of day. "At Allrecipes.com, pie searches got the most action on Wednesday morning," the Times said. "But by 10 a.m., people began earnest hunts for sweet potato casserole and stuffing recipes. By noon, 100,000 people had searched for mashed potato recipes. The real outlier is gravy. If this Thanksgiving Day is anything like last year’s, most searches will slow by 10 a.m. But not gravy. That vexing cook’s kryptonite should peak about 3 p.m."

People also do different searches depending on where they are. In the Southeast, it's broccoli casserole. In North …

Thinking of looking for a flu shot while you're out shopping this weekend but don't know where to look?

There's an app (Google Maps) for that. Type in a location and it will show you locations in the area that offer flu shots, as well as their times -- and it will differentiate between seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccines, in case you need one and not the other.

The application isn't perfect. It seems to focus primarily on commercial providers of flu vaccines, such as drugstores, supermarkets, and department stores. It doesn't, however, provide information on vaccination clinics offered by local health districts -- though it does provide the name of the nearest health district, a link to flu information on its website, and suggests that users call the district for more information. It also doesn't seem to include medical providers such as doctors and clinics, unless, coincidentally, the doctors in all the cities I checked were out.

Its geographic range also appears to be fairly small; checking my own town found nothing, but didn't show possibilities in larger cities just 20 minutes away. There also doesn't seem to be a way to widen the range of the area in which the application looks.

But, it's a start, it's better than nothing, and if a particular area doesn't have commercial vaccine providers, users can get in contact with the area health district to get more information.

Ever wanted to see the International Space Station but didn't know when or how to look?

There's an app (Twitter) for that.

Start following @twisst and using the information in your profile, it will let you know when the International Space Station is scheduled to pass by you.

"So, every time the International Space Station is coming, Twisst sends the follower an alert throught Twitter," the website said. "It announces when ISS will pass, at the user's local time. Also Twisst tells whether it is a remarkable nice one or not - so how bright and how high the space station will be on that pass."

(The @twisst guys are from the Netherlands and some of the phrasing is a little odd. But it's better than my Dutch.)

The application doesn't yet use the recently announced Twitter geocoding feature, partly because the application predates the feature and partly because the majority of users have the geocoding feature turned off, a company representative said.

"ISS will cross the sky at your location at [time]! more details: http://twisst.nl/17460" is reportedly the message.

Unfortunately, I have to say reportedly, because although my local news showed the ISS passing overhead in my area last night -- they had film and everything -- @twisst didn't tell me. However, it's supposed to go by again tomorrow, so I'm willing to give it another chance.

@twisst currently has nearly 25,000 followers.

In 1968, a teacher named Jane Elliott performed a seminal experiment with her class of third-graders. Wishing to teach them about prejudice, she told them that kids with blue eyes were superior to those with brown eyes, gave the blue-eyed kids all sorts of privileges, and made the brown-eyed kids second-class citizens. Soon enough, the kids had internalized the differences, with the blue-eyed kids picking on the brown-eyed ones.

Now, students across Canada and the U.S. have taken it upon themselves to set up a similar scenario, except with prejudice against redheaded kids, inspired by a four-year-old South Park episode.

Four redheaded children in Los Angeles-area schools were attacked on Friday, based on a Facebook group declaring it to be "Kick a Ginger Day," according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, while two dozen children in an Ontario, Canada, school were suspended after a similar incident and other students in the Vancouver area reported being kicked as many as 80 times during the day.

In the U.S., it was not considered to be a hate crime, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are considering classing it as such.

Facebook has since taken the group down, saying it had not been aware of it, but a cached version indicated that it had more than 4,500 fans.

In fact, at this point there are now eleven pages and more than 180 groups, the …

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 an article in the New York Times.

Google has stopped using commercial databases such as Tele Atlas, choosing instead to use freely available government databases, as well as input from users. "[W]e've worked directly with a wide range of authoritative information sources to create a new base map dataset," according to the Google Earth and Maps blog. "In our experience, these organizations that create the data do the best job of keeping it accurate and up-to-date.

Even Tele Atlas itself is starting to incorporate input from users, though it does not rely on it, the New York Times said. Beyond that, organizations such as WikiMapia and OpenStreetMap are open-source maps created by users.

However, users have been unable to determine the existence of a U.K. town called Argleton, though it is described in Google Maps, according to a different New York Times story.

"When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton – which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park – he found just acres of green, empty fields," the New York Times reported.

Paper maps often include minor imaginary streets to enable the map …

We're already heard about people being fired for calling in sick and then posting on Facebook.

Now a woman has lost her insurance.

According to CBCNews, Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression. She was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife, her insurance company. When the payments stopped, she called the insurance company and was told she was "available to work, because of Facebook."

The insurance agent reportedly described several pictures Blanchard had posted, including ones showing her at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party, and at the beach — evidence that she is no longer depressed.

Blanchard said she had taken the vacation on her doctor's advice and that she had informed the company of the trip.

In addition, Blanchard said she didn't understand how Manulife accessed her photos, because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts. Ironically, it was due to pressure from the Canadian government that Facebook recently revised its privacy policy. Online speculation is that one of the woman's coworkers at IBM may have turned her in.

The company confirmed that it uses the social networking site to investigate clients but said it would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.

Here's a switch. Instead of newspapers trying to protect the identities of the people posting to their websites, the newspaper is the one outing them.

As described by editor Kurt Greenbaum of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, someone posted a vulgar word in the paper's online commenting system, and re-posted it after a newspaper staffer deleted it.

"I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school," Greenbaum reported. "So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included."

The school managed to track down the offending (literally) poster, who turned out to be a school employee, and when confronted, the person resigned.

Since then, however, the incident has resulted in a great deal of discussion about whether Greenbaum acted responsibly, especially for a newspaper.

"t's still troubling that a journalist with 27 years of experience didn't question whether it was wise to out one of the paper's readers -- a decision that certainly seems to violate the paper's own policies," noted The Daily Online Examiner. "The site's privacy policy states: "We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials.""

The blog went on to …

A lawsuit over a website's publication of a celebrity threesome sex tape is provoking some thoughtful discussion about fair use.

Not to mention giving PBS, NPR, and the New York Times the opportunity to talk about sex tapes.

The tape consists of Grey's Anatomy actor Eric Dane and his wife Rebecca Gayheart, as well as Kari Ann Peniche -- a former Miss United States Teen beauty queen who was dethroned after posing for Playboy, went on a reality show to be treated for sex addiction, and reportedly is now a Hollywood madam -- engaged in various activities. The original tape is 12 minutes long; the website Gawker.com posted a four-minute excerpt with censorship covering various portions of the Grey's Anatomy star's, uh, anatomy.

"Hollywood sex tapes making their way to the Internet are nothing new," noted the PBS blog, written by Rob Arcamona, a second-year law student at The George Washington University Law School. Neither are lawsuits, though as it notes few cases go to trial. What is different about this lawsuit is that rather than using the usual criteria such as invasion of privacy or defamation of character, they claim that Gawker's publication of the video violates their copyright -- which they reportedly registered two days after the tape was posted online -- and filed a $1 million lawsuit.

Arcamona notes that Gawker is considering its publication as "fair use" because …

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 BBC.

More than half those surveyed said they used social networking sites during the working day for personal use, with the average being 40 minutes per week on these sites. While this doesn't sound like much, it adds up to almost a week a year, Morse said.

Other responses from the study, which surveyed 1,460 people:

• More than three-quarters of respondents said their employer had not given them specific guidelines with regards to using Twitter.
  
• A third of workers said they had seen sensitive information posted on social networks.
  
• 84 percent said they felt it should be up to them what they posted online.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. 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 $500,000 for its 38,000 municipal employees to use Google's e-mail, spreadsheet and word- processing programs, giving them an Internet-based alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Office software, installed on computers, according to Bloomberg.

Interestingly, the chief technical officer responsible for the decision was Vivek Kundra, now Chief Information Officer of the United States. The White House recently decided to migrate its website from proprietary software to Drupal.

Los Angeles plans to complete implementation of the Google system by June and will begin with a pilot period during which a limited number of employees will test the system, the Times said. City law enforcement agencies including the Los Angeles Police Department will migrate to the new system once they are satisfied with the security and functioning of the system.

Los Angeles worked on the decision for nearly a year, where Google competed with other software vendors, including Microsoft. "Parties on all sides believe that if smaller cities see Los Angeles successfully transition to Google's cloud system, they may be more likely to follow suit," the Times said.

In addition to funding broadband projects in the states, particularly in rural areas, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, includes funds for collection of state-level broadband data, as well as state-wide broadband mapping and planning.

The project, which will also help create a national broadband map, is being managed by the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

The State Broadband Data and Development Grant Program, announced on July 1, is a competitive, merit-based matching grant program that will provide approximately $240 million in grants to assist states or their designees to develop state-specific data on the deployment levels and adoption rates of broadband services, the NTIA said. Awardees are required to contribute at least 20 percent non-federal matching funds toward project costs.

Each state could have only a single, eligible entity to perform the mapping. Applications for the program were accepted from July 14 to August 14.

On September 9, the NTIA announced that it had received applications representing all 50 states, five territories, and the District of Columbia. Fifty-two of the 56 states (or their designated entities) also submitted requests for broadband planning funds, typically about $500,000 each over a 5-year period, the NTIA said, which also released a list of the applicants.

Now, the NTIA is beginning to announce grant awards made to the states for mapping. On October 5, the NTIA

Not sure, sorry.

The Associated Press reported this weekend that the official White House website 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 less expensively updated, the AP said.

The White House site had been using technology held over from the administration of former President George W. Bush, but the staff had been working toward the transition since the inauguration. For example, the website that tracks stimulus spending, launched in February, was already built using Drupal.

Several other federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration, are also said to be using Drupal.

However, modifications made by the White House staff, such as to improve security, have not thus far been given back to the Drupal community, noted Tim O'Reilly in his blog. "The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared," he said.

Two groups are working to set up a .gay top-level Internet domain, with plans for using some of the proceeds for registering sites in that domain to support gay causes, according to an article in the New York Times.

While it can cost up to $400,000 to set up a new top-level domain, companies compete for control, because the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the development and management of the Internet’s unique identifiers, awards the registry rights to just one applicant for each new top-level domain, which can result in millions of dollars per year, the Times said.

Currently, the two groups are competing for the right to apply by each claiming to be more gay than the other. "The Dot Gay Alliance (dotgay.org), out of New York City, is being led by a longtime gay activist," the Times said. "And dotGay (dotgay.com) is being spearheaded by a heterosexual German man in Riga, Latvia, who has incorporated a company in San Francisco."

The Dot Gay Alliance points out that it is run by a gay man, while dotGay points out that it is based in San Francisco and that its head has experience setting up new top-level domains.

Neither of the for-profit groups has said what percentage of revenues it would commit for gay causes, though Joe Dolce, founder and executive director of the Dot Gay Alliance, spoke favorably of Al Gore's declaration that …

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 reported in the Hartford Advocate, an alternative newsweekly.

State Republican Chairman Chris Healy told the paper that it was the Connecticut Republicans' idea.

Twitter announced earlier this year that it planned to verify the accounts of people such as public officials, after several cases of Twitter impersonations.

According to the paper, a Democratic legislative leader reported the accounts to Twitter, which replied, "A person may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others. ... Impersonation is against our terms unless it is a parody. The standard for defining parody is, 'Would a reasonable person be aware that it's a joke?' Because this is not the case in your situation, we have removed the profile(s) from circulation."

Healy criticized the Democrats' response as "stopping free speech."

The fake web sites all use the same theme and basic design, and note at the bottom that they were "Paid for and Authorized by the Connecticut Republican Party, Jerry Labriola Jr. Treasurer." They are called "Meet Matt Lesser," "Meet Joe Aresimowicz," and so on, with the names of the 33 Democratic legislators.

The sites, as well as other articles about the issue, can be …

True, though I've been reading that some coffeeshops are now restricting the amount of time one can stay there, taking away electrical outlets, etc.

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 submissions was earlier this year.

Now, you can search the database yourself to find what projects were submitted.

Endeavour Partners, a consulting company, downloaded the data to see what it could find out about the proposals.

First of all, $28 billion in requests was submitted for $7.2 billion in funding.

Other observations include:

• 2,186 applications were received
• The average application size was $12.7 million, but the median application size was $2.7 million
• Alaska had the largest total dollar amount requested, at $1.3 billion
• The largest application was from RADgov, a proposal to build and connect computer learning centers in underserved communities across the US for $938 million
• The top 10 states requesting the most money were California, Florida, Colorado, Alaska, New York, Texas, Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, and Illinois.
• The top 10 states requesting the most money per capita were Alaska, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Hawaii, Vermont, Colorado, New Mexico, and Maryland.

While a number of the top 10 per capita states actually are laggards in terms of broadband availability, "three of the top 10 states ranked on funding requests per capita are in …

The other day I was on Facebook and a chat window popped up from a college friend of mine.

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?

What "Bob" didn't know was that I was already suspicious of him by then.

Bob: Im stranded in London. I got mugged at a gun point last night!

Sure you did, "Bob."

This is a classic example of the "I've been mugged!" scam that's been going around Facebook chat. A friend starts a chat, tells how they've been mugged in some world city, and begs you to use Western Union to wire them some money.

(Poor Western Union. Does anyone use them for anything legitimate any more?)

Not to mention -- robbed at gunpoint? In England? Are you kidding?

But I played along.

Sharon: oh no!
Bob: All cash,credit card and phone was stolen!
Sharon: that's terrible!
Bob: Thank God i still have my life and passport
Sharon: yes, for sure
Bob: I need your urgent help Sharon!
Sharon: how can I help?

Then I waited for "the touch." Sadly, there were no more messages, and four minutes later "Bob" had signed off.

I got into email to contact "Bob" and let him know what was going on, only to find email …

The 2008 presidential election featured a new emphasis on using the Internet, ranging from raising money to advertising 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, according to a recent article.

"Facebook’s features, such as the ability to add real-world events to a group or fan page, the ability to send a message to up to 5,000 members on a group page and the built-in discussion boards, make it an all-in-one stop for the connected protester," the article said.

It's also expected that, while the Federal Elections Commission ruled in 2006 that campaign regulations do not apply to most Internet activity, except for paid political advertising on someone else's Web site, new rules on campaigning will be in effect by the 2010 election cycle, according to an AP article.

"When does a blog connected to a campaign need to disclose its allegiance?," the article asks. "Does a candidate's personal Facebook page need a disclaimer if it is updated by a staffer? Can a campaign-related tweet — a message posted on social media site Twitter — even be regulated?" Another example cited in the article was whether Internet advertising -- such as pop-up ads whenever someone Googles an opponent -- need the sort of "Paid for by..." disclaimer that printed ads require.

Ironically, however, a report …

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 patent thrown out by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Acacia Research's patent on streaming media technology had been targeted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of its Patent Busting Project for being overly broad. "Laughably broad patent would cover everything from online distribution of home movies to scanned documents and MP3s," the EFF described it.

The company systematically acquired a number of patents on streaming media, with an eye toward making money on licensing fees, according to a 2003 CNET article.

"The company's digital media strategy began in earnest several years ago," the article said. "It had determined that it owned about a third of the patents it needed to mount a licensing strategy for Web streaming, and its attorneys spent considerable time researching the rights held by another set of companies that Acacia ultimately purchased in 2001. By the time Acacia finished, it owned five U.S. patents and 17 international patents dating back to 1991."

Acacia started with the adult website market. "The case reaches all the way back to 2002, when Acacia began sending out media packets to online adult companies asserting that the companies were violating patents associated with …