Microsoft must be so proud. The company’s $240 million investment in Facebook, one that implicitly valued the social network at $15 billion, hasn’t yet paid off. But it will. In three years or so when Facebook finally settles on a business model. Assuming, of course, it’s a viable one.
Five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release. That’s the maximum sentence facing the Tennessee college student who was indicted today on charges that he broke into Gov. Sarah Palin’s private email account last month.
What an ugly week for the digital GOP. First, John McCain’s domestic policy adviser conjures up a PR disaster by crediting the senator with the development of the Blackberry–odd, since McCain’s not exactly a digital native. Then former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s not qualified to run HP. And now, Palin’s Yahoo email account has been hacked and its contents published to Wikileaks. What an astonishingly tech-savvy presidential ticket.
The best thing about social networks is also the worst thing about social networks: They make it easy for us to share information about ourselves. Of course, by making that information easier to share with friends and colleagues, social networks are also making it easier to share with less “social” entities. Among those are hiring managers, who are increasingly surfing social-networking sites for background info on job candidates.
Google’s new Chrome browser hasn’t been available for a week yet and already, privacy advocates are sounding alarms. Over the weekend, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security warned against using the browser, which it fears collects and centralizes a bit too much user data with Google.
It’s taken nearly a year, but the inevitable class-action fallout from Facebook’s ill-starred Beacon advertising system has finally begun. Filed in California, the suit claims Facebook and its ad partners violated online privacy and computer fraud laws by collecting and publicly disclosing information about users’ online activities without proper consent.
Well, it’s about time. On Aug. 1, four top members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters ordering 33 cable and Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, to explain in detail their privacy standards. Of particular concern to the Committee was “the growing trend of companies tailoring Internet advertising based on consumers’ Internet search, surfing or other use,” i.e., behavioral targeting.
Overseas travel to the U.S. has plummeted in the past five years, and it may well plummet further thanks to The Department of Homeland Security’s recently revealed border policy on laptops, iPods and other electronics carried into the country by travelers.
As Google, Viacom, and Viacom PR flack Jeremy Zweig will tell you, user IDs and Internet protocol addresses aren’t personally identifiable. So any public outrage over the logging database YouTube is handing over to Viacom under court order is really just the product of so much misinformation and paranoia.
There are just 28 words permitted on Google’s famously spartan homepage. And for years now, “privacy” hasn’t been one of them. An odd choice for a company that professes to be so committed to “transparency and choice,” and one it’s finally reconsidered
So much for privacy on YouTube. The federal judge presiding over Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google and YouTube denied a motion for the pair to produce their source code Wednesday. “YouTube and Google should not be made to place this vital asset in hazard merely to allay speculation,” U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton wrote. Apparently he didn’t feel quite as strongly about the privacy of YouTube users, because he felt entirely comfortable turning that over to the media company.
“Good for competition.” That’s how Omid Kordestani, Google’s senior VP of Global Sales and Business Development, described the company’s partnership with Yahoo yesterday. But the U.S. Justice Department isn’t quite buying his professions of altruism.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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