Yves's planet

Court Allows Unmasking of P2P Downloaders

2010-05-01T13:07:00+00:00

bricko writes "A federal appeals court says copyright-infringing downloaders can now be outed. If you use or have used P2P, this may interest you. From Wired: 'The RIAA detected what it claimed to be infringing activity on an IP address the university linked to the student. The unidentified student moved to quash a federal judge’s order that the university forward the student’s identity to the RIAA. The student asserted a First Amendment right of privacy on the internet, in addition to a fair-use right to the six music tracks in question. The appeals court ruled in the RIAA’s favor (PDF) after balancing a constitutional right to remain anonymous against a copyright owner’s right to disclosure of the identity of a possible “trespasser of its intellectual property interest."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from ocelma] Experiments with audio, part IX

2010-05-01T12:44:54+00:00

[from ocelma] Point and click polyline encoder

2010-05-01T12:20:48+00:00

warming to Gordon

2010-05-01T12:19:09+00:00

Yesterday, my postal vote went off and lacking a Plaid Cymru candidate far from my homeland I made do with the best of the rest. This is perhaps the most exciting election in the UK for many years as it seems likely that one result will be a ...

Factoidal

2010-05-01T12:19:05+00:00

danbri: ""Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them."
danbri: "Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."
danbri: "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer."
danbri: "Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is."
danbri: "Fact, fact, fact!" said the gentleman. And "Fact, fact, fact!" repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
danbri: ""You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the gentleman, "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact."

(2010-05-01 11:15)

Weekly Wrap-up: High-Presure Facebook, PowerPoint Friendly Fire, Steve Speaks, And More...

2010-05-01T12:18:38+00:00

Once again, Facebook is our top story of the week - this time thanks to its high-pressure opt-in tactics. Oh Facebook, our readers just love reading about your privacy antics. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: On the Internet of Things highway, cars are getting smarter; Google Wave has found new purpose as a real-time blogging platform; and don't miss the augmented reality jigsaw puzzles. Read on for more.

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Story of the Week: Facebook's High Pressure Tactics

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com.

Mobile Web

POLL: Which Location-Based Mobile App Do You Use Now?

One Third of iPhone 2Gs Sold Still In Use, Will Be Unsupported

Apple Shuts Down Lala: Here are 5 Alternatives

More Mobile Web coverage

Augmented Reality

Move Over Jackson Pollock, Here Come AR Jigsaw Puzzles

Layar Launches Its Augmented Reality Content Marketplace

More Augmented Reality coverage

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future. This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here.

Internet of Things

More Internet of Things coverage

Real-Time Web

Google Wave Finds Purpose as Live Blogging Platform
Infochimps Release Twitter Data, "Trst.Me" App and API for Ranking Twitter Users

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

How to Avoid Making PowerPoint Your Enemy: Tips for Your Pitch Deck

Angel-Backed Companies More Likely to Succeed, Says Harvard Study

What to Do When a PR Disaster Strikes Your Startup

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

Bringing Google, Facebook, Twitter Together: Third Party Login Grows Rapidly in 2010

Google's Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5

Oregon First To Go Statewide With Google Apps For Education

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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[from ocelma] py-gpolyencode - Project Hosting on Google Code

2010-05-01T12:08:20+00:00

The PalmPilots That Never Were

2010-05-01T12:05:00+00:00

harrymcc writes "Among the things that HP is getting in its $1.2 billion takeover of Palm are hundreds of patents for mobile technologies. Many are reflected in Palm's iconic products. But they also include odd keyboard designs, peculiar ideas like a stylus tip that converts into a joystick, and pre-Treo hybrids of phone and PDA that just didn't work. I rounded up some fascinating examples." It's worth clicking through the obnoxious slide-show format to see them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from ocelma] Google Maps Encoded Polylines « Wyatt Baldwin

2010-05-01T12:02:49+00:00

[from hublicious] Alastair Sawday's Special Places To Stay - Accommodation

2010-05-01T11:39:24+00:00

[from jwissmann] idbeer - Bier & Etiketten selbst gestalten - schöne und lustige Geschenke für alle Events

2010-05-01T11:19:12+00:00

The Open Graph Protocol

2010-05-01T11:09:50+00:00

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page. While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn't a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.

Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services

2010-05-01T11:04:00+00:00

Amazon is quietly pursuing the multi-billion dollar federal cloud computing market, intensifying an already fast accelerating sales and marketing effort by Google, Microsoft and a host of others.

According to the Seattle Business Journal, Amazon is making progress with federal agencies and is being included in a host of proposals.

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It's a potentially huge market. According to the Business Journal, the federal government will spend $76 billion this year on IT. That includes $20 billion to pay for infrastructure.

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra is leading a charge for the Obama administration to invest in cloud computing. This could represent any number of services, be it application hosting, test and development or for managing certain operations.

This is where Amazon may have sway. The company has the most experience of any cloud computing service provider. It is focusing on Amazon Web Services as the most profitable part of the business, exceeding annual e-commerce revenues.

The Seattle Business Journal cites one bid the company made with a Virginia-based IT Service company:

"In a sign of Amazon's interest in the federal cloud market, the company last year teamed with Apptis, the Chantilly, Va.-based government IT services company, to respond to a request for quotes (RFQ) put out by the General Services Administration. The GSA was seeking information on "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" offerings for the government, including cloud storage, virtual machines and cloud web hosting.

The GSA later canceled the RFQ, saying the cloud market had matured and it needed to make changes to the solicitation. The agency will put out a revised RFQ in the coming weeks. Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton called Apptis a "good partner" and said "we expect to keep working with them," but did not elaborate. She declined to talk about Amazon's plans for the new RFQ, saying the company hasn't seen it yet."

The Business Journal states that Amazon has an office in Washington, D.C. and has hired a former FBI officer with a background in computer security to help with developing relationships.

That's an interesting and important distinction. Amazon has to assure the federal government that its systems are safe. Security is the biggest challenge for federal agencies considering cloud computing. They are responsible for the personal data of U.S. citizens. To secure that data is the highest priority.

According to the Business Journal, Amazon works with NASA. But security issues have been a concern for the space agency. The agency spent seven months negotiating over such issues as audits.

In addition to its own efforts, other service providers are including Amazon in its bids.

The Business Journal:

"Synteractive, a D.C.-based IT firm that helped build the federal stimulus web site Recovery.gov, used Amazon Web Services to test and develop the site last summer. Evan Burfield, CEO of Synteractive, said Amazon made sense because the "very tight turnaround time" for the project -- 10 weeks -- left little room for provisioning computers.

Synteractive was a subcontractor to Smartronix, of Hollywood, Md., on the Recovery.gov project. The two companies are teaming again on a bid for work on Treasury Department websites, including FinancialStability.gov and MakingHomeAffordable.gov. Burfield said if they win the bid, they'll develop and run the sites on Amazon's cloud."

That's an advantage the major cloud service provider have in the market. The architectural scale of the major service providers gives customers a wide choice of potential services. Amazon and others can provide an a la carte service that customers can dip into when demand spikes or scale back when it ebbs. To provide that elastic level of service on the federal level is a task that only the largest service providers can provide.

Discuss

False Start For Cyber Security Challenge UK

2010-05-01T10:11:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft writes about an ironic 'false start' for the Cyber Security Challenge UK website. The new venture touts itself as 'a programme of national challenges, designed by experts, to identify and nurture the UK's future cyber security workforce.' Unfortunately, the website appears to be vulnerable to a basic cross-site scripting vulnerability which was easily found by some Twitter users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from jwissmann] YouTube - Scale Practice Tips (Spanish Guitar)

2010-05-01T09:48:23+00:00

[from snowfallsoon] Tutoriel Windows : Flashez la rom Galaxo 1.6.2 et 1.6.1 sur Samsung Galaxy

2010-05-01T09:38:59+00:00

Ontology Browser under development

2010-05-01T09:19:05+00:00

dmiles_afk: it connects to Cyc and LarKC for a graphical browser
dmiles_afk: still needs help getting the more of the editing stuff - contact dmiles@daxtron.com
dmiles_afk: written in Java based on TouchGraph

(2010-05-01 09:03)

IT Crowd (UK) Coming Back For Season 4

2010-05-01T09:07:00+00:00

sammyF70 writes "Every geek's favourite non-sci-fi show (the original UK one, not the abysmally bad German and US remakes) is coming back for a fourth season! According to the IMDB's message board, it should be on the air 'Juneish.' While you wait, you can check out what kind of vintage hardware will be on the show this time, and remember: if you illegally download movies, you will face the consequences!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from jerrell] [from tommorris] Jon Stewart Mocks the Laughable Tameness of British Political Scandals - - Gawker.TV

2010-05-01T08:57:16+00:00

[from inkdroid] RDFaHashURIs - ESW Wiki

2010-05-01T08:49:46+00:00

[from inkdroid] Tyrosine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2010-05-01T08:24:33+00:00

apparently good for withdrawing from caffeine?

Australian Gov't Claims Internet Filter Legislation Still In Play

2010-05-01T06:02:00+00:00

Dracophile writes "Contrary to yesterday's article about The Australian's report that the Australian government had put on the back burner plans to introduce Internet filter legislation before the next election, The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the government rejected claims that it had abandoned such plans, and that 'a spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the government remained committed to the policy.' Unless the Australian Labor Party abandons the plan altogether, will the timing make any difference to voters?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Cameron To Develop 3-D Camera For Mars Rover

2010-05-01T03:11:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes "Computerworld reports that movie director James Cameron, of Avatar and Titanic fame, is working with Malin Space Science Systems Inc. to build an updated 3-D camera that will be installed on the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity if completed in time, to be the machine's 'science-imaging workhorse,' says Michael Malin, who is working on the camera team. Malin delivered two cameras to be installed on the rover's main mast; however NASA has provided Malin with funding to work with Cameron to build alternatives to these two cameras. 'The fixed focal length [cameras] we just delivered will do almost all of the science we originally proposed. But they cannot provide a wide field of view with comparable eye stereo,' he says. 'With the zoom [cameras], we'll be able to take cinematic video sequences in 3-D on the surface of Mars.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Writer Peter Watts Sentenced; No Jail Time

2010-05-01T02:30:00+00:00

shadowbearer writes "SF writer Peter Watts, a Canadian citizen, whose story we have read about before in these pages, was sentenced three days ago in a Port Huron, MI court. There's not a lot of detail in the story, and although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples) he was not ordered to do any time in jail, was freed, and has returned home to his family. The judge in the case was, I believe, as sympathetic as the legal system would allow him to be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Support for HTML 5 Helps Break A Logjam But Does It Matter?

2010-05-01T02:00:29+00:00

The news broke yesterday about the Microsoft General Manager who said that that the "future of the Web is HTML 5."

But it's important enough for us to write about even if in the long run it still does not solve the issues with earlier versions of the Internet Explorer browser.

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The news came from Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager, for Internet Explore. Of note:

"Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today's web."

It's this kind of development that will give more developers the confidence to build HTML 5 apps. But does it really matter that much? IE has been hands off in how it deals with support for HTML 5 on its existing browsers. Further, full support for HTML 5 is nonexistent across Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE. We have no release schedule for IE 9 but it will support HTML 5.

HTML 5 is very cool. But IE's market share is not to be taken lightly.

From Psyked:

"You can't ignore 40-60% of your users because they use a browser that isn't up to the same standard as its competitors. I'd dearly like too, but I can't. Which means everything has to be developed without HTML5 & CSS 3, either using browser targeting and using multiple styles and coding options, or developed to the lowest common denominator - IE.
You might say that things will eventually catch up - but considering IE6 is still at 10% market share, you're always going to be developing something for IE6, or IE7, or IE8. None of which have very much HTML5 support at all. IE9 isn't going to be available for users on Windows XP, which means the best they'll ever get is IE8, which means... argh, this really isn't going to work."

Microsoft's acknowledgement should be viewed as a positive one for developers. HTML 5 can be used universally on any device. Google thinks that's important. It's good to see Microsoft showing that sentiment, too.

But still, let's not give this too much credence, either. Microsoft's first allegiance is to Silverlight. That's not going to change.

We referenced a Forrester viewpoint post last week that illustrates the reality of the situation:

"Will HTML 5 make rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash/Flex and Microsoft Silverlight obsolete? For at least the next five years, the answer is a definite "no"; inconsistent implementations of the draft HTML 5 specification and immature tooling make building HTML 5 apps that work consistently across browsers and operating systems a real challenge. Furthermore, this "either/ or" scenario is driven only by vendor politics, not by developer realities. Ultimately, HTML 5 and RIA platforms will be complementary technologies, and enterprise development shops will need to invest in both approaches to deliver expressive applications that combine reach and richness."

Well, vendor politics will always be rich in themselves. In the meantime, HTML 5 sure is sexy. Unfortunately, it may be a while before we see how beautiful it really is.

Discuss

Web sémantique | Phéromone | Agence d’interactions

2010-05-01T01:43:13+00:00

Tendance lourde des prochaines années, le Web sémantique consiste à mettre en contexte chaque élément d’information que vous diffusez, par exemple en associant «Léonard de Vinci» à «peintre» et «Renaissance italienne», etc. Le but: faciliter les transferts entre les différentes plateformes (Web, mobile, médias sociaux, etc.).

Semantic Web / Web sémantique

2010-05-01T01:25:00+00:00

Web intelligent dans lequel les informations, auxquelles on donne une signification bien définie, sont reliées entre elles de façon à ce qu'elles soient comprises par les ordinateurs, dans le but de transformer la masse des pages Web en un index hiérarchisé et de permettre de trouver rapidement les informations recherchées.

Education 2.0: The Importance of Ownership

2010-05-01T00:46:36+00:00

I've been teaching adults for almost twenty years. First as a lecturer, then as a professor and for the last ten years as a coach and facilitator for large organizations all over the world. I love technology and the possibility that it represents but I believe that technology can only ever enable educational success. It rarely drives. As technology becomes more pervasive we must shift our focus to the driving factors. I would argue that a key driver for educational success is the internal sense of ownership each student has for his or her own development. If they have this, they will find a way to succeed. If they don't, the technology enables ever greater levels of complacency.

For example, companies offer more and better educational content to their employees each year via technology. The delivery mechanisms become more sophisticated, the market analysis and demographic segmentation become more precise. The richness of the experience and the connectedness of the learning with the world beyond the classroom becomes ever-broader. Do employees learn more today than they did in 1970? In 1900? I'm not sure. I've seen no compelling evidence either way. The ones who really want to learn, learn more. The self-starters learn more. The employees of the best companies learn at a breathtaking pace but that has more to do with these company's ability to attract those who are committed to their own self development than it does with the quality of the educational technology. Students who own their own development use new technology well - it serves as an accelerant to their educational success. But the accelerant is not the spark.

This is the case for adults - employees in the world's largest and richest organizations. Is it the case for children? I don't know. Probably.

I was hiking with my son yesterday. It was a long hike for a boy his age and he asked me, “Dad, do your feet hurt?” I turned my head as we walked and said, “Yeah. They hurt. But not all hurting is bad and you wanted to get to the top of the hill. Do you want to stop?” He thought about it for a long while, ten, maybe twenty steps and said, “no, but my feet hurt too. I’ll be glad when we get to the top.” Ed 2.0 won’t make our feet not hurt. We’ll just be hiking to more wonderous places.

Ed 2.0 won’t be a kinder and gentler place, free from conflict and strife. It will be a hard place. A place where trolls and naysayers and those who would discourage others have the same loud microphone as anyone else. For each online Gandhi, an online bully. It will be a confusing place. A painful place. It will also be a wonderful place, a place where real liberation and intellectual progress will be possible in ways and on a scale we have never seen in human history.

Ed 2.0 isn’t only or even primarily about technology. It is about arming students with the tools and the fierce determination they will need to learn with and through that technology. It is about encouraging intellectual entrepreneurship - creating of our students hundreds of millions of one-person startups, kludging their way to happiness and success.

Ed 2.0 is about encouraging ownership - genuine heartfelt ownership of one’s own educational destiny. The institutions will transform faster than we can keep pace. Between the cracks of our existing educational infrastructure will grow varied species of educational delivery the likes of which we have never seen and cannot possibly forecast. What our students will need is a love of learning but we should not mistake this for an easy love affair. A love of learning is a hard relationship. Learning hurts sometimes. Learning is scary most of the time. It’s impact is all-too-often proportional to its agony. As Benjamin Franklin described it, “Those things that hurt, instruct.”

To paraphrase MLK, we must teach our students that suffering is redemptive and that that redemption takes the form of learning. Ed 2.0 is teaching a student what to do when the system doesn’t work, when the teacher is bad, when the school is failing, when the district is broke. The answer in each case is to rise above the failure and to use the power of technology to surmount each barrier. That’s the real model of liberation with technology - it’s not the gleaming cities of glass, it’s the kluge with wires poking out, too much Cat 5 cable, and the fuses in your house always on the edge of tripping because you’re downloading too much information. It’s turning on the fire hose. It’s taking the spark that is the desire to learn and building into an unquenchable fire.

Lessons Learned: April Post Roundup for Startups

2010-05-01T00:35:28+00:00

Many of our posts here on ReadWriteStart offer tips on launching your startup and insights on how to become a successful entrepreneur.

But as the saying goes, hindsight is often 20/20, and in that spirit we offer a round up of lessons learned from the month of April.

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Build Customers, Not Just Products:

Devver co-founder Ben Brincherhoff describes the dangers of emphasizing product development at the expense of customer development.

Respond Promptly to a PR Crisis:

Blippy's response to a leak of customers' credit card information points to the importance of responding quickly and correctly to potential public relations disasters.

Pay Attention to the Technical and the Business Aspects:

Startups need to balance both the technical and business sides, as WePay co-founder Rich Aberman advises.

Retain Customer Trust:

Responding to ongoing allegations about improprieties, Yelp lifted the veil on its review system, demonstrating the importance in being transparent and open in order to maintain both customer trust and company reputation.

Know When to Veer Off-Course:

As Spark Capital" partner Bijan Sabet argues, it's important to be nimble and know when to divert from the project roadmap.

Hire the Right Execs:

This post looks at Ben Horowitz's thoughts on how startups can be sure to put the right executives in place.

Have an Exit Strategy:

Although the speculation continues about whether or not Foursquare plans to sell, discussions between the popular location-based service and Yahoo serve as a reminder that having an exit strategy can help you shape the direction of your business.

Although these posts document realizations entrepreneurs have had in hindsight, hopefully other entrepreneurs can learn from these lessons and use them to be better equipped for the future.

Discuss

Why Tor Users Should Be Cautious About P2P Privacy

2010-05-01T00:30:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "I went across your post a few days ago saying that a machine connected to the Internet was all one needed to spy on most BitTorrent users of the Internet. I followed the link to find out that those researchers from INRIA claimed their attacks also worked for BitTorrent users on Tor. I didn't believe it at first, but then today I found this link on the Tor Project. It seems their attacks don't only link your real IP to your BitTorrent files on Tor but also to the web pages that you're browsing! Tell me it's a joke." No joke, but according to Jacob Appelbaum (a Tor developer), the security flaw is more nuanced — and the fault of software outside of Tor. Read on for his explanation of how the privacy benefits of Tor can be easily lost.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Jobs Hints At Theora Lawsuit

2010-04-30T23:44:00+00:00

netcrawler writes "Steve Jobs' open letter on Flash has prompted someone at the Free Software Foundation Europe to ask him about his support of proprietary format H.264 over Theora. Jobs' pithy answer (email with headers) suggests Theora might infringe on existing patents and that 'a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now.' Does he know something we don't?" Update: 05/01 00:38 GMT by T : Monty Montgomery of Xiph (the group behind Theora, as well as Ogg Vorbis, and more) provides a pointed, skeptical response to the implicit legal threat, below.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japanese Researchers Make Plastic Out of Water

2010-04-30T23:22:00+00:00

greenrainbow writes with this excerpt from Inhabit: "The material shown in the picture above is just ice, right? Look again. Elastic water, a new substance invented by researchers at Tokyo University, is a jelly-like substance made up of 95% water along with two grams of clay and a small amount of organic materials. As is, the all-natural substance is perfect for medical procedures, because it's made of water, poses no harm to people, and is perfect for mending tissue. And, if the research team can increase the density of this exciting new substance, it could be used in place of our current oil-based plastics for a host of other things."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from mischatuffield] Designing for Interesting Moments

2010-04-30T23:01:08+00:00

Apple Raises E-book Prices For Everyone

2010-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Nom du Keyboard writes "I was informed by my publisher this week that they would have to raise my e-book prices because they planned to sell them through the Apple iBooks store. How could this happen? A lot of my individual stories sell in the $1 to $3 range, which is well within the impulse purchase amount for many people. In this price range a 50-cent price difference may well be the difference between a purchase and a pass. Meanwhile, Apple is touting its new 'agency model,' whereby the publishers set the prices. However, it seems that Apple requires books sold in its iBook store have prices ending in .99 — nothing else." (More below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When a Wine Loves a Robot

2010-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

How can you tell a 1973 Batard Montrachet from a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill? Or a '45 Mouton-Rothschild from a box of Franzia? Well, you could taste the difference, presumably. But what if you had to discern between the '45 and one of the top years of the Eighties? Few could. And while the difference might be taste, it certainly is money.

People collect wines for a number of reasons, but one of the top ones is the fact that a good wine appreciates. If a counterfeiter is good at selling one similar wine as another it can make the difference between $2000 and $200,000. Now some wineries are using RFID to hold the counterfeiters at bay.

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In the wake of junk bonds, the "irrational exuberance" of the Internet and the housing boom, all now nothing more than echoes of collapse, the wine bubble is appealing to the skeezy, of which the wine world has no paucity.

So some wineries, like Vinyard 29 in Napa, California, are using small RFID tags, distinct radio frequency signatures buried in the labels. With smart phones gaining more muscle, users can often select one with an RFID reader built in. With such a phone, a consumer can just "phone up" a bottle prior to buying to make sure it's legitimate.

RFID tagging in wine started at least as early as 2004. In 2005, Italy's Arnaldo Caprai wineries began using the SmartCorq system. Now, the transmitters can fit in labels and foil.

Security is not the only use for RFID in the wine business.

eProvenance uses RFID to keep a coherent track of wines as they travel, often globally, from vintner to buyer, ensuring the wine's safety, but also ensuring it has been kept at ideal temperatures during its voyage.

Bàcaro, a high-end retailer, has installed an RFID reader in a table at their Zurich airport kiosk. The customer places a bottle on a table. Its RFID tag is scanned and the scanner instructs an adjacent screen to show information on the wine's region, vinyard and taste.

Things that go for a dime a dozen rarely serve as the proving ground for experiments with technology. But anything as valuable, easily counterfeited and constantly mobile as wine is going to attract many such experiments. RFID seems one that has gained significant purchase in that community.

If robots ever do take over the world, you can look forward to an illustrated tour through the wine-making regions of the Mosel valley. Then, of course, well, it's kill, crush, destroy time, isn't it?

Top photo by Darin Barry
Bottom photo by jsgphoto

Discuss

Weekend Reading: Money Magnet, by Jacoline Loewen

2010-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Here on ReadWriteStart we are often providing resources and tips for young companies looking to raise funding from venture capitals and angel investors. This week's recommendation for our Weekend Reading series, Money Magnet: How to Attract Investors to Your Business by Jacoline Loewen, is a book aimed at helping entrepreneurs learn how to deal with financing and how to make their businesses attractive to investors.

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Author Jacoline Loewen is a Canadian business consultant and strategy writer who has aided companies seeking capital and private equity. In Money Magnet, Loewen provides valuable lessons she has learned from her career on raising capital in a style that is "informative, relaxed and easy to understand," according to book's description. Though the book was published in 2008, and most of Loewen's work involves multi-million dollar businesses, there are still some lessons startups can likely take away from the book.

Money Magnet is a bit like Fundraising 101. Loewen describes the various types of investors, how to meet and pitch to them, how to read term sheets and how to handle relationships with investors as companies grow. She also provides a run down of the important things investors look for from potential companies, as well as the "four brutal questions" they all ask. The first question most investors ask, she says, is "Are you the right people to make this happen?"

"The teams most likely to attract money will be those that demonstrate they will roll up their sleeves, get on with the unglamorous grunt work of operating plans and do things just a little bit better," writes Loewen. "Anyone new to running a company who has a good idea and now wants funding, probably will not get the money, no matter how smooth they appear. No one, except your mom, is going to fund your learning curve."

It's interesting that she singles out all entrepreneurs with no experience and says they will most likely not get any funding for their idea. Depending on the VCs they seek out, this may be true, but there are plenty of opportunities for inexperienced entrepreneurs to get funding, though the odds are leaning against them. The other questions she says all investors will ask center around the investment opportunity, sustainability and return on investment - questions which will all essentially prove your readiness to get the company off the ground.

Loewen's insider view into the investment process provides an unique perspective for startups looking to meet and woo potential investors. Most advice on the subject comes from either the entrepreneurs involved in the deals or the venture capitalists doling out the cash, so an angle from a consultant who has facilitated numbers of deals is certainly a fresh one.

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Got Linux? Red Hat Enterprise Licenses Now Portable to EC2

2010-04-30T22:20:00+00:00

RedHat recently announced that premium enterprise subscription customers are now able to move their Red Hat Linux licenses to the Amazon cloud in the form of EC2 instance. Amazon EC2 is the first cloud provider that Red Hat is supporting for this service.

If you have a block of Red Hat Linux licenses, you can now enroll with the company to enable these to be authorized on an EC2 instance with your Amazon account. We took a few moments to sit down with the team from Red Hat to learn more about the details of the partnership.

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Going Elastic

One of the big reasons motivations is the ability to support enterprise use cases, such as web hosting, that are increasingly including a part of their service in the cloud. Red Hat is committing to make the latest versions of Red Hat Linux available on Amazon EC2 at the same time as their normal release. This includes both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Red Hat Linux.

Red Hat is already supported on virtualization platforms such as VMware and (of course) KVM, so this move is a natural extension in giving IT the ability to run a Red Hat image wherever and however they host their compute resources.

A Few Considerations

One nice thing about Red Hat in the Amazon cloud is that the company is proving updates to the OS to the Amazon customers as well.

Of course, this is available today in the normal subscription service, but in talking to the company we were able to envision a cloud future where your Red Hat instances on EC2 "report in" through a messaging service that they are ready to be updated. We can see a time where provisioning updates, including pulling servers out of the pool gracefully, reconnecting them, could be triggered by a Red Hat update and automated through the pool of services.

Red Hat emphasizes that when hosting your licenses on Amazon EC2 that you will be billed for what you use. Just like you can configure instances spin-up and down based on need, your license pool can extend as well. Like the core computing billing the license tally will follow this pattern. Something to consider when you are allocating licenses. We wonder if there will be an "elastic pool" someday, or if the company will offer deeper incentives for scaling.

Getting Started

The Red Hat Cloud Access subscription feature is available for Amazon EC2 now. To learn more about Cloud Access, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/access/

Here's a few more resources we found that are a good starting point:

Getting started

Red Hat in the Amazon cloud

Subscriber guidelines

How to enroll

Red Hat Linux in Amazon's cloud makes sense for enterprise customers. We like the fact that the company launched in a way that supports existing license holders and enables license portability.

Red Hat is also helping companies build clouds with its virtualization technology and large asset in Linux. The company is positioning itself to be a force in cloud computing by continuing its legacy of open software.

We wonder: Will all software platforms move to Amazon? Will there a be a time that the "cloud distribution" is the first priority at Red Hat and other operating system releases?

Discuss

Kid Health Experts Attack Video Game Summer Camp

2010-04-30T22:16:00+00:00

Jack Action writes "The University of British Columbia runs a summer camp where kids get to play computer games for three hours a day. The camp organizers say it is 'a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.' However, health professionals declare they are 'troubled' by the camp. A professor in UBC's department of medicine says kids should be outside and engaged in 'unstructured play,' while the CEO of an NGO that monitors kids' health chimes in that they already spend too much time in front of screens and not exercising. Do the health experts have a point, or are they just criticizing something they don't understand, or perhaps is not to their taste?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philip K. Dick's Exegesis To Be Published In 2011

2010-04-30T21:55:00+00:00

Dynamoo writes "The NYT reports that a two-part edition of PKD's Exegesis will be published next year. This huge work, a combination of journal and philosophical treatise, has been published in part before, but this is the first time that the whole version will be made generally available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can Oil-Eating Bacteria Help Clean Up the Gulf Oil Spill?

2010-04-30T21:34:00+00:00

sciencehabit writes "At this point it's unclear how much of an environmental threat oil spreading from the BP spill will cause, but the federal government is mobilizing thousands of workers to prepare for the worst. They have a potential ally: microbes that have evolved an ability to break down oil that seeps from the ocean bottom. It gets devoured by a variety of bacteria, which eat it by chemically transforming its compounds into useful cellular constituents." Wired has some pictures of the spill from orbiting satellites.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter Says: These Are Not the Mobile Ad Units You're Looking For

2010-04-30T21:20:55+00:00

The new version of Tweetie, the iPhone Twitter application acquired this month by Twitter Inc., says it contains a surprise. What's the surprise? When you pull down the stream of Tweets to refresh, a slot machine appears.

The slot machine's wheels spin, then stop. Some percentage of the time you're rewarded with a little graphic telling you that Tweetie will soon be known as Twitter for iPhone (congrats to you!). This sure looks like the future home of advertising on Twitter for iPhone, doesn't it? Twitter's Sean Garrett says that's not the case, "The slot machine thing is just a fun way to get the word out about the upcoming change from Tweetie to Twitter." It sure looks like prime real estate, though.

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Now, there may not be ads up there in the future, but offers, promotions, paid inspirational haiku - something? That placement just seems too valuable for the company to let it sit there empty. Just as ads are coming to Twitter (relatively unobtrusive sponsored Tweets at the top of search results) so too can we imagine the free iPhone app will have ads. This seems like as good a place as any to put them. It's an easy assumption to make: tech investor Dave McClure freaked out on Twitter today calling them ad units, and the thought certainly crossed our minds when we saw them yesterday. Time will tell...

Storm trooper image from MotivatedPhotos.com.

Discuss

Metadata!

2010-04-30T21:19:32+00:00

danbri: Part of schepers' slides on svg

(2010-04-30 20:30)

[from mischatuffield] BBC News - Networks blur the private and public divide

2010-04-30T21:06:33+00:00

[from mischatuffield] How informative is Twitter? « TextWise Blog

2010-04-30T21:04:17+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Digital Safety in an Interconnected World - Annie Mullins, Global Head of Content Standards, Vodafone

2010-04-30T21:01:55+00:00

Annie Mullins

[from mischatuffield] YouTube - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

2010-04-30T20:57:47+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Danah Boyd Interview - PepsiCo Podcast Playground at SxSW 2010

2010-04-30T20:51:38+00:00

Research Exposes Risks for BitTorrent Seeders

2010-04-30T20:51:38+00:00

It is no secret that BitTorrent users publicly share their IP-address when they share something. This is how anti-piracy outfits collect info for their takedown requests, and how some copyright holders use the information to demand cash from claimed infringers.

Less known is the fact that the people who are adding content – the initial seeders – can also be exposed quite easily. With this info copyright holders could potentially track down the big uploaders that are responsible for providing the content which goes on to be distributed among millions of people, and take action against them.

TorrentFreak spoke with Arnaud Legout, one of the researchers who examined how easy it is to spy on BitTorrent users. “Our goal is to make the privacy issues associated with BitTorrent usage public,” he said. “BitTorrent is truly one of the most beautiful, elegant, and efficient protocols ever designed. However, it has never been designed with privacy in mind.”

Legout and his colleagues found that spying on BitTorrent users is relatively easy and cheap. “We showed that anybody can monitor tens of millions of BitTorrent users in real time from a single machine and with a xDSL connection,” he told us.

The researchers also found that pinpointing the IP-addesses that make files available (initial seeds) is relatively easy to do. “We were able to identify 70% of the initial seeds for all the contents uploaded to The Pirate Bay in one month,” Legout told us, adding that they could have achieved a much higher percentage if they further refined their techniques.

The researchers were able to find the initial uploaders by quickly jumping on new torrents that were added on The Pirate Bay. This allowed them to grab the IP-addresses of the ‘content providers’.

Another interesting detail that the research revealed is that the majority of all the uploaded content originates from a small group of users. The Pirate Bay has millions of users, but only 100 IP-addresses are responsible for seeding 30% of the material uploaded to The Pirate Bay. The top 1000 IP-addresses are the ‘content providers’ of 60% of the torrents.

Taken together, this means that anti-piracy outfits could quite easily track down the biggest providers of copyrighted material, instead of just going after regular sharers.

Although most of these top providers do not use their home connection but high bandwidth seedboxes instead, shutting these down through legal action might hinder the distribution of copyrighted material.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The Role of Education in Entrepreneurship

2010-04-30T20:50:00+00:00

On Wednesday of this week, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake wrote a provocatively titled blog suggesting that wanna-be entrepreneurs should drop out of college. She based this opinion on the amount of successful companies founded by drop-outs, including Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft, as well as the drop-outs she finds herself investing in as an angel. But should education play such an insignificant role in entrepreneurship? The answer is not as simple as some think.

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As with many blogs by intellectual authors, the comments they elicit are often as good, if not better reads that the original post itself. As for Fake's post about dropping out of college, this is certainly the case. The notably civil discussion ignited in the comments by Fake's intentionally comment-baiting title and post are some of the most interesting perspectives on entrepreneurial education I've yet to read.

"College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs... Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model."
- Caterina Fake

A commenter by the name of "Anonymous Coward" pokes holes in Fake's argument about successful companies founded by drop-outs with an exhausting list of companies founded by college grads (some even with masters and doctoral degrees). Some of these companies include Adobe, Cisco, Sun, Google and Intel, all of which are fairly high-tech companies likely benefiting from their founders' educations.

Another reader, David Whiteman, rebukes the Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg/Williams argument by pointing out that "they became successful entrepreneurs after they dropped out but that doesn't imply causation." One of the sentiments largely agreed upon by the commenters is that there are valuable lessons learned and resources gained by attending college, and that it shouldn't be avoided all together.

Whether Fake intends to say that entrepreneurs should either drop out or avoid college altogether is unclear, but most agree that being a drop-out may indeed be a good strategy. Instead of ignoring college and starting a company, the best solution may be to attend college, learn the early basic lessons, gain access to resources and contacts, and begin the early stages of your company while still enrolled. Then, if the company takes off, leave school. If it doesn't, then you didn't drop out for nothing and you can continue your education and even attempt another company.

Aside from the argument for or against attending college, there is an interesting point Fake brings up about college that got me thinking: "College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar," she says. "Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model."

While I think this is largely true among most universities, I also believe this trend is changing. Steve Blank argued recently that business schools need to evolve or branch into entrepreneurial schools. Most business programs prepare students for Fortune 500 companies with traditional business practices, which are still practical lessons for students looking to go down that road. But a student looking to found a startup has different needs.

Some schools are doing more than others to provide entrepreneurial training. One school whose name I continually hear as the alma mater of new startup founders is Babson College, which topped Entrepreneur Magazine's list of the top programs in the nation. Others aren't doing so well keeping up. Some of the startup-minded people in my area criticize the local universities for their paltry entrepreneurial efforts, and other business schools are stuck in their old ways of teaching more traditional business practices.

Can true entrepreneurial education work in the current university system? Will these colleges start losing students to smaller schools with highly focused entrepreneurial programs? These are some of the more deep-thought questions derived from this discussion, and the answers could change over time. Right now, I don't think entrepreneurial training is working as well as it could in the current college system, but there are things to be taken advantage of.

Entrepreneurs can potentially make the system work for them by attending college for the resources and contacts and founding their companies while still enrolled. As Steve Blank pointed out, TechStars, Y Combinator and other incubators are the early stages of true entrepreneurial education systems. These could one day grow up into full blown specialty schools, challenging the more traditional business schools that are slow to change. As for whether to go to college, avoid it or drop out, I think one commenter on Fake's blog, who goes by Stephen, summed up the college question best.

"About the only thing that you cannot (okay you can, but at your own peril) do, is nothing," says Stephen. "So, drop out of college - or don't .... but get after something, cause it's all up for grabs - and quite frankly I'm thrilled about that."

Photo by Flickr user Herkie.

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Palin Email Snoop Found Guilty On 2 Charges

2010-04-30T20:49:00+00:00

netbuzz writes "A federal jury in Knoxville today has convicted David Kernell, 22, of two charges — misdemeanor computer fraud and felony obstruction of justice — in connection with the 2008 episode where he accessed the personal Yahoo email account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and then initiated a worldwide rummaging of its contents. The obstruction charge carries a maximum prison term of 20 years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from mischatuffield] Linked Open Data — The National Dialogue

2010-04-30T20:48:16+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Chris Jackson

2010-04-30T20:47:37+00:00

[from mischatuffield] The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized

2010-04-30T20:44:20+00:00

[from mischatuffield] IdentityBlog - Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet's Missing Identity Layer

2010-04-30T20:43:25+00:00

[from mischatuffield] GoodRelations Language Reference

2010-04-30T20:37:59+00:00

[from mischatuffield] FOAF.Vix - FOAF Visualizer and Relation Explorer

2010-04-30T20:37:49+00:00

Nostalgic Elation — the Super Mario Crossover

2010-04-30T20:28:00+00:00

eldavojohn writes "Sure, they're stepping all over proprietary rights and copyright, but something must be said about the amount of bliss-filled nostalgia inside Exploding Rabbit's Super Mario Crossover. If the plumbers never really did it for you, you can now kill those goombas as Link, Mega Man, Samus, Simon Belmont, or Contra's Bill. Goodbye jumping and spitting; hello slicing, whipping, and shooting. Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from mischatuffield] RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers: Grepping N-Triples - The Datagraph Blog

2010-04-30T20:23:59+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Advertising on Facebook Strikes Some as Off-Key - NYTimes.com

2010-04-30T20:22:06+00:00

Siri acquired by Apple; iPhone becomes the Virtual Personal Assistant?

2010-04-30T20:12:48+00:00

Apple buys Siri, and brings real semantic smarts to Cupertino.

[from mischatuffield] A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere | The Economist

2010-04-30T20:12:15+00:00

[from mischatuffield] The Futurist Manifesto

2010-04-30T20:11:39+00:00

Google Wave Finds Purpose as Live Blogging Platform

2010-04-30T20:10:47+00:00

Do you remember Google Wave? After a lot of hype around the initial launch of Wave - which some pundits billed as an "email killer" at the time - things have been rather quiet around the service. The latest update to Wave, however, could push the service back into the public eye. Publishers can now easily embed waves on their sites and readers can see them without having to be logged in to Wave, which makes Wave a great live blogging platform.

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Wave for Live Blogging (and more)

At first glance, this looks like a minor update, but for the first time, you can now easily embed waves on your own site. Google notes that you could use Wave for real-time RSVPs with the Yes/No/Maybe gadget and to publish documentation via embedded waves. For us, however, the real potential here is live blogging with Wave.

The interesting thing about using Wave as a live blogging platform, of course, is that readers can see what a blogger is writing in real time. Live blogging doesn't get more real time than that.

Wave allows users to easily style text and embed images and videos. Adding additional writers to a wave is also as easy as adding another contact to the wave.

Wave Elements: Embedding Waves Made Easy

Until now, embedding Waves took a bit of work and users who weren't logged in to Wave weren't able to see your updates. Thanks to the newly released Wave Element tool, however, embedding a wave is now simply a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript into your site or blog post. To make a wave public, you also have to add the public@a.gwave.com account to your wave.

You can see an example of what an embedded Wave looks like below.

One Caveat: Doesn't Work With Internet Explorer Yet

The Wave team, however, also points out one major deal-breaker: the embedded waves don't work with Internet Explorer yet (even with Chrome Frame). The team plans to resolve this issue soon, however.

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[from mischatuffield] Charlie Brooker | iPad therefore iWant? Probably. Why? iDunno | Comment is free | The Guardian

2010-04-30T20:10:12+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Track Your Happiness

2010-04-30T20:09:05+00:00

[from mischatuffield] PeteSearch: How to run CURL fetches in parallel in PHP

2010-04-30T20:08:27+00:00

[from mischatuffield] PeteSearch: How to split up the US

2010-04-30T20:07:38+00:00

Avatar Blu-Ray DRM Issues

2010-04-30T20:06:00+00:00

geekd writes "Once again, DRM only hurts legit content purchasers: 'An unusual glitch has angered some Avatar Blu-ray owners. For these unlucky people, since the disc won't play on their Blu-ray players, their new Avatar DVD serves no real purpose other than to sit idly on the coffee table. ... It appears the main culprit concerning playback issues with Avatar is, ironically, the disc's DRM (digital rights management). ... Even with updated firmware, a lot of Blu-ray players weren't prepared for these security measures. Despite the security problems, bootleggers are having a field day. Pirated copies of Avatar, according to Los Angeles Times, were available as early as January.'" Reader Murpster adds that this problem isn't specific to the Blu-ray version: "Got a regular Avatar DVD and it won't play on either of my DVD players. It will play on one computer DVD drive, if I want to watch it on a 12-inch screen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from mischatuffield] PeteSearch: WebFinger in PHP

2010-04-30T20:05:45+00:00

[from inkdroid] n3 rules for facebook schema types

2010-04-30T20:05:32+00:00

This Week in Online Tyranny

2010-04-30T20:00:00+00:00

I said last week that "When the level of evil plummets...I wonder, for instance, if Tinhorns the world over aren't taking the week off to apply neat's foot oil to their collection of rubber hoses." I had no idea how right I'd be.

Cuba arrests blogger Diana Virgen García. Garcia, who covers issues of free speech in Cuba, and supports the Ladies in White movement, was arrested on April 22. The next day she was "sentenced" to a year and eight months in prison for unannounced "charges."

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Gizmodo reporter's computers seized. After writing about the new iPhone, based on a leaked handset, whose origin is unclear, the California Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a U.S. law enforcement authority, seized the reporter's electronics.

Twitter takes down a Tweet. Responding to a U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice, Twitter eliminated a user's post on a leaked music album.

Chávez starts a Twitter account. After frothing about how Twitter is terrorism, primarily because opposition members use it to good effect, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, has started his own account.

China institutes yet another repressive online law. The law is nothing new. It merely "legitimizes" the gun-barrel instructions the state's law enforcement agencies issue to ISPs and others to cooperate with state secrets issues.

Brazil objects to Google government request data being published. Google published government requests and Brazil "won," making the most data requests of any country, 3,663, and the most removal requests, 291. They claimed the number was accounted for by child porn investigations, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Nay Phone Latt, imprisoned Burmese blogger, honored by PEN. The PEN writing group honored the young blogger who is serving a 20-year sentenced after blogging about the 2007 Saffron rebellion in Burma.

Tunisia blocks Flickr. On the 28th, Tunisia added Flickr, the photo-sharing site, to its list of blocked services and sites. Chief among these are individual blogs critical of the government and video-sharing sites.

United Arab Emirates plan to monitor cybercafe users. The country's Interior Ministry plans to require cataloging of cybercafe users under the guise of child porn. "The move to keep Internet-users under observation comes at the same time as a population census is being held in the countries of the UAE along with a standardisation of ID cards for all citizens."

Belarus seizes journalists' emails. A senior Belarus police officer allowed police computer experts to access the email and Skype accounts of independent journalists as part of an investigation for a defamation suit by a former KGB official.

Thailand arrests Facebook user. One of Thailand's favorite tools to stifle dissent is "lese majeste," the law that makes it a crime to criticize leaders, in this case the royal family. Unfortunately, there is no proof that Wipas Raksakultha did any such thing when he was arrested on the 29th.

India arrests man for fake Facebook profile. The unidentified man was arrested by the Dehli police for allegedly creating a fake profile of parliamentarian Rajiv Pratap Rudy. This is reminiscent of the arrest and imprisonment of Fouad Mourtada for doing the same thing for a prince of Morocco in 2008. The same questions needs to be asked now as then: what role did Facebook play in providing law enforcement with private user information? Or is there such a thing any more when it comes to Facebook?

United States Senators fault Facebook. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Facebook questioning the company after it made a huge change in its site that enforced a site-wide change in privacy. Schumer also sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling on them to enact clearer privacy guidelines for social networks.

Egypt indicts videographer and blogger Wael Abbas. Abbas, who is most famous for posting videos of police abuse, including rape, of arrested citizens, is being pursued by the Egyptian courts. His appeal opened yesterday in Cairo on charges of selling communications services without a license. "Neither he nor his lawyers were informed of his trial on these charges and he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined 500 Egyptian pounds (65 euros) in his absence."

Kazhakstan ISP blocks news sites. State-owned Kazakhtelecom has been blocking two news sites that are critical of government corruption.

Top photo by Andrian van Leen
García photo from World Women International
Abbas photo by Elijah Zarwan

Discuss

[from inkdroid] Eine JavaScript-Bibliothek zum Darstellen von Graphen « Johann Philipp Strathausen

2010-04-30T19:51:39+00:00

[from inkdroid] Overview — Beaker v1.5.3 documentation

2010-04-30T19:30:24+00:00

Gov 2.0 Week in Review

2010-04-30T19:30:00+00:00

Since last week's Gov 2.0 Week in Review was well-received, we're going to make it a regular feature. If you have news and tips about the government 2.0 space, please let me know at alex@oreilly.com or @digiphile on Twitter.

Open Government Initiative checkpoint

Over at WhiteHouse.gov, federal CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra posted an initial assessment of open government plans, evaluating "version 1.0" of agency plans against the requirements of the Open Government Directive. The White House also published an updated open government scorecard that includes specific self assessments. Analysts Andrew DiMaio and Alan Webber both observed that no agency failed the initial assessment.

The White House's Office for Science and Technology Policy teamed up with the Case Foundation for a policy innovation summit today in Washington on "citizen-centered solutions." The event included a livestreamed conversation with Sonal Shah regarding the use of contests, prizes and other initiatives to engage the public in policy making.

Government Web managers meet

Will better websites lead to better government? If the government Web managers that assembled in DC this past week achieve their goals, many signs point to "yes." As the Washington Post reports, USA.gov is being redesigned to promote interaction.

The event kicked off with a conversation between White House new media director Macon Phillips and Vivek Kundra on changing online government. White House priorities for electronic privacy include HIT, smart grid and education.

More details emerged about "FedSpace," a forthcoming social networking platform for federal employees will get their own social network this fall. Steve Ressler, the creator of Govloop, a social network for government employees, posed five ideas for FedSpace success.

Many of the videos from the government Web manager's conference are available on-demand at uStream, including GSA Administrator Martha Johnson speaking to the conference via Skype.

The federal government URL shortener, currently in beta, is also seeing increased use. Go.USA.gov enables government employees to create short URLs from official government domains, such as .gov, .mil, .si.edu, or .fed.us. According to Sam Algood, Go.USA.gov has already shortened 6009 URLs that have been clicked 1111895 times.

Social media election in Britain

The impact of the Internet on the 2008 presidential election in the U.S. was clear. Now the world is seeing how the Internet is changing politics in Britain. Can Twitter celebrities swing a vote? After Gordon Brown's moment of truth, it's clear the social Web can cut both ways.

Pew Internet report on online government

New research from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project showed unprecedented numbers of citizens turning to the Internet for government data, policy and information about services. According to the report on online government, use of government websites for info is nearly ubiquitous among Internet users. Nearly one third of U.S. Internet users are using social media to access government services and information. And the use of social media by government has particular appeal for engaging minorities that have been traditionally underserved. Micah Sifry's assessment? The report showed substantial citizen participation but little government engagement.

Loosening up legislatures

The House of Representatives entered the live online video age with the launch of HouseLive.gov, a livestream of what's happening on the House floor.

Can citizens help legislators make better laws? Cristiano Faria offers up a government 2.0 case study in legislation from Brazil.

Lives lived in public online are likely to change the vetting process for government, just as they have for admission to colleges or workplaces. Promiscuous online culture is likely to change that vetting process permanently.

Government gets more social

The U.S. Air Force began opening social media access on all of its bases this week.

The Department of Defense is now using uStream to feature lectures from its generals at Science.DoDlive.mil.

The Library of Congress provided on updated FAQ on Twitter inclusion in its archives.

NASA's cloud grows, Federal CIOs urge changes

The open source NASA Nebula cloud computing infrastructure has gone bi-coastal. According to the Register, NASA will open a second Nebula site at Goddard Space Flight Center, outside of DC, although NASA's new CTO for IT, Chris Kemp, will stay in Silicon Valley. His colleague, NASA CIO Linda Cureton, sees the changes at the agency as a positive for IT missions.

Federal CIOs are urging changes to entice IT workers into government employ. A new report, "Net Generation: Preparing for Change in the Federal Information Technology Workforce," emphasized how the expectations of young IT workers are changing with new technology and cultural shifts around its use.

Microsoft extends government offerings

Following the introduction of Townhall, Microsoft launched Gov2Social, a directory of government social media accounts that uses Silverlight and the Azure cloud computing platform. Microsoft's move towards "we-gov" will depend upon people using the platform provides by Gov2social to populate the social media directory, instead of submitting accounts to GovTwit.com or other resources.

FEMA goes mobile

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said that people will be able to register for disaster relief from their cellphones, reported the Atlantic Monthly's Marc Ambinder. THe newly stripped-down mobile version of FEMA.gov, m.fema.gov, is optimized for the screens and more limited bandwidth of mobile phones.

On Internet Freedom, Open Government and Policy

Tim Berners-Lee spoke about the value of the open government and the World Wide Web as part of an open data panel at the 2010 WWW Conference at Elon University. "It turns out the data is much more powerful when matched up with something else online," said Berners-Lee. "The real benefit of the Web is the serendipity. You find that people will use the information for all kinds of other things.” Berners-Lee will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Gov2.0 Expo in Washington next month.

This week in Washington, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Strickling also delivered an important speech on Internet Policy 3.0: All Hands on Deck, where he discussed governance, online privacy, regulation and intermediary liability for ISPs.

Alec Ross, the State Department's senior advisor for innovation, shared his perspective on Internet freedom as the opening speaker at Princeton University’s CITP’s conference on Internet Security and Internet Freedom. Ross' talk touched upon China, which, with 384 million wired citizens, has the most online users of any nation, even if that number means penetration is currently only 30% of its populace.

China's Internet paradox, however, will continue to bedevil observers who seek to categorize its netizens into censored masses, fast-moving entrepreneurs or free speech beneficiaries.

Government 2.0 Bits and Bytes

Andrew Hoppin was named New York State's CIO of the Year for his innovative work on NYSenate.gov.

David Hale gave more insight into the origins of Pillbox, an innovative pill identification system at NIH.

The FBI launched a new form to accept electronic Freedom of Information Act requests at foia.fbi.gov.

Mark Headd wrote a useful guide to 311 and Open311 for Govfresh.

The Sunlight Lab's Design for America contest continued to receive entries. Winners will be announced at SunLightLabs' contest at #DCMM. Winners announced at the Gov2.0 Expo.

EveryBlock partnered with SeeClickFix to add feedback to its feeds.

Oregon public schools became the first in nation to use Google Apps for Education.

[from mischatuffield] YouTube - OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine version - Official

2010-04-30T19:27:29+00:00

[from mischatuffield] scriptwriting software | Adobe Story

2010-04-30T19:26:36+00:00

The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive

2010-04-30T19:25:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes "Charlie Stross has written a very interesting essay, ostensibly about the 'real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash,' but really about how Jobs is betting Apple's future on an all-or-nothing push into a new market as Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland. Stross says that Apple is trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat — the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry and turn PC manufacturers into suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligible profit. 'Any threat to the growth of the app store software platform is going to be resisted, vigorously, at this stage,' writes Stross. 'And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem.' The long-term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary. 'This is why there's a stench of panic hanging over Silicon Valley. This is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it's why everyone is terrified of Google,' writes Stross. 'The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from mischatuffield] What Came 'Before' the Big Bang? Leading Physicists Present a Radical Theory

2010-04-30T19:24:48+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Decode Exhibition Points Way to Data-Driven Art | Underwire | Wired.com

2010-04-30T19:18:54+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Video: Tim Berners-Lee on the UK national data website launch | Technology | guardian.co.uk

2010-04-30T19:16:16+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Data.gov.uk: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Q&A - Telegraph

2010-04-30T19:15:38+00:00

[from markng] General election 2010: The liberal moment has come | Comment is free | The Guardian

2010-04-30T19:12:08+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Boxee

2010-04-30T19:11:49+00:00

[from mischatuffield] silly experiment with the built in camera on the macbook on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

2010-04-30T19:08:33+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Weave Browser Sync :: Add-ons for Firefox

2010-04-30T19:07:30+00:00

US Says 4.3 Billion People Live With Bad IP Laws

2010-04-30T18:42:00+00:00

bowser100 writes "The US government has released its annual Special 301 report (PDF) in which it purports to identify those countries with inadequate intellectual property laws. Michael Geist digs into the report, noting the list is so large that it is rendered meaningless. According to the report, approximately 4.3 billion people live in countries without effective intellectual property protection. Since the report does not include any African countries outside of North Africa, the US is effectively saying that only a small percentage of the world meets its standard for IP protection."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Shuts Down Lala: Here are 5 Alternatives

2010-04-30T18:26:40+00:00

Apple plans to shut down Lala, the cloud-based streaming music service it bought in December 2009. Lala stopped accepting new users today and will close on May 31. Thanks to its unlimited music locker and innovative pricing scheme, Lala had long been a favorite of ours. Rumor is that Apple will revive the service is some form under the iTunes.com label, but as with all things Apple, this is just a rumor until Steve Jobs walks on stage and announces it.

Sponsor

Given the date of the shutdown, we assume that Apple will make an announcement about its plans for Lala/iTunes.com at it's annual WWDC developer conference, which is set to begin just a week after Lala shuts down.

Until then, here are 5 online music services that either allow you to stream your own music collection or give you access to large libraries of streaming music. Some of these even allow mobile streaming, which is something Lala never offered.

Streaming Music Locker

MP3tunes

If you don't want to be limited to playing the music that the music industry made available for on-demand streaming and you don't mind paying a monthly fee, MP3tunes is also worth a look. Just like Lala, MP3tunes allows you to upload all your music to an online music locker and then stream it. MP3tunes offers a web interface, mobile apps and support for a range of other devices like the Chumby, Wii and Logitech Squeezebox. As we noted earlier this week, MP3tunes now offers up to 10GB of free storage.

Streaming Music Services

MOG

For $5 a month, MOG's users get access to more than 5 million songs on demand. At this year's SXSW festival in Austin, MOG also announced that it will offer mobile apps for the iPhone and Android platforms in the next few months. The service also offers artist-based radio stations that are similar to Pandora's and Slacker's offerings.

Napster and Rhapsody

While the name harks back to the early days of illegal MP3 downloads, Napster is now a pretty standard MP3 store that also allows you to stream any of the 9 million songs in its library. For $7 per month, you can stream all the songs in Napster's library and download an additional 5 DRM-free MP3 files (more if you sign up for an annual plan).

Rhapsody also offers 9 million songs for on-demand streaming ($10/month), but unlike Napster, it also offers mobile apps (iPhone and Android).

Do-It-Yourself

Sockso

You can, of course, also use your own computer at home to stream music over the Internet. Simplify Music used to be our favorite service for doing this, but the company shut down last month.

A good alternative to Simplify Media is Sockso, an open source program, that can be installed on any Windows, OSX and Linux machine with very little effort (though you will need to set up the port forwarding on your router). The application gives you total control over your music experience and you can even share your music with anybody else on the Internet if you feel like doing so (and, of course, you have the legal rights to do so).

For a simplified version of this, also have a look at Opera Unite, which offers a built-in streaming music server for all Opera users.

Discuss

[from tomheath] Imagining the Internet

2010-04-30T18:24:42+00:00

1 More Week Until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit - Register Today!

2010-04-30T18:24:00+00:00

There's only one week left until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010, so we invite you to register now. Be a part of high-value, intimate conversations with people working throughout the world of mobile, from garage developers to industry luminaries.

The summit will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. We are looking forward to some amazing discussion and debate about mobile with participants like:

Sponsor

Deb Schultz of Altimeter group
Patrick Chanezon, Don Dodge & Bob Meese of Google
Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless
Scott Raney and Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures
Adam Blum of Rhomobile
Brady Forrest of O'Reilly
Brent Simmons of Newsgator Technologies
Patrick Burns of DASH7 Alliance

As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the "unconference" format. Laura Fittion, founder of oneforty.com, had these thoughts about ReadWriteWeb's last summit:

"There were a lot of investors there and it was a great dialogue between startups and investors. The unconference format was great because it got away from the bogus who-is in the real-time Web, and made it who-wants-to-be. You didn't have to be big and influential to get your ideas across - if it was a good idea then it got heard. It wasn't just Twitter, it was many things real time, defined pretty expansively."

How Unconferences Work

What's an unconference all about? Here's the idea: Convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion, ask important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize the value of the event and minimize hot air.

Martin Källström, CEO of the real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly brought his team over from Sweden for our last event. "Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin's unconference events," he told us. "We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen; it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples' minds to 'this is about whatever we want it to be about", they look at how they can create value."

Or, as Google's Brett Slatkin said when using the elite FooCamp events as a way to explain the unconference format: "Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks."

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We're using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you - the attendees - who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks:

Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform?
Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices.
Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR.
Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

If you're a company in the mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can't wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here, if you're so inclined.

We hope to see you on May 7!

Discuss

[from ebx] Major Initiatives | EDUCAUSE

2010-04-30T18:16:16+00:00

Reddit Tries Voluntary Email Verification In Its Fight Against Spam

2010-04-30T18:10:00+00:00

In Reddit's continuing effort to weed out spammers, it has taken another not-quite-traditional step: email verification.

Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further - email verification that is completely voluntary.

Sponsor

Earlier this month, the social news and bookmarking site announced that it was going to be drafting its users in a form of crowdsourced spam filtering. This next step, it says, could make "the spammers' job dramatically harder".

From Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi's blog post:

First and foremost, nobody has to verify their email address. If you're paranoid about this sort of thing and would rather jump off a cliff than tell reddit your email address, you'll still be able to log in, vote, post crazy comments, submit links to bunker supplies and tinfoil hat designs, and everything else that you're used to.
In fact, we think (and hope) that normal, non-spammy users won't even notice any change. The only ones who should have a problem are people who submit one crummy link after another, as often as the site will let them. We're going to start limiting them to a certain number of crummy links per hour (and per day, per week, etc).

Schiraldi goes on to explain that "crummy" links are ones that are flagged as spam, fail to pass "deputy moderation" (that crowdsourced spam filtering we mentioned above) and links with more downvotes than upvotes.

So, if you surpass the number of crummy links allowed, all you need to do is verify your email address and "you'll be granted a lot more leeway."

It's interesting to see these attempts at slightly twisting traditional spam filtering because, as Schiraldi notes in the beginning of his blog post, "there are plenty of occasions when reddit users wish to remain anonymous" and "it's a fine line to walk, crushing spammers without hurting [their] community."

The IAmA is a perfect example. The name is a multipurpose anacronym, where someone says "I am a" but it also means "Ask Me Anything". Without anonymity, this massively popular section of Reddit would be far less interesting, if not impossible.

Discuss

[from inkdroid] SPECIAL REPORT: Conference on Tape Storage Discards the Myths

2010-04-30T18:07:27+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Stickam - The Live Community, Live Streaming Video

2010-04-30T17:59:30+00:00

Opera Acquires Fastmail.fm

2010-04-30T17:59:00+00:00

mattcsn writes "Opera Software just bought email service provider Fastmail.fm. Here's hoping that Opera uses a light touch and keeps the email service as unchanged as possible. From the article: 'FastMail has included a FAQ, in which it says that users who wish to not transfer their accounts over to Opera have to go into settings and indicate just that. Not acting upon the email the company sent out to its users or actively accepting the transfer will result in Opera assuming control over the mailbox and the account registration details. As to the reason for selling, FastMail says the market was getting increasingly competitive and that Opera's expertise in web browsers and especially the mobile market would help the company grow and take on the next big challenges in running and building an email service.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[from mischatuffield] Your Personal Memory Device. You Could Have One Today | h+ Magazine

2010-04-30T17:58:19+00:00

[from danja] The Musicoffice Europe - Lace Alumitone

2010-04-30T17:53:20+00:00

pricey!

[from mischatuffield] Civilization V

2010-04-30T17:47:21+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod

2010-04-30T17:42:55+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Acronym Soup

2010-04-30T17:42:07+00:00

[from mischatuffield] Semantic Technology Blog: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Philanthropy goes Semantic

2010-04-30T17:40:17+00:00

Yves's planet

Court Allows Unmasking of P2P Downloaders

[from ocelma] Experiments with audio, part IX

[from ocelma] Point and click polyline encoder

warming to Gordon

Factoidal

Weekly Wrap-up: High-Presure Facebook, PowerPoint Friendly Fire, Steve Speaks, And More...

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Subscribe to Weekly Wrap-up

[from ocelma] py-gpolyencode - Project Hosting on Google Code

The PalmPilots That Never Were

[from ocelma] Google Maps Encoded Polylines « Wyatt Baldwin

[from hublicious] Alastair Sawday's Special Places To Stay - Accommodation

[from jwissmann] idbeer - Bier & Etiketten selbst gestalten - schöne und lustige Geschenke für alle Events

The Open Graph Protocol

Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services

False Start For Cyber Security Challenge UK

[from jwissmann] YouTube - Scale Practice Tips (Spanish Guitar)

[from snowfallsoon] Tutoriel Windows : Flashez la rom Galaxo 1.6.2 et 1.6.1 sur Samsung Galaxy

Ontology Browser under development

<em>IT Crowd</em> (UK) Coming Back For Season 4

[from jerrell] [from tommorris] Jon Stewart Mocks the Laughable Tameness of British Political Scandals - - Gawker.TV

[from inkdroid] RDFaHashURIs - ESW Wiki

[from inkdroid] Tyrosine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Australian Gov't Claims Internet Filter Legislation Still In Play

James Cameron To Develop 3-D Camera For Mars Rover

Writer Peter Watts Sentenced; No Jail Time

Microsoft Support for HTML 5 Helps Break A Logjam But Does It Matter?

Web sémantique | Phéromone | Agence d’interactions

Semantic Web / Web sémantique

Education 2.0: The Importance of Ownership

Lessons Learned: April Post Roundup for Startups

Why Tor Users Should Be Cautious About P2P Privacy

Steve Jobs Hints At Theora Lawsuit

Japanese Researchers Make Plastic Out of Water

[from mischatuffield] Designing for Interesting Moments

Apple Raises E-book Prices For Everyone

When a Wine Loves a Robot

Weekend Reading: Money Magnet, by Jacoline Loewen

Got Linux? Red Hat Enterprise Licenses Now Portable to EC2

Going Elastic

A Few Considerations

Getting Started

Kid Health Experts Attack Video Game Summer Camp

Philip K. Dick's <em>Exegesis</em> To Be Published In 2011

Can Oil-Eating Bacteria Help Clean Up the Gulf Oil Spill?

Twitter Says: These Are Not the Mobile Ad Units You're Looking For

Metadata!

[from mischatuffield] BBC News - Networks blur the private and public divide

[from mischatuffield] How informative is Twitter? « TextWise Blog

[from mischatuffield] Digital Safety in an Interconnected World - Annie Mullins, Global Head of Content Standards, Vodafone

[from mischatuffield] YouTube - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

[from mischatuffield] Danah Boyd Interview - PepsiCo Podcast Playground at SxSW 2010

Research Exposes Risks for BitTorrent Seeders

The Role of Education in Entrepreneurship

Palin Email Snoop Found Guilty On 2 Charges

[from mischatuffield] Linked Open Data — The National Dialogue

[from mischatuffield] Chris Jackson

[from mischatuffield] The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized

[from mischatuffield] IdentityBlog - Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet's Missing Identity Layer

[from mischatuffield] GoodRelations Language Reference

[from mischatuffield] FOAF.Vix - FOAF Visualizer and Relation Explorer

Nostalgic Elation &mdash; the <em>Super Mario Crossover</em>

[from mischatuffield] RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers: Grepping N-Triples - The Datagraph Blog

[from mischatuffield] Advertising on Facebook Strikes Some as Off-Key - NYTimes.com

Siri acquired by Apple; iPhone becomes the Virtual Personal Assistant?

[from mischatuffield] A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere | The Economist

[from mischatuffield] The Futurist Manifesto

Google Wave Finds Purpose as Live Blogging Platform

Wave for Live Blogging (and more)

Wave Elements: Embedding Waves Made Easy

One Caveat: Doesn't Work With Internet Explorer Yet

[from mischatuffield] Charlie Brooker | iPad therefore iWant? Probably. Why? iDunno | Comment is free | The Guardian

[from mischatuffield] Track Your Happiness

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<em>Avatar</em> Blu-Ray DRM Issues

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Nostalgic Elation — the <em>Super Mario Crossover</em>