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Social Networks

Submission + - SPAM: Facebook will shut down Beacon to settle lawsuit

Submitted by
alphadogg
alphadogg writes: "Facebook has agreed to shut down its much maligned Beacon advertising system in order to settle a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in August of last year, alleged that Facebook and its Beacon affiliates like Blockbuster and Overstock.com violated a series of laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the California Computer Crime Law."
Link to Original Source
NASA

Submission + - Crew for Final Scheduled Space Shuttle Mission Ass (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Toren Altair
Toren Altair writes: "NASA has assigned the crew for the last scheduled space shuttle mission, targeted to launch in September 2010. The flight to the International Space Station will carry a pressurized logistics module to the station.

Veteran shuttle commander and retired Air Force Col. Steven W. Lindsey will command the eight-day mission, designated STS-133. Air Force Col. Eric A. Boe will serve as the pilot; it will be his second flight as a shuttle pilot. Mission Specialists are shuttle mission veteran Air Force Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr., and long-duration spaceflight veterans Michael R. Barratt, Army Col. Timothy L. Kopra and Nicole P. Stott."
Privacy

Submission + - FreeScore.com sues Yahoo to out anonymous blogger (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by
zokuga
zokuga writes: "Back in July, a small blog named "flaneur de fraude" posted a slew of articles and documents purportedly showing that FreeScore.com, a FreeCreditReport.com-like service, had a history of allegations of abusive sales practices, including collecting customer info – including credit card numbers – from financial companies, offering "free trials" for a credit-check service to the customers, and then charging the surreptitiously collected card numbers without notice (they settled a lawsuit by the New York attorney general without admitting wrongdoing). flaneur also pointed out that FreeScore.com had received an F by the Better Business Bureau.

A month later, Adaptive Marketing (owners of freescore.com), who hadn't complained about the content in the blog entry, filed a lawsuit in Connecticut. Not against the blogger, but against Yahoo, in order to get the blogger's identity (the blogger posts with a Yahoo email address). Yahoo failed to show up at the hearing (which was in Connecticut) and so the court ordered Yahoo to reveal the blogger's identity on Sept. 21. flÃneur de fraude, who claims her blog "has had about as much readership as a small-town high school newspaper on the last week of school before summer", has now responded back with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation Group. And she posted more history about freescore.com's owner (which has changed its name 3 times), including its lawsuit against Wikipedia.

flaneur concludes "seems to me they should have let my post and my blog die the quiet death it had settled into.""
Censorship

Submission + - Amazon bans public domain from Kindle (sacred-texts.com) 6

Submitted by
John B. Hare
John B. Hare writes: "John B. Hare writes "Many publishers of public domain content on the Kindle are being turned away for reasons which Amazon declines to clarify. In the past two weeks any publisher posting a public domain book (or a book which appears to be a public domain book) have received the message "Your book is currently under review by the Kindle Operations team as we are trying to improve the Kindle customer experience. Please check back in 5 business days to see if your book was published to the store."

Amazon claims that this is a quality control issue, that readers can't figure out on their own that a five page Kindle book for $9.99 is a rip-off or yet another Kindle edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' is pointless. This was supposed to be the point of user feedback and the Kindle return policy: the user can quickly decide what the best choice is, and if they don't like it, back out without any harm done.

I own and run one of the primary contributors of new public domain etexts on the web: sacred-texts.com. When the ban went into effect, I was just back from an intense round of chemo. I was disappointed to get this message. I am (was?) in the process of converting all of the 2000+ ebooks at sacred-texts into Kindle editions. I use a homebrew preflight Kindle filter to construct the Kindle binary from my master files, which we have invested nearly a million dollars into creating. We spend thousands a month in-house doing legal clearance, scanning, OCRing, and proofing, often by domain experts. So we are hardly a fly-by-night operation. In fact, many of the PD texts floating around on the Internet and on the Kindle were originally done at sacred-texts at great investment of labor and time. Our Kindle return rate is close to zero.

This morning I received an email stating:

Dear Publisher,

We're working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers. For an example of this problem, do a search on "Pride and Prejudice" in the Kindle Store. The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which 'Pride and Prejudice' to choose. As a result, at this time we are not accepting additional public domain titles through DTP, including the following: The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Medieval Mysticism
The History of the Knights Templar by Nicolas Notovitch...


If you believe that we have wrongly identified this title as a public domain title, and you are the copyright holder or are authorized to sell it by the copyright holder, then please reply to title-submission@amazon.com with appropriate documentation of your e-book rights.

Thank you, Amazon.com

As can be seen, this brings an entirely new issue into play: apparently, if I owned the rights to a public domain book and can prove it, they will reconsider. However, nobody can own a public domain book. Amazon is telling us that in order to post our books we need to prove a contradiction!

One key point is that Amazon has applied this ban completely non-selectively. Established publishers such as myself and others who have never had any quality control issues whatsoever, and give good value for the price, have all been tarred with the broad brush of 'Public Domain Publisher--do not post'.

By banning new public domain books from the Kindle, they are making an implicit decision as to which books people should read. You can argue that 'you can get these texts anywhere' but by excluding high quality Kindle books of them from the nascent Kindle marketplace, Amazon is implicitly trying to decide what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of ebooks.

"
Social Networks

Submission + - Should we be able to bitch about our boss online? (computerworld.com.au) 3

Submitted by boss man
boss man writes: In Australia, the fate of a group of six prison wardens lies in the hands of an industrial relations committee, after they landed themselves in trouble for writing awful things about their boss and other co-workers on a Facebook group page. Some comments even went so far as to call their boss Judas! Their boss, who says he was offended by the comments, is seeking to sack the group of employees, but the employees believe they should have the right to vent frustrations about their boss on Facebook. So, whose side are you on? One expert argues that we will see more of these cases appear as society struggles to come to grips with issues arising from social networking.
Microsoft

Submission + - Alcatel-Lucent Vs Microsoft Patent Case Overturned (reuters.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Last year, Microsoft was ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent a tiny sum of money for patent infringement. Well, that's just been overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit saving Microsoft $358 million in damages. But Microsoft isn't in the clear yet, the appellate court said that they did infringe on Alcatel-Lucent patents but that said infringements did not warrant $358 million in damages. The case needs to be retried."
Education

When Teachers Are Obstacles To Linux In Education 1589

Posted by kdawson from the height-of-ignorance dept.
jamie found this blog post up on the HeliOS Project, which brings Linux to school kids in Austin, TX. It makes very clear some of the obstacles that free software faces in the classroom. It seems a teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks: "Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..." Starks pens an eloquent reply, which contains a factoid I have not seen mentioned before: "The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way. Then again, being a good NEA member, you would spout the Union line. Microsoft has pumped tens of millions of dollars into your union. Of course you are going to 'recommend' Microsoft Windows."
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Vanuatu cargo cult marks 50 years 2

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Residents of the South Pacific island of Tanna worship an American "messiah" named John Frum who first appeared to them in the 1930s. According to a village elder quoted in a recent Smithsonian article, John promised to someday return and "he'll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him. Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful th
The Internet

Submission + - War of words over Wikipedia ads continues

Submitted by Willis W.
Willis W. writes: Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales reiterates his opposition to advertising in response to reports that Wikipedia needs a major cash infusion. Responding to Jason Calacanis' charges that he 'has a fringe, anti-corporate bent to him' that is 'holding Wikipedia back,' Wales says that running ads on Wikipedia is not his decision to make. 'Though he personally dislikes the idea of advertising on Wikipedia, any decision to utilize ads would have to come from the community. At the moment, he won't rule anything out. "I can't say if I would ever support something like that," he tells Ars, "but I can say that I currently maintain the same position I always have: I am opposed to it."'
Enlightenment

Submission + - Earth's constant hum explained

Submitted by
MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: "It has been known for some time that there is a constant hum that emanates from the Earth, which can be heard near 10 millihertz on a seismometer. The problem was that nobody knew what caused it. It has now been shown that it is caused by waves on the bottom of the sea, and more specifically "by the combination of two waves of the same frequency travelling in opposite directions""

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