So Google is indeed being optimized..for its own advertising. The message to all but the very biggest vendors is that you must pay to show up. No more getting in the back door by being picked up by an price listing service that gets on Google’s first page, or by matching the search terms well.

But as a user, it looks like Google is cooking its own goose. These crappy results makes me much more inclined to go to Amazon and look at Amazon merchants, and compare price at 3 or 4 Apple vendors I know are reliable with returns in case I get a bum machine. The fact that I’m not getting remotely usable results from Google searches and that means I’ll skip them.

How long will it take for advertisers to realize that they are effectively being scammed by Google, that they are often paying for bad clickthroughs because Google is putting them on search results where they don’t belong but the retailer has written successful clickbait ads so they get bad visits? My impression is that Google Adsense reporting is opaque enough that they might not recognized Google’s culpability (indeed, I can see Google optimizing its algos to keep the bad clickthroughs at the highest level that an advertiser would tolerate).

Just as net neutrality opponents were celebrating the claim that their outrage-o-matic form letter campaigns resulted in more FCC-filed comments than neutrality supporters, the FCC has announced that it somehow managed to lose roughly 600,000 net neutrality comments during processing. According to a blog post by the FCC, the agency says that the comments were misplaced due to the agency's "18-year-old Electronic Comment Filing system (ECFS)."

In an attempt to find a balance between releasing footage and redacting private details, Seattle police held a hackathon of Friday.

Discussion around whether law enforcement agents should wear body cams has surged in the months since the shooting of Michael Brown. And as funding comes through for pilot programs, it's increasingly important to answer question about how these devices will be implemented.

As GeekWire reports, about 80 people—including developers, community members, and law enforcement agents—attended the Seattle Police hackathon. The goal was to work on techniques for redacting things captured in streamed dashboard or body cam video such as people's faces or license plate numbers. The hackathon was specifically looking to address these topics as they relate to Washington’s privacy laws, but the work could be relevant all over the country.

• I just saw a mouse in the kitchen. Is DDT OK to use? (1946)
• What does it mean when you dream of being chased by an elephant? (1947)
• Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963)
• Where can I rent a beagle for hunting? (1963)

Viacom’s claim wasn’t that YouTube was just turning a blind eye to users infringing copyright—it was that YouTube was offering filtering technology to its media partners that it wasn’t making available to companies who weren’t playing ball.

The Interactive Voter Choice System comprises a unique web-based consensus building mechanism that enables democracy stakeholders to overcome this crisis. In particular, it enables voters to self-organize from the "bottom-up" into autonomous voting blocs and electoral coalitions around common transpartisan agendas that cross party lines. These blocs and coalitions, which can work with parties or independently, can outflank and outnumber the electoral base of any single political party and run and elect candidates to defeat opposing party candidates. This capability enables these blocs and coalitions to overcome the polarization and partisan divisiveness that political parties and special interests inject into electoral and legislation processes.

The Interactive Voter Choice System's social networking platform also overcomes the well-documented tendency of social groups of like-minded people — especially political groups, to move to extremes, particularly when they are led by self-serving politicians. While the common goals of social and political groups can unite their members, research shows that these goals can exert a divisive influence by prompting them to adopt extreme positions to compete with external groups. In contrast, the consensus building mechanism contained within the Interactive Voter Choice System counteracts this tendency by encouraging the members of voting blocs and coalitions to continuously reach out across partisan divides to attract the new members they need to build electoral bases that possess the voting strength required to win elections.