Apple, and Foxconn's "Suicide Cluster"

Ruling could have chilling effect on P2P services - Reuters

Pocket-lint.com

Ruling could have chilling effect on P2P services Reuters LOS ANGELES/DENVER (Billboard) - A May 12 federal court ruling finding LimeWire and its founder/chairman, Mark Gorton, liable for copyright infringement is the latest in a string of high-profile legal victories against companies and individuals who ... Legal experts: LimeWire likely doomedCNET Court Rules That File-Sharing Service Infringed CopyrightsNew York Times Federal Judge Rules LimeWire, CEO Liable For Copyright InfringementChannelWeb Wired News -InformationWeek -PC World all 376 news articles »

Google says mistakenly got wireless data (Reuters)

Google to Stop Selling Nexus One Through Webstore - eWeek

CBC.ca

Google to Stop Selling Nexus One Through Webstore eWeek Google says it will cease selling its Nexus One Android smartphone through its Webstore and will instead work to make the Nexus One available through carrier partners' retail channels in the United States and other countries. ... Google's Nexus One: How the Revolution DiedPC World Google says Web-only sales of Nexus One a bustmsnbc.com Nexus One FINALLY comes to actual storesTG Daily The Associated Press -The Hindu -The Atlantic all 638 news articles »

In UK, First "Anarchist's Cookbook" Downloaders' Convictions

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skype Screen Sharing Is A Huge (And Free) Productivity Tool

Over the years we’ve been pitched many thousands of times by startups. Sometimes those pitches are in person. Sometimes it’s over the phone, which works if you have a live website to play with. But all too often we get requests for meetings via WebEx or one of the dozens of competing products. Over the years those products have improved, but the percentage of failures is way too high. It’s always awkward when people are talking about what you would see if the meeting software worked.

The problems with these products are particularly frustrating when we put on a big launch event like TechCrunch Disrupt later this month. We schedule hundreds of live demos in a two week period, stacking them every 20 minutes for days on end. Companies can choose how they want to live screencast their software and demos, and we’ve informally tracked what software they choose and the failure rates.

Skype video, which now has screen sharing, now accounts for about 30% of all demos for us.

The failure rate is near zero and the lag is acceptable even for calls originating from thousands of miles away. It is hands down the easiest way to connect by screen and voice. And it’s completely free.

There are few bells and whistles. It’s only good for one computer to one computer communication, for example, and you can’t view the presenter and the demo at the same time. But the benefits are more than worth it. Just about everyone in the tech community already uses skype for calls and chat anyway. You click to initiate a call and share your entire screen or just a part of it, and you’re off and running. I wish everything on the Internet worked this well.

We are probably going to make Skype mandatory for our future events. The time and efficiency savings are substantial.

What amazes me most is that screen sharing is just a side feature for Skype. But that side feature is way better than the products released by companies that focus on virtual meetings and nothing more.

I like straightforward, reliable and easy to use products. Skype is doing all of that for us right now.

Also, I’ve been using Skype video nearly constantly since my move to Seattle for meetings with people in Silicon Valley that I used to do in person. When you go to full screen view it’s the closest thing to them sitting right in front of you that I’ve seen. Well, other than if they were actually sitting right in front of you. That would definitely be more real than Skype Video, I guess.

Mobile phones banned at Cabinet, 10 Downing Street

TonenGeneral mulls action as rivals cut capacity

18 Manly Skirts and Dresses - From Male Bridal Gowns to Cage Skirts for Men (CLUSTER)

Shuttle Atlantis races to space station - The Associated Press

ABC Online

Shuttle Atlantis races to space station The Associated Press CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Atlantis is speeding after the International Space Station for a Sunday morning hookup. NASA says the docking will not be delayed, even if the space station needs to dodge space junk. Flight controllers have been ... Space shuttle Atlantis launches for last timeLos Angeles Times NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis Launches on Final MissionBusinessWeek Atlantis off on NASA's Third-to-Last Shuttle FlightABC News Space.com -Computerworld -Houston Chronicle all 2,562 news articles »

Gizmodo-iPhone Saga: Court Docs Reveal Fascinating Details - PC World

Kansas City Star

Gizmodo-iPhone Saga: Court Docs Reveal Fascinating Details PC World If you've been following the strange tale of how tech blog Gizmodo came upon an unreleased iPhone prototype, wrote about it, and raised the ire of Apple and law enforcement officials, you probably know the basics by now. In short, Apple engineer Robert ... Apple's Jobs Asked Gizmodo to Return 'Stolen' IPhone PrototypeBusinessWeek Search warrant in iPhone raid is unsealedLos Angeles Times 'Lost' Apple 4G Prototype Now Treated as Theft, Vandalism CaseChannelWeb San Francisco Chronicle -The Associated Press -CNET all 542 news articles »

Gizmodo-iPhone Saga: Court Docs Reveal Fascinating Details (PC World)

Google Has Been Collecting Wi-Fi Data, Accidentally

Crowdsourcing Political Candidates - Colorado Independent Seeks Running Mate on Craigslist (GALLERY)

Globular Grinders - The Orb Pestle and Mortar Set is a Contemporary Twist on an Old-School Tool (GALLERY)

The Fire Eagle Flies. Tom Coates The Latest To Leave Yahoo’s Nest

Everyone is talking about location now. But back in 2007, basically no one was talking about it. But Tom Coates was. That’s the year that Fire Eagle, an early location platform spearheaded by Coates first peeked its head out of Yahoo’s now-defunct Brickhouse. Yes, Yahoo had the pieces in place to be perhaps the key location platform 3 years ago. Obviously, that never happened. And now Coates is leaving Yahoo.

In a post tonight on his personal blog, Coates details some of his favorite memories at Yahoo over the past four years. In it, he singles out Yahoo Hack Day, Brickhouse, and Fire Eagle (as well as a dozen or so former colleagues). Coates came to the U.S. to head product for Brickhouse, which Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake started for Yahoo in 2007. A number of products launched out of there, but Coates is clearly most proud of his work on Fire Eagle. As he notes:

When I first joined Yahoo! in 2005, Simon Willison and I wrote a list of some areas we thought could be really fascinating to work on, and which could be a really huge deal over the coming years. We’d become really interested in location and had come to the conclusion that every website on the planet could be enhanced in some way if you could add some element of location.

That dream is of course coming into existence only now. Coates acknowledges that his dream was perhaps a bit ahead of its time.

In 2008, Fire Eagle launched the the public. I was at the launch event and recall it being one of the first location-based ideas that fueled my excitement about the topic. Location had just started to come on my radar with the launch of iPhone 3G and its GPS chip (and the App Store), and I was particularly interested in how services such as this would deal with privacy issues (a problem which is still an issue today). Fire Eagle actually had a very smart approach, and Coates knows it, writing today:

We spent an incredible amount of time thinking about the privacy implications of users sharing their locations. Many other services see privacy as a problem and attempt to gloss over it for their users. We thought of it as an opportunity and made the privacy features the core part of the project. Users could choose where to share, how much to share, hide themselves and change or retract their permissions at any time. I think we progressed the state of the art in that area.

But the money quote in Coates’ post has to be, “Someone once referred to Fire Eagle as the Pixies of the latest batch of Location Services, and if that’s at all true, it may be the biggest compliment I’ve ever received.” In many ways, Fire Eagle was the precursor to some of what we’re seeing now. It’s too bad, that for whatever reason, it never really took flight.

Coates notes that over the past year at Yahoo he had been working on taking some of the ideas behind Fire Eagle and applying them across Yahoo’s other location services. We’ll be seeing the results of what he’s been working on in the months (and years) ahead, he says. Let’s hope that’s true, but I’m not too confident in Yahoo’s commitment to the future of location, considering that the Director of Geo Engineering just left a few days before Coates did.

Yahoo had been making a run at the hot location network Foursquare, but the latest word is that that is now off the table too.

Coates won’t say what he’s up to next beyond taking a break. He does note that he’s been talking to a few people about interesting projects though. Hopefully he’ll be able to contribute to the exploding location field now that he’s outside of Yahoo.

[photo: flickr/patrick h. lauke]

Avatars Used For Australian Online Sex Appeal Study

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cumulus Cloud Lighting - Environmental Furniture 2010 Collection is Obviously Eco-Friendly (GALLERY)

Apple's Jobs involved in iPhone prototype search (AFP)

AFP - Apple chief executive Steve Jobs personally contacted the editor of a technology blog which obtained an iPhone prototype last month to ask for it back, according to newly released court documents.

30 Submerged Style Shoots - From Underwater Goddess Editorials to Drowning Lingerie Shoots (CLUSTER)

Distressed whale dies on beach in Dana Point - Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

Distressed whale dies on beach in Dana Point Los Angeles Times The marine mammal nicknamed Lilly beached itself and died just two days after having been rescued from binding netting. Lilly the gray whale beached itself at Doheny State Beach and died, two days after it had been rescued from netting. ... Gray whale dies after week off Southern CaliforniaThe Associated Press Scientist: Dana Point whale has died in the surfOCLNN Rest in Peace Beloved LilyDana Point Times AHN | All Headline News -San Jose Mercury News -OCRegister all 546 news articles »

Cushion-Creating Chairs - The Lambert Kamps Waffle Chair Produces Its Own Waffle Pillows (GALLERY)

Jobs made phone call seeking return of lost iPhone (AP)

AP - Brian Hogan's world closed in fast almost as soon as he sold the next-generation iPhone he found in a Silicon Valley bar to a popular technology website for a stack of $100 bills, according to court documents released Friday.

Villainous Illustrations - The Art of Benoit Ladouceur is Breathtakingly Amazing (GALLERY)

Ad company Virtual Iris riding the HTML5 wave - VentureBeat

New York Times (blog)

Ad company Virtual Iris riding the HTML5 wave VentureBeat As the web format battle between HTML5 and Adobe's Flash heats up, the creators of an ad-building tool called Virtual Iris say they can deliver the rich media experience of Flash in HTML. Much of the interest in HTML5, which is the latest update of the ... Adobe co-founder: 'We never abandoned Apple'CNET Adobe-Apple war on Flash reminiscent of PostScript struggleApple Insider Why Taking The High Road Against Apple Is The Right Move For AdobeChannelWeb Register -Fortune -BusinessWeek all 695 news articles »

Chemical Cocktail Can Keep a Heart Viable 10 Days, Outside the Body

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Report: "Hurt Locker" producers will soon blast tens of thousands of BitTorrenters with lawsuit

The Hollywood Reporter recently broke news that Voltage Pictures, which produced the Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker, has teamed up with a law firm going by the alias "The Copyright Group" to sue tens of thousands of suspected BitTorrent downloaders.

An earlier and related story from THR is here. Other Voltage Pictures releases will be included, including Personal Effects, starring Twitter darling Ashton Kutcher.

After filing the lawsuits, the plaintiffs must subpoena ISP records in an effort to match IP addresses with illicit behavior on BitTorrent. According to lawyers at Dunlap's firm, 75 percent of ISPs have cooperated fully. Those that have resisted are mostly doing so, they say, because of the amount of work involved in handing over thousands of names. But the clock may be ticking. For example, in the lawsuit over "Far Cry," Comcast has until next Wednesday to file motions to quash subpoenas. (Here's the stipulation by the parties.) By the end of next week, thousands of Comcast subscribers could be turned over.

Of the some 50,000 individuals who have been sued thus far, only three have tried to quash the subpoena. In one instance, a Georgia man tried to invoke the state's shield law protecting journalists from having to disclose their sources. The judge denied the motion. In another instance, a woman successfully got a court to throw out the subpoena because her IP address wasn't listed in the original complaint. Unfortunately for her, the complaint was then amended. After unmasking individuals who have illegally downloaded films, the U.S. Copyright Group then sends a settlement offer.

The lawsuit is expected to be filed in the coming days. If the ISPs involved cooperate, accused downloaders will receive a "settlement letter" within the next few weeks.

An aside: I was a guest on a taping of "This Week in Law" earlier today, and my fellow panelist Martin Schwimmer pointed out that legal filings from The Copyright Group show the name is sort of a branding front for a D.C. based "name, name, and name" law firm (Update: Ars Technica reports the firm's name is Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver). The Copyright Group's url? http://www.savecinema.org. [Eye-roll.] Also, the website is truly clip-art-tastic.

Torrentfreak has an item here.


Source: Boing Boing | 14 May 2010 | 10:03 pm

Google: We inadvertently collected personal data sent over open WiFi networks

Two weeks ago, Google tried to address the questions and criticism in a blog post. It admitted to collecting certain kinds of data around the world that identify Wi-Fi networks in order to help improve its mapping products. But the company explicitly said it did not collect or store so-called "payload data" - the actual information being transmitted by users over unprotected networks.

But Google is now saying, in a late-night-Friday European-time confession that is sure to infuriate regulators and privacy advocates, that its previous claims were wrong.

Square, Citysearch lead the pack for Best Android Apps of the Week (Appolicious)

Google abandons smartphone Nexus One online store (AFP)

AFP - Google has said it is closing down the online store for its Nexus One smartphone in a strategic shift that signals the failure of its bid to market the device directly to consumers on the Web.

Spider accomplishes what 1000 penis-enlargement products could not

Ants in your pants? Fine. Just be thankful it's not a katipo spider. A tourist in New Zealand apparently startled one of these venomous beasties by pulling back on the shorts he'd left on the sand for a nude beach swim. The result: A bite that led to horrific swelling on a certain, sensitive part of his anatomy and 16 days in the hospital with an inflamed heart. (Via Angel Wardriver)

Why not go back to the moon?

Why do you hate the moon, John P. Holdren, Presidential science adviser and director of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy?

At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the questioner at this session from the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy was trying to ask. Holdren, for his part, has a pretty good answer—namely, that re-prioritizing how we spend money on space, and killing specific programs that aren't turning out a good (science) return on (money/time) investment, isn't the same thing as spray-painting "The Moon Sucks!" on the White House locker-room door.

And, yes, Neil Armstrong thinks we need to go back asap. But Buzz Aldrin disagrees. And, as we all know, it does not pay to argue with Buzz Aldrin.

For more detail on the Obama space plan, and why it could be a very good thing for NASA and space-lovers in general, check out this analysis by Phil Plait.

Via Ginger Pinholster

Taiwanese Researchers Plug RFIDs As Disaster-Recovery Tools

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blood Cell Bakery: Using cookies to explain science

I absolutely love the frequently geeky baking blog Not So Humble Pie (home of gel electrophoresis cookies!), so imagine my thrill when I found out that Isa Humble had teamed up with University of Illinois-Urbana histology lecturer Joanne Manaster for a video blog combining science and baked goods into one delicious package.

This introductory video launches the series, but there's others covering all the different cells that make up your blood stream—from erythrocytes to eosinophils. And, yes, there's a cookie to represent all of them. I'm particularly fond of the erythrocytes, with their perfect, little dented centers. I haven't seen any how-to posts up on Not So Humble Pie, but I'd love to know how these were made.

CrunchGear Review: Canon T2i DSLR camera

An outstanding consumer DSLR and liberating video recorder, Canon’s new flagship Rebel is a powerhouse media device in a small and relatively affordable package. What I think of as killer features, however, may not be viewed as such by the buying population at large.

Its main selling points are a highly improved LCD, a more complete video mode than its predecessor, and of course an increase in megapixels. Other than these features, the T2i is pretty much still the Digital Rebel we know and love. At $800, it’s not exactly an entry-level camera, but for enthusiasts and casual moviemakers, it’s a huge value.

Cars can be hacked

The same networking systems that allow modern cars to communicate with services like OnStar also allow the cars to be hacked. Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego were able to take control of cars' computer systems—remotely forcing the vehicles to brake, shutting down the engines, and even disabling the brakes altogether. The team analyzed the security risks inherent in modern automobiles and published a paper explaining their findings. You can read it online. (Via Erin Biba)

More Americans would rather type a message than speak it

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Email / IM, Smartphones, Mobile

According to data released by CTIA, more Americans are spending more time on the Internet and texting than talking on the phone.  This kind of surprises me and it doesn’t at the same time.  I’m surprised that it happened this early, yet the amount of smartphones and teenagers with cell phones has increased tremendously over the past few years.  Data such as texting and Internet usage has seen as 50% increase, while an average same-area call declined from 2.3 minutes in 2008 to 1.8 minutes.
Leading phone manufacturers realize teens are more interested in QWERTY keyboards and the ability to be connected online, as opposed to talking on the phone.  Similarly, adults and business people enjoy accessing email and typically spend a lot more time reading and writing emails instead of calling the person to deliver the same message.  Simply put, people find it more convenient to text a message to someone instead of calling and saying the same thing.  I am also guilty of this because I text whenever I can and reduce speaking on the phone as much as possible.

Read [Electronista]

Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GPS glitch hit some military systems in January (AP)

Review: Canon T2i DSLR camera

Short version: An outstanding consumer DSLR and liberating video recorder, the T2i is a powerhouse media device in a small and relatively affordable package. What I think of as killer features, however, may not be viewed as such by the buying population at large.

Features:

• 18-megapixel images/up to 1080p video
• ISO 100-6400
• 3″ high-resolution LCD (1040K dots/720×480px)
• Mic in and HDMI out ports
• MSRP: $800 (body only)

Pros:

• Great image and video quality
• A better camcorder than “real” camcorders at similar prices
• Beautiful LCD

Cons:

• Compact body isn’t for everyone
• Built-in flash is limited; AF strobe is a pain
• Could really use a thumb wheel

Full review:

Let me just, right of the bat, say that for serious image quality comparisons, you should head over to DP Review. I don’t have the kind of setup necessary to test chroma levels between seven different cameras at once. This review, like all our reviews, is more anecdotal than analytical. From what I’ve seen (and read), the T2i’s image quality is comparable and sometimes better than the other cameras at its price level, depending of course on the lens. I put a pair of unmodified sample shots (RAW –> JPEG) here, but the image quality of DSLRs at this level is pretty solid across the board.

But to continue: the T2i is a camera I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, I freely admit. I bought the Rebel XT, skipped the XTi, bought the XSi, and skipped the T1i. They were clearly onto something with DSLR video, I thought, but it needed more time to mature. I think the T2i is the fulfillment of the promise made with the T1i. While it’s clearly a consumer camera, it’s extremely versatile piece of electronics, almost as much so, I feel, as the Casio Exlilim FC-100 (my favorite compact camera).

Its main selling features are a highly improved LCD, a more complete video mode than its predecessor, and of course an increase in megapixels. Other than these features, the T2i is pretty much still the Digital Rebel we know and love. At $800, it’s not exactly an entry-level camera, but for enthusiasts and casual moviemakers, it’s a huge value.

The body is almost identical to earlier rebels, and slightly thicker than my XSi. the other changes I noticed are largely shared with the T1i: molded buttons instead of circular, a more aggressive cut to the hand grip, and a dedicated live view button. I found the dials to be a little bit stiffer than on my XSi, but they’ll probably loosen up with use. And is it just me, or is the movie mode at the wrong end of the dial? Maybe they should have it on both ends.

The new LCD is a smart move on Canon’s part: the T1i had a similarly high-resolution screen (this one is 720×480), but the new 3:2 aspect ratio means your photos will no longer be cropped or letterboxed when they’re displayed. If you haven’t experienced the new resolution, get ready for a treat; I’ve spent a lot less time zooming into my pictures to check focus than I did on my XSi or other DSLRs. Other than that, the interface seems unchanged, and as before the D-pad is only just sufficient for navigating your photos. I know it’s considered a high-end feature, but a thumbwheel would go a long way towards making this camera more fun to use.

The pop-up flash is still really only useful for snapshots, and focusing in low light produces the strobe effect familiar to Canon shooters, dazzling your subjects and giving them a confused look in the actual exposure. But if you’re really serious about flash photography, you probably already own a Speedlite or some such.

As I mentioned before, image quality is best tested systematically, and DP Review has that covered. The new 18 megapixel sensor certainly creates larger images, and low light performance is improved somewhat over the T1i. I still recommend setting the ISO manually to avoid unnecessary noise. Other general photography tips can be found in forums and other reviews.

Video is really the fun part of the T2i. Within seconds of trying shooting 1080p at 24 FPS, I knew the T2i was a winner. If you put a reasonably fast lens on the camera, with a decent focus ring, you’ll feel like a serious filmmaker in no time. The fidelity, sensitivity, and ease-of-use are off the chart; there are plenty of perfectly nice little camcorders out there right now, but the fact is that their image quality is pretty rotten, and low light performance is just plain terrible across the board. I’ve said some things about DSLR video, and I stand by them, but for anything less than a professional production, a T2i or 7D (or K-x or other brand of video-shooting DSLR) is a great option.

It is important that you actually want to do more than the average Flip camera. If all you want is a single button and automatic YouTube uploads, of course a $100 pocket cam will be sufficient. But for those of us frustrated by the annoying interfaces and limited customizability of current camcorders, something like the T2i is a dream come true. A few minutes of experimentation had me changing settings like a champ, playing with depth of field, manual follow focus, and so on. I won’t bore you details of the cinematic experiments I attempted, but in almost every case I’ve found that the T2i acquitted itself wonderfully. You can watch the video below, but to see it in high definition please click here!

I shot mostly at 1080/24p, but you can also shoot at 720p or 640×480, though both are inexplicably limited to 60FPS. I have no idea why that is, but it’s annoying. If people ask for it, Canon might consider putting alternate frame rates into a firmware update, but at the moment it is worth consideration if you care about that sort of thing. There’s still plenty of skew when you move the camera around quickly, which is something that’s hard to explain but you’ll notice it during playback. It’s a flaw shared by most non-pro digital video cameras, and Canon’s is better than Nikon’s right now, but it’s something to be aware of. Other than that, I found video quality to be quite good and not too affected by encoding artifacts. You’ll get some smearing, of course, but that’s the same for any device recording live to H.264. Check out this frame grab from a video that was taken in the middle of the night (late ferry) — there’s very little noise to speak of and yet the darks are dark and the brights are bright.

Keep your workflow in mind (and final product too) when shooting — I found that my computer would crash when trying to re-encode a bunch of 1080p/24 under certain circumstances, and of course most web video has 720p/30 as a reasonable maximum.

I stuck with manual focus throughout the review, despite the wimpy focus ring on my 35mm F/2, because the contrast-based autofocus is too slow for any kind of action. It was accurate, sure, but you don’t always have the luxury of a spare five seconds in which for it to work itself out, when it could be as simple as a twist of your hand. I’m sure they’ll be improving that sometime, but probably not any time soon, so if you’re uncomfortable using manual focus for video, I’d stick with the fixed focus pocket cams. They’re still great for a ton of stuff, and they’re a lot cheaper.

The downside of shooting video is pretty obvious: it drains your battery and fills up your card extremely fast. SD cards are cheap these days, but in my newfound love for high-definition video, I’ve already started filling up the hard drive on my laptop. It’ll be a while before I get that under control. One minute of 1080/30p took up about 340MB, and the lower-end VGA/60p video was a little less than half that, by my estimation.

The combination of a cropped sensor and no image stabilization means that your video will probably be pretty shaky. I’d recommend picking up a cheap or portable tripod, or looking into DIY stabilization solutions. If you don’t have a 1080p-capable monitor either, you might want to pick one of those up too. You see? It’s kind of a gateway drug.

You’ll also want to think about getting an external microphone. The on-camera mic is tiny and records in mono; sound quality varies widely and the best thing to do is to just get a small one that perhaps clips onto the hot shoe.

Conclusion

The T2i is a great success and a great value. I know I’m biased as a Canon shooter, but I think it really is the best value on the market right now for an all-purpose imaging device. Stills are excellent, video is fun. As long as you are aware of the shortcomings of digital video in general and DSLR video specifically, this is a great buy for a home video connoisseur. Beyond the improved video and body, it’s the same winning Rebel formula, backed by the same great Canon lens selection. Seriously though, if you want to shoot great video, get a fast prime with a big focus ring. It’ll hurt at first but you’ll thank yourself later.

Product page: Canon T2i DSLR (also known as the 550d or Kiss X4)

Mick Jagger talks downloading and piracy on 40th anniversary of "Exile on Main Street"

This BBC News interview with [Sir] Mick Jagger on the 40th anniversary of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street contains a few really choice grafs about the myth that the internet has robbed artists of their livelihoods. He seems pretty chill about the perceived threats of downloading, and explains that for a long time, the record labels did a fine job of robbing artists:

BBC: What's your feeling on technology and music?

Jagger: Technology and music have been together since the beginning of recording. [The internet is] just one facet of the technology of music. Music has been aligned with technology for a long time. The model of records and record selling is a very complex subject and quite boring, to be honest.

BBC: But your view is valid because you have a huge catalogue, which is worth a lot of money, and you've been in the business a long time, so you have perspective.

Jagger: Well, it's all changed in the last couple of years. We've gone through a period where everyone downloaded everything for nothing and we've gone into a grey period it's much easier to pay for things - assuming you've got any money.

BBC: Are you quite relaxed about it?

Jagger: I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don't make as much money out of records. But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.

Proposed Apple response to Adobe's "We [heart] Apple" ad

Adobe has launched a "We ♥ Choice," "We ♥ Apple" messaging campaign directed at Apple's lockout of Flash on the iPad. Here's a proposed response from Apple. (Image by @isaaco, and *this is a joke* not a real Apple statement)


Source: Boing Boing | 14 May 2010 | 6:44 pm

U.S. lawmakers to hold hearing on J&J recall May 27

Nissan Leaf to get iPhone integration

When I read in my little RSS reader that Nissan’s Leaf electric vehicle would be getting some iPhone love, I got kind of excited. I don’t even have an iPhone. But I have an imagination. Make the car magically come to the phone! Locate it in parking lots with a customized compass! I don’t know. As it turns out, it’ll ping you when it’s done charging and you can tweak the climate control. Seriously, that’s it?

Alas, it’s probably too much trouble to make a really comprehensive suite of apps for your car, allowing it to sync in all kinds of ways with all kinds of phones. It’s okay, I’m still holding out hope for a phone-driven car… like in that Bond movie. One of ‘em, I can’t remember.

Appletell reviews the Gorillapod SLR-Zoom tripod

FROM APPLETELL - When combined with the Ballhead, this compact tripod with articulable legs becomes a versatile, sturdy system that no outdoor photographer should be without.
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

“Balancing Cube” robot balances well enough – but is not a cube

What qualifies as a robot, exactly? This thing appears to be a sort of polyhedron that stands on its tiptoes. Sure, it’s impressive — but “robot?” But that’s neither here nor there. This project, called the “Balancing Cube,” is an experiment in distributed computing, as each of the counterbalancing “modules” is self-contained in its movements, though it has access to the others’ data. The sum of all of the modules’ movements keeps the cube balanced, even with a gentle push. Sure, it’s no BigDog, but it doesn’t buzz like a hornet out of hell, either. (Aw, LittleDog…)

[via IEEE Spectrum and Technabob]

Google says mistakenly got wireless data - Reuters

ABC Online

Google says mistakenly got wireless data Reuters A camera used for Google street view is pictured at the CeBIT computer fair in Hanover March 2, 2010. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc said its fleet of cars responsible for photographing streets around the world have for several years accidentally ... Google accidentally collecting personal wi-fi dataAlbuquerque Express Google Says It Collected Private Data by MistakeNew York Times Google confesses it collected private dataKHON2 CNET -PC World -Ars Technica all 480 news articles »

Cable Company Makes a Move on Internet Video

Four hundred eighty channels and nothing to watch on TV? Liberty Global, one of the largest cable service providers in Europe, is adding a few more options for its customers.

The company will soon introduce a set-top box that will marry traditional cable content with apps, widgets and access to web-based video, Wired has learned.

“It’s a set-top box on steroids,” Balan Nair, chief technology officer for Liberty Global, told Wired.com. “The interface will be very intuitive and advanced and include features such as search and recommendation that will tie in a seamless way the experience of a using a DVR and a web search engine.”

Think of it as a Boxee or Roku-like service living on the cable digital video recorder. For instance, a search for Batman will show what channel is broadcasting it, if is available through video on demand, where on the web you can find it and even if it is available through some peer-to-peer networks.

The move will be a big step forward for the cable industry, which has so far been wary of internet video content. It could change the idea of a set-top box and usher in a post-TiVo era where consumers watch Jersey Shore with the same ease as an episode of the online show Epic Fu. In addition to delivering a greater variety of content to your living room, it could open up new opportunities for video producers to reach a mass audience, and could help the cable companies sell more broadband accounts.

The only losers? Startups that have bet their futures on making dedicated internet TV boxes, with functions that set-top boxes like Liberty Global’s could soon replace.

The box or the “gateway” as Nair likes to call it will be an IP-based device that can stream video, voice and data over Wi-Fi to devices in the home such as PC, phones and eventually the iPad. Liberty will partner with Samsung and LG to build the box, which will be powered by Intel’s Atom processor.

Liberty’s new set-top box will initially be available in Europe early next year. Although the company hasn’t yet determined prices, it might be free to new customers who sign up for Liberty’s cable service, and available for a small upgrade fee to current customers.

“It makes a lot of sense because it is smart and future-proof,” says Jeff Wlodarczak, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, a New York-based equity research firm that focuses on the media and communications sector. “All of cable will eventually go in this direction.”

Web-connected TV is growing fast as more people connect to Hulu to watch the latest episode of Lost or hook up Boxee to look for Jon Stewart’s comedy clips. By 2014, about 160 million households worldwide will be watching internet-delivered video on their TVs on a regular basis, estimates The Diffusion Group. In North America alone, 63 million homes, or almost half of the TV watching households, will be viewing internet content on the big screen, Diffusion predicts.

“If you can let people personalize their TV experience by combining widgets and internet content with the 40 channels, that’s going to be very important,” says Wlodarczak.

Cable service providers are intrigued yet wary of web content and offering easy access to it. Liberty Global’s move could help some service providers in the United States find a way to replicate it, says Colin Dixon, an analyst with The Diffusion Group.

“If Liberty does this, it is a step forward for the entire industry,” he says. “If they can provide a set-top box with access to web content, then it becomes a pretty good deal for customers.”

Today, getting internet video content on your TV means having enough tech savvy and patience to jump through a few hoops. First, users have to download services such as Boxee and Roku on their PCs — though the two companies also make their services available through dedicated hardware — and then hook them up to their TVs.

Companies like Apple and Netgear have tried to make the process easy by offering consumers hardware that will stream web content to their TVs more simply. But so far, most consumers have resisted adding yet another device to their living room.

Baking web-streaming features directly on the cable box could change the picture. Liberty’s box will support the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standard that will allow different devices, such as DVD players, TVs, set-top boxes and PCs, to share their content with one another.

But all this could come at the expense of some of the smaller, innovative streaming media startups.

“Cable guys are great at delivering content and a pipeline full of channels 24/7,” says Andrew Kippen, vice-president of marketing at Boxee. “What they don’t have expertise in is delivering the interface and that’s why we are a software company.”

Kippen may be just a little too optimistic.

TiVo’s history offers clues on what happens when cable companies move in. Despite its great user interface and innovative service, TiVo’s service was crushed by inexpensive set-top boxes from cable companies that flooded consumer homes and offered similar features. TiVo recovered only when it cut a deal with the cable companies to integrate its software into their boxes, slowly giving up on the idea of having a TiVo-branded box in consumer homes.

Services like Boxee could meet with a similar fate. “If the cable companies move in, Boxee or even Hulu will cease to be quite so important in the web world as they are now,” says Dixon.

Boxee says it hopes to stay one step ahead in the game by partnering with the cable companies and creating an open platform.

“We are not a gatekeeper like the TV company is going to be,” says Kippen.

Boxee and Roku may have found the chink in the cable providers’ armor. Liberty Global’s success, for instance, will largely depend on how open their new set-top box service is, says Dixon, because openness is the key to rapidly adding new features via third-party products.

“Roku has this open API and anyone can get on its box,” he says. “But if Liberty can’t do that then they are never going to be able to keep up with what’s going on the web and they will be left behind by more open players.”

The biggest of those challengers is likely to be Google. At its developer conference next week, Google, in partnership with Sony and Logitech, is expected to announce an open set-top box that will run the Android operating system.

“It’s a business that’s likely to get intensely competitive,” says Wlodarczak.

Despite Liberty Global’s efforts, change in the cable world, especially in the United States is likely to be slow, says Corey Ferengul, Executive Vice President of Marketing for Rovi, a company that works with TV content creators and cable companies.

“Cable operators are absolutely interested in getting into internet content, whether that be shorts or user generated content,” says Ferengul. “What they haven’t figured out is how to pay for the service and that’s holding them back.”

Take that fear into account and Liberty Global’s walled garden approach could be the right first step, says Wlodarczak.

“Keep it simple, that’s what they are going for,” he says. “They can always iterate on it and add more but right now they are taking a big first step.”

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Boxee Set-Top Box and Remote
• Review: Roku Netflix Set-Top Box Is Just Shy of Totally Amazing
• Boxee Beta Is a Web Video Streamer’s Dream

Photo (bigpresh/Flickr)

Google says mistakenly got wireless data

Cable Company Makes a Move on Internet Video

Cable Company Makes a Move on Internet Video

UPDATE 3-Google says mistakenly got wireless data

Best Solutions For Massive Home Hard Drive Storage?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla stake on the table in CEO's divorce dispute

Google grabs personal info off of Wi-Fi networks (AP)

Art collection of CNET co-founder Halsey Minor goes on the block

YouTube takes down video taken of Transformers 3 set on public street

So imagine you head into your office one day, and find that an alley outside your window has been turned into a set for Transformers 3 — there are cameras and booms and you can hear Michael Bay yelling. They’re about to pneumatically fire a car down the street (it’s been Transformer-punched, you presume) so you whip out your iPhone and start recording. Up it goes on YouTube and… down it comes off YouTube after Viacom instructs it to be removed under pretense of “matching third party content.”

I imagine you’d be surprised, especially if the video your friend shot (the friend standing next to you, shooting the exact same video which you see above) didn’t get taken down. I know YouTube has to be on the lookout for copyright violations, but really now.

Here’s a screenshot, in case that one up top goes down too. Does this look like official footage from Transformers 3 — a movie which is still in production, by the way, thus making duplication impossible?

More details and analysis at TechDirt.

Google to sell Nexus One offline, close Web store (AP)

AP - Google Inc. will close an online store that it set up to sell its Nexus One phone and rely on traditional retailers instead.

Google's WiFi Debacle Shows Internet Giant's Lack of Concern for Consumers' Privacy, Consumer Watchdog Calls On Government Agencies to Ensure Private Data is Deleted

Google's WiFi Debacle Shows Internet Giant's Lack of Concern for Consumers' Privacy, Consumer Watchdog Calls On Government Agencies to Ensure Private Data is Deleted

Facebook and "radical transparency": a rant by danah boyd

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, "of course not!" I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt's page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

Over and over again, I find that people's mental model of who can see what doesn't match up with reality. People think "everyone" includes everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that "everyone" includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the settings that they see, that they're completely locked down. They don't get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo, affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in "friends-of-friends" (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people's abstractions allow them to share more. When people think "friends-of-friends" they don't think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

This week in search 5/14/10

New York Times paywall coming next year

Section: Web, Websites

The Wall Street Journal has long been a fan of the paywall business model, the method by which readers have to subscribe via monthly payments to WSJ in order to read content. But now, it seems, the New York Times will be joining WSJ by placing its content behind the bars of a paywall as early as the beginning of next year.

Do not fret, however. The New York Times’ Bill Keller asserts that:

“Those who mainly come to the website via search engines or links from blogs, and those who only come sporadically — in short, the bulk of our traffic — may never be asked to pay at all.”

This, I assume, means that the paywall will be only come into effect once a user has visited the site many times within the same month. This is actually a win-win for NYTimes because traffic from search engines will stay consistent, keeping online advertisers interested in purchasing parts of their page.

So if you are a regular reader of the New York Times, you might have to start shelling out monthly subscription payments, but for myself and the rest of the sporadically visiting public, nothing, really, will change.

Read [Mashable]

Full Story » | Written by Hunter Clarke for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

RBS Sempra assets draw Vitol, other suitors -- WSJ

Google Says It Mistakenly Collected Wi-Fi Data While Mapping

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hack: Overclock Your iPhone or iPod Touch (PC World)

UPDATE 2-Beer, betrayal, a lost iPhone in Apple device tale

Investor adds to Infogroup stake, controls 7 pct

In Communist Russia, vending machine dispenses caviar

If you’re a bigwig in Moscow you may have a caviar machine in your office. New machines in the Moscow’s mayor’s office has one of the machines that doles out sweet, sweet caviar for about 3.50 Euro.

Shown here is a caviar burger, which just sounds gross.

Sadly, according to the Telegraph, the machine is so popular that it is currently broken.

Key spill size issue: How much and does it matter?

Should Large Moons Be Called 'Satellite Planets'?

4chan Founder ‘Moot’ Raises $625K For Stealth Startup Canvas Networks

According to an SEC filing, 4chan founder Christopher “Moot” Poole has raised $625,000 in funding for a stealth startup called Canvas Networks. We’ve emailed Poole to confirm the funding.

4chan is an online bulletin board where anyone can post comments, expound on topics and share images. Poole was featured as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world last year.

As of March, 4chan was receiving around 8.2 million unique visitors per month. Poole told the New York Times’ Nick Bilton that the site receives an average of 800,000 new posts a day. He also told Bilton that a Japanese toy store offered him $45,000 for 4chan, which he declined.

In the same interview, Poole said he was “working on a new project to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available” We’re assuming that Canvas Networks is related to this.

Unsealed iPhone 4G Affidavit: Phone’s Sellers Allegedly Tried To Hide Evidence

The New Browser Wars: Will Ubuntu Drop Firefox For Google Chrome?

H-P: Why Our Ink Is Expensive [Voices]

By Justin Scheck, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Tired of hearing customers whine that printer ink is too expensive–and facing competition from ink-cartridge refillers–executives at Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) printing division would like to buff up the print giant’s reputation with consumers. So the company recently sent Thom Brown, who specializes in “competitive media intelligence,” on a media tour with a presentation called “Why Does Ink Cost So Much?”

Opening a bag of props including a trio of shot glasses, squares of foam and some disassembled print heads, Mr. Brown earlier this week explained the complex workings of H-P print heads, and the billions of dollars the company has spent over the years developing them.

He talked about the challenges in shooting drops of ink at moving pages of paper, and the perils of refilling ink cartridges rather than buying new ones from H-P.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Google Admits To Accidentally Collecting Personal Data With Street View Cars

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Google has just admitted in an official blog post that its Street View cars have been “mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks” since 2006. In other words, as these cars have been driving around, they’ve been collecting unencrypted user data in addition to the SSID and MAC addresses they were supposed to be tracking.

It’s not likely that Google grabbed enough data about many individuals for this to be a major privacy concern. After all, the cars were typically only in range of most of these Wifi networks for a few seconds. But this is certain to haunt Google nonetheless — the company has so much private data on so many people, that it’s imperative that the public maintain its trust in the search giant and its “Don’t be evil” mantra. Expect privacy advocates and the various governments that are putting Google under increasing scrutiny to refer back to this incident for quite a while, along with Google’s recent Buzz privacy debacle.

Here’s the explanation from Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research:

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short. So we will be:
Asking a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked and what data it gathered, as well as to confirm that we deleted the data appropriately; and
Internally reviewing our procedures to ensure that our controls are sufficiently robust to address these kinds of problems in the future.
In addition, given the concerns raised, we have decided that it’s best to stop our Street View cars collecting WiFi network data entirely.

The discovery was prompted by a request from the Data Protection Authority in Hamburg, Germany, who wanted to audit the data Google collected with its Street View cars. Google responded with a blog post on its European Public Policy blog, which has now been shown to contain incorect information that understates how much data these cars have been collecting.

FYI, Pandora Makes Your Music Public

Alliance for Digital Equality Appoints Teresa McBride, One of America's Leading Latino Entrepreneurs, to Its Board of Advisors

Judge Orders Gizmodo Search Warrant Unsealed

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So Hot Right Now: Top 10 Gadgetell posts for the week of May 09, 2010

Section:

Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week?  Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!

• How to Jailbreak your iPad
  ” It has been a little over a month since the iPad came out, and already we have seen the first wave of jailbreak software pop up over the web. If you are not familiar with the term, jailbreaking…” MORE »
• Android number two smartphone OS sold in Q1 2010
  ” It looks like Android has finally overtaken the iPhone, if only for the moment.  According to market research group NPD, Android was the number two top selling smartphone OS in the US for the first quarter…” MORE »
• Diaspora: Could it be a Facebook Killer?
  ” If George Orwell were alive today, he would more than likely accuse social networking juggernaut Facebook as the fruition of his 1984 nightmares. It is no secret that Facebook monitors basically everything you do. Many people have created groups…” MORE »
• Sprint ditches the Nexus One
  ”  A couple of weeks ago it was announced that the Verizon was not going to be carrying the Nexus One. Various reasons for this move might include the HTC Droid Incredible that was going to be released, the fact that the Nexus…” MORE »
• Court docs says no Verizon iPhone until 2012?
  “Did Apple and AT&T sign a 5 -year exclusive deal for the iPhone back in 2008?  And if so, have either party breached terms that would nullify the contract?  That is the thrust of the case being made as we learn that USA Today reported on court documents…” MORE »
• Square mobile payment system now available for Android, the iPad & iPhone
  ” The Square mobile payment system seems to available for a few platforms now. It was just recently added to the App Store and made available for the iPhone, iPod touch and…” MORE »
• Who loves iPad?  Old men says Yahoo!
  ” According to some statistics released on the Yahoo! Mobile Blog, Apple iPad users are overwhelmingly men and overwhelmingly older. Many expect the younger generation to adopt new technology first and fastest, but Yahoo!‘s data is at odds with that view.  Their data might just surprise you. …” MORE »
• AT&T to launch the Palm Pre Plus on May 16 for $149
  ” Starting May 16, AT&T will offer the Palm Pre Plus for $149 with a new two-year contract.  However, to entice current and new AT&T customers, the Palm Pre Plus will be combined with the Touchstone charging device.  The Palm Pre…” MORE »
• BlackBerry Bold 9800 slider shows up on video
  ” It looks like the BlackBerry Bold 9800 slider has shown up on video. Coming in at just 14 seconds, its brief and to the point, but it does offer a few items. First and foremost…” MORE »
• Google Editions Bookstore signs over 25,000 authors and publishers
  “Google is moving past offering just free books in the public domain.  The coming service, dubbed Google Editions will offer current titles from almost all American publishers and authors.  This weekend, that number ran past 25,000 adding up to over 4 million titles. So far, Google’s been…” MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (and more!) free for ATI, Nvidia gamers

Here’s one for the road: if you have an ATI or Nvidia graphics card you can download Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast from Steam for free. Woo~!

Also, bonus for Nvidia gamers: you also get free copies of Peggle Extreme and an 11-level demo of Portal: First Slice.

As an ATI gamer, I am outraged. Unless, of course, there’s some ATI deal that I can’t find, in which case I retract my outrage. Can you retract outrage? Oh, whatever.

'Cyber-Roach' Forces Rethink On Animal Movement

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First Look: Matt Kindt's Time-Warped 'Revolver'

GPS Tracker Company Helps Police Uncover Michigan Grow-Op

Yippy, Inc. DBA: 'Yippy' Has Closed the Clusty.com Transaction

Gallery: 50 Years of Real-Life Ray Guns

Workers Plan to Sue iPhone Contractor Over Poisoning

Btrfs Could Be the Default File System In Ubuntu Meerkat

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New Browser Wars: Will Ubuntu drop Firefox for Google Chrome?

Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe.

What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is considering adding Chrome (or Chromium—more on that in a second) to Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix, the next big release of which is due this autumn. What a terribly constructed sentence. Exactly why they’d replace Firefox with Chrome or Chromium isn’t known, but presumably they feel that the new browser on the block performs better on the average netbook than Firefox. No one would be inaccurate in calling Firefox a bit of a memory hog at times. I wouldn’t touch a netbook with a 10-foot pole—netbooks may also be dying, so this may all be moot sooner rather than later—so I have no idea if that’s true or not, that Chrome or Chromium out-performs Firefox on netbooks. I have no horse in that race, as it were.

Yet there’s confusion as to whether Ubuntu would use Chrome or Chromium. You normally want your free and open-source (FOSS) operating systems to come with FOSS software, something that Chrome is not.

Wikipedia explains the difference between Chrome and Chromium:

Chromium is the name given to the open source project and the browser source code released and maintained by the Chromium Project. It is possible to install the latest snapshots for Windows or download the source code and build it in Windows, Linux or Mac. Google takes this source code and adds on the Google name and logo, an auto-updater system called GoogleUpdate, an opt-in option for users to send Google their usage statistics and crash reports as well as RLZ-tracking which transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded.

Sounds to me like you’d want to install Chromium and not Chrome—who wants all that extra Google junk?—but that’s just me. But considering that Ubuntu already ships with proprietary software (Flash, certain drivers, etc.) I don’t know if the Chrome/Chromium split will be any sort of issue for Canonical.

Where this leaves Firefox is anyone’s guess. I mean, it could be that this was just a juicy rumor for a lazy Friday afternoon and nothing more, in which case I would have just wasted several minutes of your time.

Or, it could be a sign that people are starting to feel less, um, “loyalty” to Firefox. Who knows?

Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years [Digital Daily]

Responding to questions about its Street View data collection practices in an April 27 blog post, Google said that it captured only publicly broadcast Wi-Fi network names and their MAC addresses and nothing else–certainly not “payload data,” the personal information being sent over those networks.

Well, guess what Google (GOOG) has unwittingly been collecting these past three years?

That’s right, payload data. And it has been collecting them from Wi-Fi networks not protected by passwords–in the United States, Germany, France, Brazil, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks,” Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google’s official blog Friday.

“So how did this happen?” he asks, quickly supply the answer: “Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software–although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

But they captured it just the same. And now Google is in the uniquely uncomfortable position of sitting on a pile of exactly the sort of customer data that privacy advocates worried that it was collecting. Until the company figures out what to do with the information, Google has temporarily grounded its Street View cars and promised to stop collecting Wi-Fi network data entirely.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust–and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here,” Eustace concluded. “We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

I’m sure the European privacy commission and regulators in the United States will make quite sure of that.

Unsealed iPhone 4G Affidavit: Phone’s Sellers Allegedly Tried To Hide Evidence

Earlier today, at the insistence of a coalition of media organizations including Wired and Cnet, a judge unsealed an affidavit the iPhone 4G leak case that has uncovered many more details about the case. The documents, which contain the affidavit of Detective Matthew Broad of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, affirm that it was Apple that sparked the police investigation, and offers a timeline of events leading up to the police raid of Gizmodo editor’s Jason Chen’s house. We’ve embedded the full document below, via Cnet.

In the documents, it’s revealed that Steve Jobs personally contacted Gizmodo about getting the phone back (Gizmodo responded that it wanted Apple to officially state that the phone was theirs). It also reveals that Apple has claimed that Gizmodo damaged the prototype iPhone during the course of taking it apart:

“Sewell said that upon returning to Apple, employees attempted to power the phone and found that it no longer functioned. Upon examining the phone, they found the following damage occurred to it as a result of the phone being disassembling[sic]:
1. Broken ribbon cable
2. One screw was inserted into the wrong location and caused an electrical short
3. Back plate snaps were broken.
4. Stripped Screws.”

At one point in the document, the story of how Gray Powell probably lost the phone is detailed (note that this supports the claims by Gizmodo that it was not actually stolen out of Gray Powell’s possession):

“Powell said he sat at the bar with his uncle. He said the last memory he had of the prototype phone was placing it in his bag, which he then put on the floor by his feet. Powell said that his bag was knocked over at one point in time and it was possible the prototype iPhone fell out of the bag onto the floor.

I asked Powell if it was possible that someone stole the prototype iPhone from his bag. He said he did leave his bag with his uncle at one point during the evening when he went to the bathroom and it was possible, although unlikely, that someone removed the prototype iPhone from his bag”.

But most interesting, at least on our first read-through of the documents, are the bizarre chain of events that took place as the investigation closed in on Brian Hogan and Thomas Warner — the two young men allegedly working together to sell the phone after Hogan found it in a bar. Police were allegedly tipped off about the involvement of the two men by their roommate, a woman named Katherine Martinson, who was concerned that she would be considered an accomplice to the young men because Hogan had used her computer to try syncing the iPhone 4G prototype.

“Orloff said that Witness Martinson contacted him due to the fact that Suspect Hogan connected the stolen iPhone to her computer and she believed that Apple would eventually trace the iPhone back to her via IP address. Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility…”

The documents allege that when Martinson tried to talk Hogan out of selling the iPhone because it would “ruin the carer of Robert ‘Gray’ Powell”, Hogan responded “Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn’t have lost his phone.”

The documents then go on to detail the night of April 21, when Hogan and Warner allegedly tried to hide evidence that tied them to the phone. It’s a bizarre tale. Warner, who had two outstanding misdemeanor warrants, allegedly tried to hide a laptop at a church, and after saying he didn’t know where a missing thumb drive and flash card were, said that they were hidden in a bush in Redwood City. Here are the passages describing the events of that night:

Gene Wang (left) and David Moss pointing to their creation, SuRF

Moss and Wang in front of the People Power RV

SuRF kit contains two boards that communicate with each other