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02 Dec 2010 23:32

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Tech: Knight News Challenge: Check out these crazy journalism ideas

  • OK, who’s the smart-aleck? This is only one of the 687 entrants to this year’s Knight News Challenge (a contest that funds very innovative journalism projects, most notably and successfully EveryBlock), and it’s easily the least likely to win. The call for entries was closed last night, so these are the entries. We’re personally gunning for our friends at The Ann, many of whom we worked with at Bluffton Today back in the heady, throwing-stuff-on-walls days of 2005 and 2006. (We’ve got your back, K-Pop!) Their application is here. Check out some of the other entrants that caught our eye: Newsroom data-organizing appliance Panda, dissident voice amplifier Crowdvoice.org, and Ninty (an ambitious crowdsourced audio news concept akin to making NPR a lot more like Pandora). Check out the entries yourself. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Dec 2010 22:54

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Tech: Amazon drops extremely lame excuse for dumping Wikileaks

  • It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
  • A statement from Amazon • Regarding their reasons for removing Wikileaks from Amazon Web Services. Pretty much everything we said about this whole thing last night still stands, even in the wake of all of this – namely, who is Amazon (which is running a service that should be impartial) to be making a judgment call here? This feels like an excuse more than anything else. They’ve created some major trust issues here. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Dec 2010 20:49

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Tech: Smelling a trend, Amazon invests in site kinda like Groupon

  • $6
    billion     the amount Google offered fast-growing deals site Groupon in a buyout offer last week
  • $175
    million     the amount Amazon invested in the similarly growing deals site Living Social earlier today source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Dec 2010 12:24

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Tech: Bitly News gives short links the Hacker News treatment

  • Thinks we like: Bit.ly. Twitter. Hacker News. Bitly.tv. Now what if someone mashed up Bit.ly links found on Twitter to look like Hacker News, but with the ranking style that Bitly.tv uses? Well, friends, you’d have Bitly News. Which is the coolest thing we’ve seen today. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Dec 2010 11:08

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Tech: Protip: Don’t browse YouPorn if you wanna keep your privacy

  • 485 major sites exploit a privacy-exploiting browser hack source
  • » Wait, what about YouPorn?: See, YouPorn, one of the most popular sites on the Internet that nobody ever talks about going to, is the most-notable user of this particular hack, which scrapes your history using Javascript to see if you’re going to other sites, and even hijacks it. And don’t think because you don’t watch porn that you’re not getting traced – news sites, sports sites and many other safe-for-work sites also use the scary technique. (Update: In an earlier version, we linked to a site which appears to have been down much of the day. Sorry ’bout that.)
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Dec 2010 10:32

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Tech: Google handles DecorMyEyes problem swiftly, brusquely

  • evil An online store called DecorMyEyes.com used negative feedback about itself to boost its own SEO rankings on Google. It encouraged it, even.
  • dumb The site agrees to talk to The New York Times, creating such bad PR that we can ensure nobody will ever shop there ever again. Great work, NYT.
  • smart Google then changed its algorithm, saying “being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.” source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Dec 2010 22:15

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Tech: Federal Trade Commission: We should have a “Do not track” button

  • positive In the wake of the Facebook scandal over Rapleaf, the FTC is recommending that there’s a “do not track” button for Web users.
  • negative They’re only recommending it, not pushing for legislation to make it happen. Instead, they plan to offer suggestions to companies. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

01 Dec 2010 20:54

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Tech: Amazon Web Services, Wikileaks and censorship: A harbinger

  • Amazon’s quickly taken over the Web with its cloud computing services. If you’re reading this on our WordPress site, the image of the logo is from Amazon’s S3 service. If you’re reading this on Tumblr, the entire infrastructure scales thanks to Amazon’s cloud computing functionality. Ditto Twitter. Even more than shopping, cloud computing has become Amazon’s biggest gift to the Web. But the way they quickly booted Wikileaks off their site is just … wow. This is a very bad sign for the Web’s future growth.
  • What happened? In the wake of the huge DDoS attack it faced prior to its document release on Sunday, Wikileaks, which usually hosts its servers in this secret lair in Sweden, turned to Amazon’s EC2 services to ensure they’d stay online as the data broke. This was how they managed to stay online despite being the biggest story of the entire week.
  • Congressional pressure Eventually, certain members of Congress, namely Joe Lieberman, criticized Amazon for hosting the site and said Amazon and others should boycott Wikileaks. A day later, Amazon (who just recently pulled the free-speech card on a pedophilia book) complied. Wikileaks had a suitably withering response to Amazon’s actions.
  • The implications The problem here is obvious. Amazon created a service so widely used that they couldn’t control it if they tried. The New York Times (which has run multiple Wikileaks reports) even uses Amazon Web Services. This tool is only useful is Amazon is completely impartial to the content on it. This incident proves they’re not. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

30 Nov 2010 10:48

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Biz, Tech: Comcast offers up some net neutrality ammo for Netflix fans

  • This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access. With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally determined toll is paid.
  • Level 3 Communications Chief Legal Officer Thomas Stortz • Expressing anger with Comcast’s added bandwidth fees on the internet middleman, which Netflix uses for its uber-popular streaming services. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Did you hear that? Yeah, we think we did. That’s the sound of the FCC nailing Comcast for anticompetitive activity and killing their planned buyout of NBC because they aren’t playing fair. What? You didn’t hear it? We must have imagined it. We can dream, can’t we? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

30 Nov 2010 09:42

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Biz, Tech: European Union targets its frickin’ laser beam at Google’s head

  • Is Google acting anti-competitively? Does it use its search-engine prowess to favor its own services over those of competitors? Does the company’s market share (66 percent in the U.S., 80 percent in Europe) constitute a monopoly? Do sites like Foundem, eJustice.fr and Ciao (the latter owned by Microsoft) have bad luck with Google because of crappy information-thin design that completely wastes your time and has little relevance (which we’d argue with the first two) or because there are competitive issues afoot (which seems realistic with the last one)? The European Union is asking these questions themselves as part of an antitrust trial. Seems Google’s getting too big for its britches. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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