Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Prosecutor: No Charges in Webcam Spy Scandal


Federal authorities announced Tuesday they will not prosecute administrators connected to a webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district.
Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February privacy lawsuit accusing Lower Merion School District officials of spying on students with webcams on the 2,300 district-issued MacBooks. The lawyers who filed the lawsuit claim the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students, including images of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed.”
Zane David Memeger, the United States attorney for the Easter District of Pennsylvania, said he found no criminal intent in the alleged surveillance.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/webcamscandal/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20wired27b%20%28Blog%20-%2027B%20Stroke%206%20%28Threat%20Level%29%29#ixzz0wxJaikmS
Posted by rorybaust at 4:35 AM

7-inch Apple iPad readied for Christmas launch?

Manufacturing for the iPad 2 is hotting up

By Marc Chacksfield
A seven-inch version of the Apple iPad is to hit shops before Christmas, according to a report by Taiwanese media.
The Economic Daily News, a Chinese newspaper-language newspaper based in Taiwan, is claiming that a smaller version of the Apple iPad (we are going out on a limb and calling it the iPad 2) is already in pre-production and could be this year's surprise Christmas hit.


Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/7-inch-apple-ipad-readied-for-christmas-launch--710658#ixzz0wwFJktxK

Posted by rorybaust at 12:00 AM

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Windows Live Essentials 11 beta updated, gets Facebook chat

By Peter Bright 
The second beta of Windows Live Essentials 11, the application bundle containing Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Sync, and more besides, was released today.
The update includes a load of stability and performance enhancements, along with several new or improved features: publishing videos to flickr from Movie Maker, better support of Gmail's special spam and trash folders, and larger video uploads to SkyDrive, to name a few.
Arguably the biggest new feature is in Windows Live Messenger.
Posted by rorybaust at 11:57 PM

Optus seeks court ruling on meaning of "unlimited" internet

By Ry Crozier

Consumers understand it doesn't mean speed, telco claims.

Optus has amended advertisements for its "unlimited" internet and phone bundles but will pursue a Federal Court declaration that "unlimited" in the context of the internet wasn't understood by consumers to refer to the "speed" of connection.

The telco had previously marketed an "unlimited home phone and broadband bundle" that included 50 GB of "superfast" broadband that was then throttled to a speed of 256 Kbps.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/228986,optus-seeks-court-ruling-on-meaning-of-unlimited-internet.aspx

Posted by rorybaust at 6:48 PM
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Does Science Fiction Predict the Future of Journalism



What's the future of journalism? Amidst countless conferences, anxious op-eds and much hand-wringing, longtime journalist Loren Ghiglione believes he might have found some answers in an unlikely place - science fiction. Despite his initial disdain for the genre, Ghiglione argues that sci-fi is full of predictions that we'd be wise to consider.

Posted by rorybaust at 6:28 PM
The Times Of London Website Loses 1.2 Million Readers Following Paywall
from the HUFFPOST

The Times of London has been hemorrhaging online readers since erecting a paywall three months ago, according to data released today.
Internet marketing research firm ComScore reported that the websites for the News Corp-owned Times and its sister newspaper, The Sunday Times, have lost 1.2 million viewers in the three months since the formerly free site was reorganized and split into two separate sites —thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk, each of which was placed behind a paywall.
That's down from the 2.79 million that the free site attracted in May, the last month before readers were charged to access the papers' content. Pageviews dropped from 29 million in May to 9 million in July.

Posted by rorybaust at 6:07 PM
Army Spy Planes Not Used to Track New York Bomb Suspect

    The U.S. did not use military surveillance planes to siphon the cell phone calls of the Times Square car bomb suspect earlier this year, according to responses to FOIA requests by Threat Level.
    In May, Faisal Shahzad was arrested for allegedly attempting to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The local CBS affiliate in New York reported that U.S. Army intelligence planes had been used to spy on Shahzad and help authorities capture him.

    Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/army-spy-plane/#ixzz0wufMZRik
Posted by rorybaust at 5:31 PM

Resistance 3! Killzone 3! New PS3s! Sony delivers the goods

Sony is blowing the roof off Gamescom, which is taking place in Cologne Germany as we speak. The announcements are coming in fast and furious: Resistance 3! New PS3 hardware! New Ratchet and Clank! We're going to run down the news and give you a look at the games talked about during Sony's press event.
First, what's up with these new PlayStation 3 configurations? A 160GB PS3 will be sold for $299.99 and is now shipping to your local retailers. This is the same price as the previous model, but with more storage. Not bad. There will also be a 320GB PS3 that launches on September 19 for $399.99 that will include one PlayStation Move motion controller, the PlayStation Eye camera, a copy of Sports Champions on Blu-ray disc, and a bonus Blu-ray game demo disc.
Posted by rorybaust at 5:27 PM

Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking

Epic fact: We are living at the dawn of the Information Age. Less-epic fact: Our historical moment is engendering doubt. The more bits of information we have out there, and the more sources we have providing them, the more wary we need to be of their accuracy. So we’ve created a host of media platforms dedicated to fact-checking: We havePolitiFact over here, FactCheck over there, Meet the Facts over there, @TBDFactsMachine over there, Voice of San Diego’s Fact Check blog over there, NewsTrust’s crowdsourced Truthsquad over there (and, even farther afield, source verifiers like Sunlight’s new Poligraft platform)…each with a different scope of interest, and each with different methods and metrics of verification. (Compare, for example, PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter to FactCheck.org’snarrative assessments of veracity.) The efforts are admirable; they’re also, however, atomized.
Posted by rorybaust at 5:11 PM

Facebook May Make Location Announcement Wednesday

by Jolie O'Dell
We've just received an invitation to visit Facebook's Palo Alto campus on Wednesday to get "an update on the service’s features and products," and rumor has it the powers that be want to talk about location-based products.
Kara Swisher at BoomTown says her sources "indicate that Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering" on Wednesday.
If this is true, it would fulfill a promise made to developers months ago at Facebook's f8 conference, when wefirst thought the feature would launch. Such an announcement would moreover substantiate the subsequent months of "coming soon" rumors and verified quotes we heard from Facebook execs and others.

Posted by rorybaust at 3:45 PM