"My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile," says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone's profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed -- a major privacy violation. If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.
Facebook has a history of protecting profiles from outsiders. The site once sent cease-and-desist letters to two of Valleywag's sister blogs for publishing certain student profiles.
The site does not allow regular users to see which profiles other users have seen. While one third-party application lets users voluntarily make their profile-visiting known, no application allows one to "spy" on the activity of an unknowing user.
Checking who's viewed a profile may be how Facebook found the tipster who violated their terms of service by sending Valleywag Steve Ballmer's profile. But were they violating their own terms?
Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery -- it's one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program, and even AOL apologized for releasing semi-anonymous search data and violating its privacy policy.
We have no idea what else employees can see. Do they look at your messages? Your private gifts? Who knows?
The Google Phone has arrived, sort of, but not in the long-rumored embodiment that many had expected. Google announced this morning that it has developed a new mobile OS called "Android"—a result of its acquisition of a mobile software company of the same name in 2005—that will allow the company to get Google's mobile apps into as many hands as possible starting in mid-2008. Android is Linux-based and open source, and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license.
Google's handset partners upon launch will include Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and LG, confirming many of the recent rumors that Google would not be developing the hardware on its own. Google has a number of carrier partners worldwide as well, such as T-Mobile and Sprint in the US, T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom in Europe, and China Mobile in China, to name a few. The whole thing comes as part of the Open Handset Alliance—also announced by Google today.
Google has chosen to launch Android in this way is because it wanted to put its focus on the platform for development of its mobile applications. Although Java is widely available on many handsets worldwide, it still operates differently from phone to phone and can't provide the type of flexibility that Google wants for itself and its partners. In addition to rolling out its own suite of mobile apps, Google also plans to make a "full" SDK for Android available next week, making the platform even more attractive to third-party developers (and perhaps delivering a slight ice burn to Apple on the side). And the more third-party apps there are available for the platform, the more attractive it will be for customers.
Over the years we've heard plenty from both sides of the filesharing lobby - those against and those for.
Both sides have used a variety of weapons, not least statistical analysis and research. Now you can pick and choose the studies you want (numbers can say pretty much anything) but the pro-filesharing lobby has had to rely on one major study for most of its ammunition - the Oberholzer-Strumpf documents of 2004 (there's a PDF here.
We wrote about that study, but now it's been backed up by another - this time commissioned by the Canadian government.
The new review - which was conducted by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, two researchers based at Birkbeck College in London - is available online... and it comes up with some interesting results:
" We are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada... That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing."
A couple of Canadian commentators, Michael Geist and Mathew Ingram, chipped in over the weekend with their thoughts.
I can honestly say that in the years since Napster, I've enjoyed a musical renaissance - listening to (and crucially buying) more music across more genres than ever. But are people like me mainstream examples, or just edge cases?
Two prominent blogs that cover Google -- Google Blogscoped and Google Operating System -- have posted screenshots of a new Gmail interface that has been made available to a limited number of users.
They're calling it "Gmail 2.0," even if Google isn't.
"Google during the recent Analyst Day announced they want to release an updated version of Gmail that's supposed to be faster than the current one, thanks to a JavaScript back-end rewrite," said Google Blogscoped publisher Philipp Lenssen in a blog post. "Also, the new version aims to improve contacts management. 'Gmail 2.0' -- possibly the announced update -- was also mentioned in Google's internal company goals last year, the aim being to achieve '70% user happiness' for that version."
Google confirmed the update is under way at its new San Francisco office, just prior to a briefing on an unrelated upcoming Google announcement. A Google spokeswoman said the new look has been made available to about 1% of all Gmail users and is being rolled out to the rest on an ongoing basis. She also said the upgrade isn't being called Gmail 2.0.
"So recently the Gmail team has been working on a structural code change that we'll be rolling out to Firefox 2 and IE 7 users over the coming weeks (with other browsers to follow)," Gmail engineer Dan Pupius said in a post on the Official Gmail blog on Monday. "You won't notice too many differences to start with, but we're using a new model that enables us to iterate faster and share components (we now use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the Contact Manager can be seen in several Google apps). A few other things you will notice are some new keyboard shortcuts and the ability to bookmark specific messages and e-mail searches."
Pupius also said that Google is fanatical about speed -- and why not when you have hundreds of thousands of servers around the world -- and that "[u]sing an alpha version of Safari 3 on a MacBook, we're seeing sub-200ms times when opening messages -- pretty quick."
If there's a downside to Google's upgrade, it's that third-party extensions to Gmail may stop working.
Larry Johnsrude, edmontonjournal.comEDMONTON — More than one-quarter of all adult Canadians are going online to improve their education, says a new report from Statistics Canada.
An estimated 6.4 million adult learners — or about 26 per cent of Canada’s adult population — logged onto the Internet during 2005 for the purpose of education, training or school work, StatsCan said in a report released today.
Almost 80 per cent of full-time or part-time students went online as part of their studies, it said.
“The Internet is changing the way many Canadian students conduct their research for assignments or solve academic problems,” the report said.
The study, appearing in the StatsCan publication Education Matters, found that relatively more Canadians from rural communities and small towns are using the Internet for distance learning.
“This finding suggests that electronic distance learning could be a possible solution to some post-secondary access problems facing rural youth,” it said.
New CU-Boulder Study Confirms First-Known Belt Of Moonlets In Saturn Rings
A narrow belt harboring moonlets as large as football stadiums discovered in Saturn's outermost ring probably resulted when a larger moon was shattered by a wayward asteroid or comet eons ago, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder study.
Images taken by a camera onboard the NASA Cassini spacecraft revealed a series of eight propeller-shaped "wakes" in a thin belt of the outermost "A" ring, indicating the presence of corresponding moonlets, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Miodrag Sremcevic, lead author of the study published in the Oct. 25 issue of Nature. The propeller wakes highlight tiny areas of the belt where ring material has been perturbed by the gravitational forces caused by individual moonlets, Sremcevic said.
The team calculated that there likely are thousands of moonlets ranging in size from semi-trailers to sports arenas embedded in the "A" ring's thin moonlet belt that circles the planet. At about 2,000 miles across, the belt of moonlets is only about 1/80th the diameter of Saturn's total ring system, which at roughly 155,000 miles across would stretch about two-thirds of the way from Earth to the moon.
Facebook near deal with Google or Microsoft: reports
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online social network Facebook is close to reaching a deal with Google Inc or Microsoft Corp for an investment that would value the company as high as $15 billion, according to media reports on Wednesday.
A Facebook deal would include an agreement with the investing company to handle its overseas advertising sales, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment.
Web search leader Google and software maker Microsoft, now rivals for Internet-based audiences and applications, have each expressed interest in a minority stake in Facebook for its fast-growing user base and unmined advertising potential.
Executives from both companies traveled to Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto this week, and a decision could come as early as Wednesday, the Journal reported. Earlier in the day, the New York Post said a decision on the Facebook investment could be announced within 48 hours.
Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download, says a new measure (PDF) sanctioned by the Copyright Board of Canada. Requested by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), the tax would apply at least 2.1 cents to every individual song download and 1.5 cents per track for complete albums. Subscription download and streaming services would themselves be charged between 5.7 and 6.8 percent of a user's monthly fees. Minimum fees would also apply for every larger download or subscription.
The surcharge would help compensate artists for piracy, according to SOCAN's reasoning. The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues.
The tax may have a significant impact for online stores such as iTunes and Canada-based Puretracks, which will have to factor the amount both into future and past sales. The new tax would be retroactive to January 1st, 1996 and would effectively cover all sales and subscriptions from such services since their beginnings, which typically followed shortly after those in the US. Free services are not currently subject to the added cost.
The Storm Worm's days may be numbered, according to a University of California researcher.
Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at UC San Diego, has been tracking Storm since July and said that, despite the intense publicity that the network of infected computers has received, it's actually been shrinking steadily and is presently a shadow of its former self. On Saturday, he presented his findings at the Toorcon hacker conference in San Diego.
Storm is not really a computer worm. It's a network of computers that have been infected via malicious e-mail messages, and are centrally controlled via the Overnet P-to-P protocol. Enright said he has developed software that crawls through the Storm network and he thinks that he has a pretty accurate estimate of how big Storm really is.
Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world's most powerful supercomputer. But Enright said that the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time.
Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network.
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