Monk writes "The Federation of American Scientists has obtained a recently disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement which details its policies for divulging its customers' personal information. (Here's the handbook itself in PDF form.) All of Comcast's policies seem to follow the letter of the law, and seem to weigh customer privacy with law enforcement's requests. This is in apparent contrast to AT&T and a number of other telecommunication companies, which have been only too happy to give over subscriber records. According to the handbook, Comcast keeps logs for up to 180 days on IP address allocation, and they do not keep all of your e-mails forever (45 days at most). VoIP phone records are stored for 2 years, and cable records can only be retrieved upon a court order. The document even details how much it costs law enforcement to get access to personal data (data for child exploitation cases is free of charge)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeff A. writes to let us know that Verizon Wireless is trying to change its policy on what it can do with your calling record info. Basically, it sounds like they want to start selling it to marketers, so they had to change their terms of service. What they did was send customers a letter telling them they had 30 days to call and opt-out of this new plan to hand over your calling records, or you'd have automatically accepted their changed terms of service and Verizon Wireless could hand over the info to advertisers. Of course, many people will probably just see this as junk mail and toss it out, not realizing that they've just agreed to get a lot more advertising sent their way -- and, more importantly, opened up access to (what they thought were) their own private phone records. This is doubly sneaky, because the FCC recently released new rules on how telecoms shouldn't release info to third parties without "explicit consent from a customer." Verizon Wireless seems to think that sending this letter with its fine print and demanding people opt-out within 30 days falls under "explicit consent," though some customers would likely disagree.

cphilo points out a NYTimes article on Led Zeppelin's decision to sell its music online. The group is one of the last superstar acts to hold out against the digital tide. There was a months-long, trans-Atlantic bidding war for the rights to license the band's catalog. In the US, the only digital holdouts that outsell Led Zeppelin are the Beatles and Garth Brooks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instead of using my iPhone and Twittergram to post real-time pictures, I used the Nikon and took higher resolution pictures.

The leaves are turning, and the sun was out after a huge rain. I thought there would be some good pictures, and there were.



Click on the picture above to see the set.

After many many months of saying the company was "working on it," Google has finally released the details of its tool to help angry copyright holders deal with their content being shared on YouTube. The tool doesn't sound all that surprising. Basically, the company tried to build its own version of Audible Magic's famed "magic bullet" approach to stopping unauthorized sharing. Of course, Audible Magic's solution has run into problems when people realized it doesn't work very well, and you have to wonder how well Google's homebrewed solution will work as well. It's not an easy problem to solve, and going back to the original Napster (which tried to add its own similar filter), people quickly find ways around the filters. There are two noteworthy things in the Google announcement. First, it requires copyright holders to upload their own copies so that Google can match them to the content on the site, and it offers the copyright holder a variety of options beyond just "block any copies." That's where it gets a little interesting. Copyright holders can also choose to leave the content up, but place ads on it, with a split of the ad revenue going back to the copyright holder. In other words, Google is at least encouraging copyright holders to consider that simply taking down the infringing content may not make as much as sense as trying to make money off of it. Somehow, we doubt that too many copyright holders will sign up for this "leave it up, but with ads" program, but perhaps we'll be surprised.

mcgrew (sm62704) writes with news that the Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Microsoft and a unit of Best Buy to dismiss a lawsuit alleging violation of racketeering laws. This means the class-action complaint can go to trial. The case was filed in civil court and the companies, with the US Chamber of Commerce behind them, wanted the Supreme Court to put the brakes on the expanding use of RICO laws in civil filings. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was designed to fight organized crime, but in recent years more than 100 times as many civil as federal RICO cases have been filed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Way back in 2003, we wrote about accusations that Microsoft and Best Buy were scamming customers into signing up for Microsoft's ISP MSN. The accusation was that Best Buy employees would scan the "free trial" MSN CD-ROMs that were at the store when customers would make a purchase. Customers wouldn't realize it, but the scan would then charge that customer's credit card once the free trial ended, signing them up as fully paying customers. While we wondered how widespread this practice was, some Best Buy employees have come forward to confirm that it was done at times. Both Best Buy and Microsoft have been fighting the case, and an appeal went all the way up to the Supreme Court, trying to get the case thrown out, but the Supreme Court has refused to review it, meaning the case can move forward. Of course, what's left out of much of the coverage is that lawyers working for Best Buy have already admitted to altering some of the documents he handed over in the case, which certainly doesn't bode well for Best Buy. While it's still unclear just how big a "class" this covers, if the two companies really were involved in such an activity, it does seem quite sleazy.

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv: Mad Professor Mark Frauenfelder shows us how to make a motor with simple materials. A perfect office time-waster! And Xeni Jardin interviews Bahar Shahpar, a designer participating in the EcoNouveau project who makes chic, environmentally-friendly clothing. Video Link.

eweekhickins writes "The Governator has killed a recent data protection law in California, and it won't be back. Using a tried-and-true argument, that the bill would have 'driven up the costs of compliance, particularly for small businesses,' California Governor Arnold Schwartzenneger vetoed what some are calling one of the nation's most stringent proposed e-tail data breach security laws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, the Chinese government is trying to build a huge 3D virtual world online that will function as something of a direct-to-consumer portal for Chinese manufacturers. The idea is that rather than buying "Made in China" goods through retailers, you could just log into this virtual world and order your products directly. In fact, the idea includes putting unique identifiers along with the "made in China" stickers so that people know where to go in this virtual world to order more. This raises a ton of questions, so we'll just start with the easy ones, and let you fill in the rest in the comments:

• How often have we seen big gov't projects online succeed? How often do they fail? Somehow we doubt this is going to get very far.
• To its credit, China has been somewhat successful with its big "censor the internet" project (aka The Great Firewall of China) -- so perhaps they can do it. However, how will they handle censorship in a virtual world mainly designed to deal with foreigners from countries where such censorship isn't appreciated?
• Oh wait, this should have been the first question: A 3D virtual world? Say what? Why? What's wrong with standard web pages?

This seems like the type of project gov't officials would think is cool without having any understanding of how people use the web, how they shop online or how they interact within virtual worlds. Otherwise, sounds like a fantastic idea.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have lots of imagination. After developing plastic as solid as steel, other scientists from in Australia, Korea and in the U.S. have created a plastic which could cut CO2 emissions and purify water. Their new material mimics pores found in plants and is exceptionally efficient. As said one of the lead researchers, 'it can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas.' Now it remains to be seen if commercial companies are interested, either for water desalination or for natural gas processing plants."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today we looked at two electric kettles (one bad and one unreleased, the Kenwood above, which glows red when boiling); a bike that cane switch from standard to recumbent, perhaps the most wasteful disposable cutlery I've ever seen, a scratch-and-snif phone, an unnecessary but modestly nifty sunlight calculator for gardening, a wristwatch phone that has a industry-standard low for suck, ways to use 35mm lens on DV cameras to emulate film, a book about rocketbelts, a computer stuffed into the dismembered torso of a French maid (I am lobbying for this to become the staff machine of Boing Boing, an MP3 player shaped like a guitar with a real amp speaker, silly clothing-mounted mirrors for bikers, and Portal papercraft. As per usual, random gadget links and deals. Who knew there were such advanced electric tea kettles?

Why is it that the highest-rated sites, some with supposedly hundreds of thousands of subscribers, only generate a couple hundred hits when they link to you?

As Pete Cashmore on Mashable says, it's because the subscriber numbers don't reflect actual readership. The people who subscribed may not even be aware that they are subscribed. Or put another way, we haven't learned yet how to measure what's valuable, we only have the crudest ways to measure value, so crude as to be meaningless.

Ultimately what matters to me is not how many people subscribe to my feed, rather how much of a connection I can make with the people I want to connect with. I'm satisfied that the people I care about read my site, and the aggregators flow mostly the wrong people through my posts with the most sensational headlines, ignoring the ones with the greatest value, imho.

I'm a blogger not a broadcaster. Blogging isn't about mass markets, it's about the small picture. My small picture (and for you, yours). I'm trying to draw a picture, create a frame of reference that's personal, not corporate. I'm a zig to corporate media's zag. I am a blogger. I am personal.

I don't want a hundred thousand ghosts "subscribing" to my feed. I want to influence the thinkers of the tech sphere, and I'm satisfied that I do. No leaderboard is ever going to reflect that, even though my site is often favorably rated by them.

I want rating services to provide clues about what I should be subscribing to. I want them to find not what's popular with the masses but what will be valuable to me. My favorite movies are not the ones the masses like, I prefer art films and ultra-violent comedies (I like everything Quentin Taratino does, for example).

It's a simple matter to apply collaborative filtering to this problem, we've even done it in SYO. These ideas need revisiting now that everyone else seems to have caught on that this is a problem worth solving.

Sometime after I updated to 1.1.1 my iPhone stopped ringing. I checked myself, calling my iPhone using my Blackberry. Sure enough, no ring. I did a soft restart (hold the button on top down while clicking the menu button on the bottom). Didn't help. Did a search, found I'm not the first with this problem. Dr Fran says she missed a social event because her iPhone didn't ring. I missed a bunch of important calls before I realized my phone wasn't ringing anymore. This is the nightmare, I can't afford to be without the phone, but a phone that doesn't ring is like 1/4 a real phone. Oy. Let me know if you have any ideas. I don't relish getting in Apple's loop on this.

Update: Ben had the answer. Yehi!! The phone rings again. Happy.

The home page on Scripting News has changed to match the RSS feed. Now the 20 most recent items are posted, as opposed to just the items of the current day. The current day's items are expanded, the previous days' items are collapsed. You can toggle the expand-collapse state by clicking on the plus or minus to the left of the title. As always, the blue arrows are the permalinks, if you're going to point to an article, you should use the page it points to. This is an experiment, it's possible that the expand-collapse approach doesn't work in all browsers. Report any problems here. Hope you like!

butterwise writes "AOL plans to cut 2,000 jobs, or 20 percent of its worldwide workforce, as the Internet division focuses on advertising sales to make up for subscriber losses. 'The latest cuts will pare AOL's staff to 8,000, down from about 18,000 employees in 2001, when the company bought New-York based Time Warner for $124 billion. The combination led to $100 billion in losses and a more than 60 percent drop in Time Warner's stock as customers dropped dial-up Web access.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.