Chris Blanc tips an Ars writeup on a survey of consumer attitudes toward targeted advertising. The results of the survey, conducted for TRUSTe, confirm that advertisers are in a tough spot. "[The survey company] randomly selected 1,015 nationally representative adults... Although only 40 percent of the group was familiar with the term 'behavioral targeting,' most users were well aware of the practice. 57 percent reported that they weren't comfortable their activities [were being] tracked for advertising purposes, even if the information couldn't be tied to their names or real-life identities. Simultaneously, 72 percent of those surveyed said that they find online advertising annoying when the ads are not relevant to their needs..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'd almost think this was an April Fool's joke if it weren't for both Glenn Fleischman and Steve Stroh reporting on it, but it appears that Ricochet, one of the first wireless ISP services is finally dead, for real. This is the service that used up more than its allotted nine lives. I was an early Ricochet customer, and still have two old Ricochet modems. For a period of time when I was killing off broadband companies, Ricochet's 128kbps service via Metricom was my connection to the world -- until it went bankrupt and shut down the network. After that, Ricochet kept resurfacing, as the company was bought and then sold and bought and sold again. However, each new owner would try to do something new with it, only to realize that the wireless network had totally missed its chance. With the rise of WiFi and cellular 3G, Ricochet just didn't make sense any more. Still, it's a bit sad, as I still remember wowing people by being able to connect to the internet while on the go. These days it may be common, but a decade ago it was a big deal.

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mithro writes "If you thought that you had missed out on applying to the Google Summer of Code, you've just gotten a reprieve. The deadline for student submissions has been extended from the original April 1 to Monday April 7, 2008. To quote Leslie Hawthorn: 'This year, we experimented with the Google Summer of Code program timeline, providing one week for students to discuss project ideas with their mentors and then a single week to submit applications. The good news is that we've heard that overall application quality is much higher this year and that students have really benefited from the opportunity to have extra time to discuss their ideas with their potential mentors. However, we've still heard feedback from the community that it would be useful to provide more time for students to submit their applications, so we've done just that.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Mike noted the latest example of the trend towards people wanting to share the news, rather than just consuming it. Now that two-way communications have become cheap and easy, people (especially young people) are growing accustomed to news reporting being a two-way enterprise, with them commenting on the news and sharing it with others rather than just passively consuming it. A recent Washington Post profile of the Obama campaign's online efforts suggests that something similar is happening in politics. The Obama campaign's fundraising efforts have put to shame those of the McCain and Clinton campaigns. The Post suggests that a major reasons is that Obama's campaign has been careful to cultivate a real relationship with its supporters, rather than just treating them like walking ATM machines. It notes that Obama's emails to his supporters are less likely to ask for money and more likely to invite them to attend a campaign event, watch a video, read an article, or volunteer time for the candidate. This is politics as crowdsourcing. Just as companies can build brand loyalty by cultivating an ongoing relationship with customers, so political campaigns can spark greater levels of support by making them feel like they have a greater stake in the campaign.

A particularly interesting part of this strategy was discussed is a recent edition of Don Marti's LinuxWorld podcast with Tony Steidler-Dennison, who talked about the Obama campaign's success with phone banking. The campaign has an online phone-banking system that allowed users to log into a website, get a list of phone numbers to call, and make the calls from the comfort of their own home. This saves the campaign the hassle of having to rent out space for phone banking, but more importantly it gets more volunteers the opportunity to participate, which gives them a stronger sense that they have a stake in the campaign. The net result will be that money will become less important, while volunteer engagement and enthusiasm will become a lot more important. Thanks to the Internet, campaigns that can energize large numbers of people will find it easier and easier to harness that enthusiasm and translate it into concrete results.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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We just received permission from the publicity handler for George Lucas to air this *!*!*!*exclusive*!*!*!* interview with the Star Wars creator about his new self-help audiobook and line of aromatherapy bath salts and sugar scrubs, "The Boba Fett Mystique."

This product is co-branded by notoriously cocooned celebrity author JD Salinger. Behold, our power of videobloggage is mighty! It's a special calendar day.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and exclusive online discounts.

Nokia announced a new version of the N810 handheld Linux computer designed to work over a Wimax network, which raises the obvious question, does Berkeley have Wimax? What other cities has it? What are the economics?

To mark the 11th anniversary of Scripting News, here's a pointer to docs on the software I used to edit the site.

http://www.scripting.com/frontier/netscripting/newsPage.html

I thought of what eventually became the weblog as a News Page, a roughly reverse chronologic list of links to news stories. Then as now I edited using the outliner in Frontier.

We made the NewsPage suite and all the other code that ran in the Frontier environment (the "Aretha" release) available in source to anyone who wanted to use it, and amazingly, a fair number of sites poppped up that more or less followed the pattern of Scripting News.

I don't remember them all, but the most notable one (to me) was Robot Wisdom, which was managed for the first few years with this software.

There will be people who give me a hard time for writing this, but that's their problem not mine. One of the benefits of creating something that really took off is that you get to gloat about it.

kamlapati sends us to EETimes for news that the Chaos Computer Club in Germany and researchers from the University of Virginia have cracked the encryption scheme used in a common RFID chip, NXP's Mifare Classic. According to the article the device is used in many contactless smartcard applications including fare collection, loyalty cards, and access control cards. NXP downplays the significance of the hack, saying that that model of RFID card uses old technology and they do a much better job these days.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A little over a year ago, Skype filed a petition with the FCC asking to extend the Carterfone decision to mobile networks. The Carterfone ruling was what allowed people the opportunity to connect non-AT&T telephones to the phone network, and kicked off an awful lot of innovation in the telephone arena (getting everyone past the black rotary phones). The Skype petition was a bit misguided, because the situation in the mobile world was quite different than the AT&T telephone monopoly of the 1960s. In fact, there is a lot more competition and openness in the mobile world -- and that competition has pushed many of the players to continue to open up at a greater rate, knowing they need to in order to compete.

So, it probably doesn't come as much surprise to find out that telco buddy Kevin Martin is dismissing the Skype petition outright. He announced this at the CTIA conference, where it was greeted by applause -- suggesting that it was mostly employees from mobile operators in the room. Martin pointed out that there was a lot of competition in the mobile space and also noted Verizon Wireless' move towards openness. Of course, it may be a bit early to declare Verizon Wireless truly open, and it seems a bit odd to dismiss the Skype petition out of hand without any public discussion. While it's probably true that the Skype petition was asking for unnecessary regulations, you would think that at least a discussion could have been held around questions of openness on mobile networks before the petition was totally dismissed.

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Passengers on an Air New Zealand flight from Fiji found themselves being fumigated yesterday, after the crew discovered the aircraft's biosecurity clearance had expired:

A bio-security certificate prevents an airline from having to fumigate an aircraft every time it returns here. The spraying left the man with a sore throat and caused a baby to gag and vomit.

The construction engineer said the MAF officers took about five minutes to fumigate the plane before leaving the passengers to sit in "a thick fog" as they sealed the door shut behind them.

Link, and here's a related story about an asthmatic passenger who thought she was going to die. (thanks, David Carroll)

"[S]tarting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars." Link. (thanks, Sam Coniglio)

* Ed. Note: I suppose I should remind the humor-impaired of the calendrical significance behind this important announcement.

Oh, alright, I made up the hippie-hating part, but they do exhibit "cannibalistic" behavior, and they are quite large. Mexican fisherman call them "red devils."

Here in the US, we call them Humboldt Squids, and here's a short video about an ongoing invasion, from QUEST, a science show produced by San Francisco's PBS affiliate station.

A mysterious sea creature up to 7 feet long, with 10 arms, a sharp beak and a ravenous appetite, has invaded ocean waters off Northern California. Packs of fierce Humboldt Squid attack nearly everything they see, from fish to scuba divers. Marine biologists are working to discover why they've headed north from their traditional homes off South America.

Link (thanks Lauren)

Zimbabwe democracy and human rights advocacy group Sokwanele created this Google maps hack to visualize first-hand reports of election-related human rights violations in the embattled Southern African nation. (more at this cheesebikini post. Thanks, Sean savage)

1shooter writes "Researchers in France are using a synchrotron as a giant X-ray machine to peer into the insides of opaque amber to reveal insects dating from the age of dinosaurs. 'The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure... From more than 600 blocks, they have identified nearly 360 fossil animals: wasps, flies, ants, spiders.' The process reveals detailed 3D images that can be used to make near-perfect enlarged scale models of the bugs using a 'plastic printer.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, we noted that BT had secretly tested Phorm's tracking system without telling customers in the summer of 2007. This gave users no way to opt-out as they had no idea their surfing was being tracked. However, now it's being reported that BT's tests were even more extensive than originally reported, and the two companies secretly tracked the internet usage of 18,000 customers back in 2006, before Phorm was even called Phorm. That's back when Phorm was known as 121 Media and considered by many to be in the sneaky adware business. In fact, the BT internal report on the test noted that: "121Media [Phorm] will take action (both technical and public relations) to avoid any perception that their system is a virus, malware or spyware and to show that in effect it is a positive web development." Perhaps that explains Phorm's recent charm offensive. It's part of it's deal with BT.

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sTeF writes in, with the hope that this is an April Fools joke. Doesn't look like it though. An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims to have obtained a document (PDF) enumerating the vote after Microsoft's OOXML won ISO standard status.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continuing my series of posts on content being advertising, I wanted to look at the newspaper industry. This seems rather fitting, as the industry seems to be freaking out about a new report claiming the largest ad revenue plunge in the newspaper business in over fifty years. While there's some movement to online ad revenue, it's not making up the difference and there are signs that the online ad business is slowing as well (which is what kicked off this series of posts anyway). First off, though, it's worth pointing out, as Chris Anderson does that things aren't nearly as bad as they look. While there is a downturn, the industry is still making a ton of money, much more than even 20 years ago.

However, I did still want to take a look at how the newspaper business has struggled to deal with changing times in the context of the discussion of "advertising is content, content is advertising." The simple fact is that, for m