Last month, we discussed how behavioral targeting of advertising risked seriously creeping people out, if it reached that "uncanny valley" of being a little too targeted, but not yet useful. It seems that behavioral targeted advertising firms are trying to deal with this by working together to come up with a set of standards covering what topics are taboo when it comes to targeted advertising. Cancer and AIDS patients, rejoice. Advertisers have decided not to target you. However, if you're old, addicted to drugs, religious, a convicted felon or dead, you're fair game. Dead? Well, the ad group says it meant the "death" category to be for targeting ads at relatives making funeral plans ("Death in the family? Get a casket for 20% off!"). How thoughtful of those advertising groups.

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aclark4life writes "NASA just launched a new website designed to provide information about its scientific endeavors and achievements. The new site was built on top of the Plone Open Source Content Management System and features an easy-to-navigate design and several new search features."

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Last year we were stunned after reading about a proposal from an old school journalist that newspapers should get government subsidies. The idea was so preposterous, we had figured it wouldn't get very far, but apparently others in the industry are still thinking the same way. Frank Blethen, president of The Seattle Times Company, is now suggesting that newspapers run by companies are not a good idea and the government should offer tax credits to newspapers. On top of that he states (with a straight face, we believe): "The question should really be not what is happening to the poor companies, it should be what public policy do we need - including subsidies - to ensure we have a variety of voices or a variety of models."

What's amazing is how that single sentence shows not just what he's asking for, but why he thinks he needs government support: because he's completely blind to what's happening in the real media world around him. When you can't see what's happening in your very own market, perhaps it's no surprise that you'd ask the government to bail you out. However, his statements are wrong in so many ways. First, there's no shortage of "voices" out there today. In fact, there are more voices than at any time in history -- and it's in spite of the newspapers, not because of them. Newspapers are still focused on believing they're the voice, rather than enabling that "variety of voices." The very reason newspapers are in trouble these days is because others were able to enable the voices, while newspapers held steadfastly to a model that just doesn't work.

And, no, government support won't help. Putting people in charge who recognize how people consume news these days is all that's needed. All Blethen has done with his statement is shown that he doesn't understand his own market, is unwilling to change and wants to blame everyone else for his own failings -- and, because of that, wants taxpayers to bail him out for his own mistakes. No wonder newspapers like his are having trouble. Meanwhile, plenty of news venues are thriving. But to do so, you have to stop thinking of yourself as a newspaper of ten, or even five, years ago. Unfortunately for the Seattle Times, it doesn't appear its leadership is able to do that.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts. Of course, they probably didn't expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings."

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If the name e360 sounds familiar to you, it may be because it was the company that sued Spamhaus for including it in its spam filter list. e360 insists it's not a spammer and anyone filtering its messages is somehow infringing on its rights. Of course, there seems to be ample evidence that e360 has been spamming, and the company has been sued directly as well. e360's latest lawsuit was against Comcast for filtering its emails, but as Slashdot lets us know, a judge has tossed that suit out of court while also declaring in no uncertain terms that e360 is a spammer.

Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.

The key in this case was that the judge relied on section 230 of the CDA -- a section of the law that we often talk about for shielding service providers against the actions of its users. In this case, it's a different part of section 230, which also shields ISPs from liability for "good faith" efforts to block objectionable content -- and then the court says that it's clear that Congress and the courts have determined that spam is objectionable content.

This isn't the first time we've seen cases like this. A few years back a series of courts all ruled against a spam company which claimed that it had followed the "rules" in CAN SPAM, so filtering its spam was illegal. It's nice to see the courts recognize that's simply not true.

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After just complaining about Blockbuster working on proprietary set top box technology (which Netflix was already working on as well), Wired points out that there's a company, Myka, working on an open set top box that can be used to bring all sorts of online content to your television. It's basically a set top BitTorrent device. The company has apparently worked out some media partnerships as well, which is important. However, unless the big players agree to sign up, it's still going to be pretty difficult. What we're getting is a fragmented market with the big providers betting on proprietary solutions that not enough people will want -- and the really open solutions (the ones people would want) getting left behind because the big companies won't agree to use open standards.

In the past I had complained that the high definition DVD crowd had missed its real window of opportunity due to a totally unnecessary standards battle. The point was that it gave broadband and online distribution a chance to catch up. What I didn't expect, however, was that online distribution of movies would end up getting bogged down in its own totally unnecessary and counterproductive standards battle as well. Never underestimate how certain players will muck up a huge opportunity by trying to keep all of it for themselves.

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YouTube has promised a commercial-free zone in the near future to help Congress deal with the problem of hosting campaign videos that were technically breaking the rule of not redirecting constituents to a commercial site. "Within a month, the one and only responder, YouTube, should have its commercial-free zone up and running, Capuano said. Republicans on the commission still fret that with only one such site, the House could be seen as picking winners and losers on the Web. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), another commission member, said the panel's Republicans want to keep the new rules fluid enough to use any future Web site that comes forward with a better plan. 'Technology moves fast. Congress moves slow,' he said."

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You have to hand it to those UK mobile operators and their disdain for their own customers' wishes. Remember how a top exec at 3 UK once declared that customers were "nuts" if they wanted to be able to access the full internet from their mobile phones (rather than the extremely limited selection of content chosen and gated by 3 UK). Eventually 3 realized that it was wrong and its customers weren't nuts, but it would appear that 3's competitor O2 is equally anti-customer. Apparently, the company has recently put a cap on its downstream 3G speeds at 128k. This is for their 3G service -- you know, the one that mobile operators had promised would bring "broadband" speeds wirelessly. Even worse, it appears that this 128k is even slower than its 2.5G EDGE network. As for how the company feels about its customers -- it may not have called them "nuts" but it came close. PR folks from the company accidentally called a reporter while talking about how to "position" this story, claiming that it was only "techie nerds" who cared about this sort of thing. I imagine that O2 may discover that it has a lot more "techie nerds" as customers than it thought -- and they'll look for opportunities to support other providers.

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Please indulge me. How often does someone get to wish their grandmother a happy 107th birthday?

(Here's a photo of my grandfather, who passed away at age 75 or so).

I'm curious -- how many Boing Boing readers have relatives 107 or older?

Donut hole hole writes "AT&T and Comcast are using recent successful P2P trials to argue to the FCC that there's no need for strong traffic management or net neutrality rules. 'Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent. This news, Comcast vice president Kathryn A. Zachem wrote to the Commission, "provides further proof that policymakers have been right to rely on marketplace forces, rather than government regulation, to govern the evolution of Internet services."' Looks like Comcast only likes P2P technology when it can be used to serve its political and regulatory agenda."

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Roland Piquepaille writes "Even with recent improvements in virtual reality technology, it's still almost impossible to physically walk through virtual environments. Now, European researchers have started a project named CyberWalk and they'll demonstrate next week their omni-directional treadmill, named CyberCarpet. According to ICT Results, the researchers 'had to address five key issues: providing a surface to walk on, controlling the surface in a way that minimized forces on the user, developing a non-intrusive tracking system, displaying a high-quality visualization, and ensuring a natural human perception of the virtual environment.' The researchers think that their new virtual environments would be used by architects and the gaming industry." Additional details are also available via the project website.

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Apparently Congressman Kevin McCarthy happened to be one of a very small number of folks in Congress who actually bothered to read some of the rules that Congress is supposed to abide by. In doing so, he realized that all those Congressional Representatives putting videos on YouTube are probably breaking the rules, which say that Representatives can't be doing stuff on commercial sites. When he first brought this to the attention of other Reps, they basically told him to ignore it, since everyone else did -- but eventually Congress decided to fix the problem. Of course, they didn't fix it by changing the rules... but by putting out a request for a webhosting site to host their videos in a non-commercial manner. YouTube was the only site to agree to do so, so now your Congresscritters can continue posting to YouTube, and (apparently) you won't see ads on their YouTube pages. I can't decide if I'm happy that Congress decided to actually follow its own rules, or worried about them spending time on something as silly as this.

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An anonymous reader writes to mention that New Scientist has a quick round-up of what they consider to be the ten weirdest types of computers. The list includes everything from quantum computers, to slime molds, to pails of water. "Perhaps the most unlikely place to see computing power is in the ripples in a tank of water. Using a ripple tank and an overhead camera, Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka at the University of Sussex, used wave patterns to make a type of logic gate called an "exclusive OR gate", or XOR gate."

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