WiredPen

After a five year investigation, the European Commission announced today that Microsoft broke European Union (EU) laws “by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems (OS) onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players.”

Part of the remedy requires Microsoft to disclose iinformation that other servers need to communicate efficiently with Windows clients; the firm must do this within 120 days. The Commission also fined Microsoft € 497 million ($611.8 million) for abusing its market power.

“Dominant companies have a special responsibility to ensure that the way they do business doesn’t prevent competition on the merits and does not harm consumers and innovation ” said European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti.
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Proving that where there’s a will there’s a way, Eyebeam as created an easy-to-use tool that shows which of our neighbors have contributed (and how much) to presidential candidates. These data are current as of 31 December 2003; they are publicly available from the Federal Election Commission (which presents “just the facts” thank you very much).

Their national map is color-coded by party and allows you to zoom to country, state or 3-digit zip code. Another “pre-set” query shows data for the top 10 donating cities.

Candidates also report spending, and Eyebeam has charts for hotels and airlines.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor

While reading the draft of Dan Gillmor’s new book, I found this set of tips for corporate bloggers. If you close your eyes, you could confuse it with basic advice for crisis communication. But that doesn’t make it any less important.

It seems like ancient history, but it wasn’t that long ago that the Blogosphere forced traditional media to re-think a story — that of a senior Congressional politician starting a speech with a yearn for the pre-civil rights era.

The politican was US Rep. Trent Lott. The occasion was (Sen.) Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. The time was December 2002. The outcry led to Lott’s resignation.

Weblogs at Harvard points us to a Shorenstein Center case study of that story, analyzing the events and players.

The marvels of modern technology allow us to read blogs from the two major presidential candidates on the same page. Probably the only time these two men are on the same page.

No, I don’t remember how I stumbled on it the first time. But daypop reminded me.

A California state elections official implies that the Secretary of State was coerced into verifying electronic voting machines that “caused polls to open late and voters to be turned away March 2.”

Preliminary research suggests that 36 percent of the San Diego County’s 1,611 polls were unable to open on time for the primary; it is unknown how many voters were turned away or how many did not return. Is this how we want to run a democracy?

The accusation came at a public hearing on the issue. Electronic voting machines were praised by representatives of the disabled community, who said that they were much easier to use than punch cards. I certainly hope so! But would they have been easier to use than paper and pen/pencil and optical scanners? I doubt it — and the scanned paper system is cheaper. And more secure.

Reuters reports that China has shut down two blog websites because content has been deemed “objectionable.”

Unlike the US Federal Communications Commission — which has been cracking down on objectionable “indecency” since the Jackson/Superbowl fiasco — the Chinese government objects to political free speech.
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One of the issues in the privacy debate is how easy it is to find public information that was once known only to insiders and how easy it is to combine data bits to create new information.

That same principle applies to a database developed by U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), ranking member on the House Committee on Government Reform.

Its contents? Specific, misleading statements (237 of them) made by President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the months leading up to the American invasion of Iraq.
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Most techie folk, when they talk about meta-data, are deep into a discussion of how to best search Web sites. But lots of things have meta-data: the information about when a file was created and modified as well as its file size are also meta-data.

This week, meta-data disclosures are nipping at the heels of the California Attorney General’s Office.

According to Wired.com, Microsoft Word is revealing information that public officials probably would have preferred remain hidden.
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Wired has reported that two ranking California legislators have asked the Secretary of State to decertify all paperless touch-screen voting terminals before the fall election.
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