Over on @Storify, I’ve responded to a tweet about TwitPic’s Terms of Service:
It’s clear that TwitPic is asserting a licensing arrangement as part of its Terms of Service. What’s not clear is how egregious it is (I am not a lawyer) or how it compares to other free image hosting services. This post compares TOS across three services: TwitPic, yfrog and Plixi (Lockerz).
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Two weeks ago Epsilon, a company that sends out 40+ billion emails a year, said it had suffered a data breach but refused to provide details, saying that it “[could not] release the names of its clients.”
Today it seems clear than more than 100 companies were part of this data breach. Most of those affected seem to be financial accounts, that is store- or service-branded credit cards.
Because of the financial nature of the breach, be aware of what is called “spear-phishing” – bogus emails that appear genuine because you can be targeted. Analytical firm Javelin says that people who have been subject to a data breach are four more times likely to be the victim of identity fraud.
What follows is an alphabetical list of companies that have been named informally.
The British press are in an uproar this weekend over the just-won’t-die story about how News International (the U.K. subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation, hereafter referenced as NewsCorp) “journalists” at News of the World (NotW) “hack[ed] into the mobile phone records of celebrities and public figures.” It should be news when journalists are arrested for privacy violations.
In 2007, one NotW reporter, former royal editor Clive Goodman, and one private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, were convicted and jailed. But the story doesn’t end there.
It’s legislation by budget fiat, and it’s wrong.
Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR, @repgregwalden), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, successfully introduced an amendment to H.R. 1 that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from using its budget to implement net neutrality rules passed in late 2010. A similar amendment lies in wait in the Senate, offered by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and John Ensign (R-NE). Continue reading
[C]an you imagine if publishers said you couldn’t loan a book to a friend and let her keep it as a long as she likes? Donate it to Goodwill? Set it free through BookCrossing? Sell it on eBay or Amazon?
We can do all of those things with a real book and none of them with a Kindle book.
I bought my first Kindle-formatted mystery novel today. It was a pragmatic decision, but it wasn’t really a purchase, even though that’s how the publisher and Amazon present the deal.
With Kindle editions we’re really engaging in a long-term lease, not a purchase. And as a result, the rents charged by publishers, as a general rule, far exceed market value. But markets that lack competition (in this case, a lack of interoperability and proprietary formats) will have “rents” that are elevated relative to those that have competition (those with interoperability a.k.a. substitution).
Let’s back up a minute.
I’m not a troglodyte.
I love books (dead tree editions). Continue reading
