If you’re the sheriff, aren’t you supposed to understand at least the basics of the law? Apparently not in Cook County, Ill. Sheriff Thomas Dart is now suing Craigslist because it’s “the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.” Of course, we’ve been through some of this before.
A lawyer in Houston is suing Citibank after he got scammed in a variation on the classic Nigerian email scam. There are a few interesting tidbits here that are worth discussing. First, the details…
Just a few weeks ago, we warned that, while the thought of increasing broadband is a good idea, the details of any sort of “broadband stimulus” plan were important–especially if it just looked like giving money to the same old incumbent players who have a long, and rather disgusting, history of accepting tons of public money and then not delivering.
Another day, another case where someone tried to blame a Web site for the actions of its users. In this case, a guy used the Web site SexSearch (seriously) to find someone to have sex with (ah, the Internet…). The woman he met claimed in her profile that she was 18 years old.
It’s difficult to see how Hasbro could have handled the Scrabulous situation any worse. Scrabulous, of course, was a Scrabble-like game made for Facebook, which quickly became one of the most popular apps on that social-networking site.
Back in March, we noted that Warner Music Group had hired Jim Griffin, a music industry guy who has been pushing the concept of a “blanket license” for file sharing. The idea would be to get various ISPs to simply add an additional fee to everyone’s Internet access, have that money go into a pool that the recording industry would be responsible for paying out–and then let people have free reign for file sharing.
Back in 2005, when Microsoft was first mulling the idea of offering security software, we noted that the company was between something of a rock and a hard place. If it decided to charge for the software, people would accuse the company of trying to get people to pay to protect themselves from the security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s own software.
It would appear that Wal-Mart’s lawyers need to come up with excuses to keep billing Wal-Mart every year around this time. Despite the fact that Wal-Mart employees admit that sites posting “Black Friday Ads” help drive more business, Wal-Mart’s hired guns keep threatening sites for posting the ads, falsely claiming a copyright on the content (hint: you can’t copyright prices).
Another day, another ridiculous intellectual property fight. Remember Lebanon claiming ownership over hummus? This is worse. Apparently, there’s a city in Turkey named Batman. Guess what they’re now claiming? You got it.
Today the tech/business press was filled with stories about how Google has settled the lawsuits from authors and publishers over its book scanning project. Google is paying $125 million, and will be changing some of how its book search system works.
The GAO had warned that there would be some pretty massive e-voting problems this year, as election officials were not properly trained on the already problematic machines, so it should come as little surprise that over in West Virginia, the “early voting” procedures have resulted in numerous complaints that the e-voting machines selected the wrong candidate.
You may recall earlier this month that a judge in New Jersey barred some researchers from releasing their report into the security vulnerabilities found in e-voting machines from Sequoia that were being used in the state. Sequoia had fought hard to stop the research from even being done in the first place. …
Now that Congress has totally capitulated and allowed the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to go on without question, it should surprise no one that leaks are coming out highlighting how the program is regularly abused to spy on everyday Americans who are calling North America from the Middle East.
We recently wrote about how you should probably be more nervous about the data your ISP is collecting rather than what Google is collecting, because your ISP has access to a lot more data, and the data it has isn’t data that you chose to give, as in the case of Google.
For nearly a decade, we’ve followed the changing business of what was originally called Gator. When it first launched, back in 1999, the company was offering an e-wallet product, and even though there were many such things on the market, Gator insisted that it was first.
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