Op-ed: Imminent "six strikes" Copyright Alert System needs antitrust scrutiny
With the "Copyright Alert System" going into operation over the next few months, major American ISPs will start sending out "strikes" to users accused of infringing copyrights online. Sean Flaim, who has just completed extensive research on the topic, argues that the system has real benefits—but it needs close supervision. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica.
Eight months ago, content owners and Internet service providers (ISPs)
agreed to the Copyright Alert System, a "six-strike" plan to reduce
copyright infringement by Internet users. Under the system, ISPs will
soon send educational alerts, hijack browsers, and perhaps even slow/temporarily block the Internet service of users accused of online
infringement (as identified by content owners). At the time it was
announced, some speculated
that the proposed system might not be legal under the antitrust laws. Were they right?
Recently, I completed
a draft research paper where I explored the potential antitrust
aspects of "six strikes" even further. There, I concluded that while the system has some promise for reducing online infringement, its private nature, combined with a lack of government oversight, raises significant antitrust concerns. It will require careful monitoring by regulators.
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Weekend Ar(t)s: What The Walking Dead S2 did right
During the weekend, even Ars takes an occasional break from discussing the validity of Yahoo's patent claims or the absurdity of "Lady Phones." Weekend Ar(t)s is a chance to share what we're watching/listening/reading or otherwise consuming this week.
Warning: This post contains speculation and potential spoilers.
Leave your complaints behind, season two is finishing strong.
Last year, Ben Kuchera expressed disappointment and displeasure with how S1 of The Walking Dead played out. Ars was apparently ahead of the curve. Many TV writers—including some of my favorites, Andy Greenwald with Grantland or Alan Sepinwall with Hitfix—share many of those same sentiments with how S2 has unfolded.
Let's take a Seinfeld cue and air these common grievances: The Walking Dead is a character drama where many of the regulars are one-dimensional and hard to feel for (let's not even mention the show's portrayal of non-white males, ugh). The second season involved talking in circles but little movement outside of it—assuming the layout of Hershel's farm is circular of course. Finally, part of the show's massive following comes from fan love of zombies, yet much of the season lacked a sense of danger... stemming largely from a lack of zombies.
Now, the S2 finale is just hours away but there are reasons to be excited for S3. Contrary to what you might read, it's because S2 did some things right.
Danger has been restored
Starting with the slaying of all family-turned-zombies at the season's midway point, the living hasn't been comfortable. We saw external human threats as a Michael Raymond James cameo turned into a shootout and hostage situation. We saw internal threats with conversational Shane/Rick showdowns becoming more "active" Shane/Rick showdowns. And if the teaser trailer for this week's episode (above) is any indication, Carl and Dale won't be the only survivors having close encounters with everyone's favorite external threat—the undead. (This now constitutes all the undead by the way, not just those first bitten by the undead. How did that discovery not make weird science this week?)The Walking Dead is most gripping when any character drama is against the back drop of death looming at any moment. Whatever tranquility Hershel's farm once provided is long gone.
Things are finally moving
I did not receive a screener for this week's finale (AMC, if you're listening, I'm always happy to review such materials). Judging from the masses of walkers at the end of last week and in the finale teaser, it's safe to say the days on Hershel's farm are numbered. Walkers loom and we know, even if these survivors don't, a potential rival group of survivors may be within five miles of their encampment. Forcing the group away from the farm means new characters and challenges; ultimately a whole new world for the show to operate within.Everything that transpired this year led to losing one of the show's most frustrating characters (Shane), moving the survivors to encounter more potential danger, and creating any number of intense life or death situations (Sophia the barn zombie, Shane v. Rick, Dale's demise, Michael Raymond James, Beth's suicide attempt, all dead become undead, etc.). Yes, there were slow moments filled with repeat discussions. But if you evaluate the season as a whole, two things stand out. First, The Walking Dead is in a much better and more interesting place now then it was at the end of S1 (call that the Sons of Anarchy S4 defense). Second, reflecting on the season as a whole reveals more points of interest and change than any episodic complaints of "too slow" lead you to believe. Perhaps things felt unbalanced as a whole due to the season being split, but a season's seventh episode is not an unusual place for things to kick into high gear (see fellow AMC titles Breaking Bad or Mad Men).
The stage is set for new villains
Fans keeping up with trade news already have confirmation of two new series regulars—legendary comic villain The Governor and Daryl's brother Merle. These two additions in particular should be excellent. The old story adage is heroes can only be as good as their villains (would Raylan on Justified seem as cunning without Boyd Crowder being so clever?). Having a clear counterpart for Rick should only raise the level of our main character. As much as the series tried to paint Shane as such (making him almost comically unable to interact with others, constantly angry), his position within The Walking Dead universe prevented him from being a pure and effective villain. How "bad" can the guy be when a majority of his actions were completely logical, possibly even best for the group's ultimate survival? Offing Shane combined with this additional survivor camp means the stage is set for stronger evil to emerge.With Merle, we now have a (presumed villainous) counterpart for the Daryl as well. Part of what makes Daryl so effective is his limitless character arc; he doesn't exist in the comic universe. While it's possible for the show to deviate from this (look up how long Dale or Shane exist on paper for instance), reworking that content too much risks alienating a preexisting, strong audience base. Daryl represents the clearest look at the capabilities of the show's writers and he has become a well-rounded, likeable hero. Merle presents this opportunity but as a villain. The show should get another presumed bad guy and an elevated Daryl. Win-win.
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New Zealand High Court: MegaUpload asset seizure order "null and void"
New Zealand's High Court decreed the court order used to seize the assets of Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload in January was "null and void," after the New Zealand police applied for the wrong kind of restraining order. Dotcom's legal team is arguing this should result in the return of the seized property, reports TorrentFreak.
The Police Commissioner applied for a "foreign restraining order," which limited Dotcom's ability to defend against the seizure. The correct type was an "interim restraining order." The error was first noted on January 30th, and the Police Commissioner since applied and received the correct restraining order type.
Justice Judith Potter in the High Court will decide soon whether this error will result in the return of the seized assets. Citing Canterbury University professor Ursula Cheer, the New Zealand Herald says this is by no means a certainty. Dotcom's lawyers would have to prove that the error was made in bad faith.
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Apple to announce plans for $100 billion cash pile on Monday
Apple is planning a conference call first thing Monday morning to "announce the outcome of the Company’s discussions concerning its cash balance." The company made this announcement in a statement on Sunday and the news will take place at 9am Eastern Time on Monday, March 19.
The surprise call comes as Apple's board has been barraged with questions—more than usual, that is—about the company's plans for its massive pile of cash. Apple is coming dangerously close to the $100 billion mark ($97.6 billion, to be exact) in the bank. With no outstanding debts to be seen, investors have been stepping up their questions to CEO Tim Cook and COO Peter Oppenheimer about whether Apple plans to finally start paying dividends to stockholders, invest the money in something new, or pursue any other plans possibly in the works.
It's unlike Apple to announce a call for the sole purpose of discussing its cash situation, so there might be some news on its way come Monday morning. What do you think it will be? Vote in our poll and find out what the answer is tomorrow morning when we cover Apple's announcement.
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Embattled businessman outs news site commenter as a federal prosecutor
A federal investigation involving New Orleans landfill magnate Fred Heebe took a surprising turn this week. Heebe filed a court petition (PDF) claiming a frequent commenter on local-news site NOLA.com was in fact Sal Parricone, one of the prosecutors assigned to his case. Heebe turned out to be right.
The commenter took regular shots at Heebe and his family, seeming to know more about the case than an average reader of the site might. The American Bar Association and the Justice Department advise against making extrajudicial comments that make either side seem biased against an outcome.
So Heebe hired a former FBI forensic linguist, James R. Fitzgerald, to analyze 598 comments made over the course of 6 months by a commenter using the handle "Henry L. Mencken1951". Fitzgerald, who also worked on the arrest and prosecution of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, compared the comments made by "Mencken1951" to the language in a 9-page proceeding filed by three Assistant U.S. Attorneys, including Parricone, against the CEO of Heebe's company, River Birch Landfill. The language was strikingly similar. Given that Parricone was born in 1951, Heebe singled him out in the court petition. On Thursday afternoon, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten confirmed Perricone had used the "Henry L. Mencken1951" handle.
"The pleading and the Mencken posts share many similarities, including the use of particular archaic words—e.g. 'dubiety' and 'redoubt'—as well as distinctive punctuation and frequent use of the rhetorical technique of alliteration," Heebe's petition read.
In a December 2011 comment, "Mencken1951" wrote, "If Heebe had one firing synapse, he would go speak to Letten's posse and purge himself of this sordid episode and let them go after the council and public officials. Why prolong this pain....perhaps Queen Jennifer has something to say about that." Jennifer is the name of Fred Heebe's wife.
Perricone's 598 comments appear under many NOLA.com stories, not all addressing the River Birch Landfill Case. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten has recused Perricone from all federal matters that the assistant attorney discussed on NOLA.com. He did not enumerate which other matter might be included.
The real Henry L. Mencken was an American journalist best known for his satirical reporting on the 1925 Scopes Trial, which found teacher John Scopes guilty of teaching evolution in a Tennessee high school.
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FAA to revisit the use of certain personal electronics on flights
Laura J. Brown, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs for the Federal Aviation Administration, told the New York Times the agency will take a “fresh look” at electronics use on planes.
Bits Blog writer Nick Bilton called the F.A.A. last week ready to pester them about travelers' inability to use personal electronic devices during take-off, taxi, and landing. Instead Brown revealed the FAA will revisit their policy—which last had the necessary testing in 2006 (well before 2010's unveiling of the iPad). "With the advent of new and evolving electronic technology, and because the airlines have not conducted the testing necessary to approve the use of new devices, the FAA is taking a fresh look at the use of personal electronic devices, other than cellphones, on aircraft,” she said.
Even without the inclusion of smart phones, this revisit could benefit the masses. According to Forrester Research, more than 40 million e-readers and 60 million iPads and other tablets will have been purchased by the end of 2012.
Current FAA regulations allow airlines to request the use of electronic devices “once the airline demonstrated the devices would not interfere with aircraft avionics.” But, naturally, it costs a good deal of money to create that research. Bilton reached out to Abby Lunardini, vice president of corporate communications at Virgin America, who explained the current guidelines required for an airline when testing devices.
Each version of a single device must be tested before it can be approved by the FAA. Each airline would need to test the original iPad, the iPad 2 and the new third generation iPad before receiving approval, and each airline needs to test every plane model in its fleet. The tests would need to each be done on a separate flight with no passengers on the plane. (Imagine the scale of each airline testing with each iteration of each device, ugh).
It may take some time and resources, but if e-readers, tablets, laptops, etc. gain approval it would be a welcomed addition for all. Should the FAA pursue testing (or make it easier for airlines to do so), we could finally see some additions to the FAA's list of electric devices approved during take-off and landing—currently including electric razors and audio recorders.
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How non-government actors have removed accountability: Consent of the Networked reviewed
The (relative) maturity of the Internet and its use by both citizens across the world and the governments that occasionally fear them has produced something of a cottage industry in books. Titles on that relationship include the fairly recent The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov and The Internet of Elsewhere by Cyrus Farivar.
The latest on the shelf is Consent of the Networked by Rebecca MacKinnon. MacKinnon was co-founder of the Global Voices international blogging project. She was also a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center and a China reporter for CNN. Her understanding of the fight against online repression begins with China, a country that suffers from Sinophilia and Sinophobia in equal measures. Her time as a reporter, academic, and critic both inside and outside the country (as well as her ability to speak with the Chinese directly) establishes her as an expert. But the book is not a China book, it's an idea book. The idea: the Internet has become a "highly contested political space." And one of the strongest contenders in this space is the American technology business community.
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When the going gets tough, Weird Science fakes its empathy
After several reader requests, we've decided to bring back a small dose of Weird Science every weekend. Enjoy!
It pays to accentuate the negative (at least for guys): Alternately, appearances matter. This study looked at the role of empathy for couples in committed relationships. One of the things it found was it's more important to look like you care than to get things right. In research jargon, that's "The perception of empathic effort by one's partner was more strongly linked with both men's and women's relationship satisfaction than empathic accuracy." There was a difference between the sexes: men were happiest when they connected with their partner's positive emotions, but women had the most satisfaction in their relationship when the guys accurately recognized their negative emotions. Sounds like a recipe for disappointment.
Daylight Savings wastes time: Lack of sleep is never good for productivity, but some researchers figured out a rather direct impact of weariness: people are more likely to "cyberloaf." The authors of the study monitored how much sleep people got and then, the next day, had them watch a boring online lecture. Each hour of interrupted sleep typically meant an extra 8.4 minutes spent surfing the web instead of watching the video. To see whether this behavior translated into the real world, the team looked at the last few years of Google search data and found the shift to daylight savings time (which cuts an hour out of sleep time) correlated with an increase in searches for topics related to entertainment.
Obvious result of the week: violent couples don't cooperate well. The study did answer an outstanding question: why, exactly, do parents who are violent towards each other do a bad job raising their kids? The answer, however, is absolutely no shock. Cooperative parenting, in which both partners work together to handle the child rearing, is more effective. These couples can't manage it. One result that did go against common wisdom: when the standard for violence is below what we associate with domestic abuse, women were violent more often than men.
Not all narcissists are created equal: Narcissism is not exactly a personality trait we associate with ethical behavior. But a survey of some business school students indicates that it interacts with other personality traits. The researchers stratified their participants according to religious beliefs, and found those skeptical of religion tended to have the lowest ethical standards. But being a narcissist didn't make matters any worse. In contrast, among both the nominally and devoutly religious, narcissistic tendencies dramatically reduced ethical tendencies.
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HTML5 roundup: access a virtualized desktop from your browser with VMware
VMware is developing an impressive new feature called WSX that will allow users to access virtualized desktops remotely through any modern Web browser. VMware developer Christian Hammond, who worked on the implementation, demonstrated a prototype this week in a blog post.
According to Hammond, WSX is built with standards-based Web technologies, including the HTML5 Canvas element and Web Sockets. The user installs and runs a lightweight Web server that acts as a relay between the Web-based client and the virtualized desktop instance. It is compatible with VMware Workstation and ESXi/vSphere.
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Oil sands and loss of carbon-trapping bogs and fens
Exploiting the Canadian oil sands to extract their stored hydrocarbons remains controversial. The mix of sand, clay, water, and bitumen that we call the Canadian oil sands might be the second largest oil deposit on the planet. If that didn't make it an attractive target for exploitation, the fact that it's located in a stable, friendly country that shares a land border with the US seals the deal for many. But extracting useable oil from oil sands is much more energy intensive (and expensive) than obtaining it from traditional oil fields, and concerns about the ecological impact remain.
In some ways, the name 'oil sands' is a bit misleading, since the area is not a sandy desert, but peatland, which has to be converted to open-pit surface mines. Although the various mines have to have plans for post-mining land reclamation, it's not possible to return the mines to peatland, and mine operators propose to construct forests and tailing lakes. A new study from the University of Alberta, published in PNAS, has examined the effect of this transformation on carbon sequestration. It doesn't paint a happy picture.
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Pinterest allows impersonators free rein—but for how long?
Each new social media service that crosses the threshold of public awareness sees two things: brands and celebrities rushing in to find out if they can use the service to their advantage and, right before that, squatters and jokers who got to the brand name first. The latest to experience this Wild West phenomenon is the visual bulletin board service, Pinterest, which recently announced a brief policy statement on usernames that hardly clears things up for companies, celebrities, and satirists alike.
Is this Michelle Obama? Unlikely, with her "Eat As I Say Not As I Eat" section, in which she pins pictures of "Places where I've consumed incredible amounts of calories while campaigning for America to eat healthier." This is clearly not Beyoncé (check the url). Nor are these boards run by FourSquare or Tiffany, nor does this Pinterest board have anything to do with Starbucks, as most people know it (again, the Pin Board header doesn't reveal any impersonation, but the Pinterest-provided domain name may prove valuable to the owners).
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Toll booth: Could Facebook charge developers for access?
Facebook is doing pretty good business these days, what with its impending IPO and thriving user base. But lately some industry types have been looking with a sharper eye at what the social network lacks—a way to make money beyond advertising. The fear among many developers at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas was that Facebook might have plans to charge them.
According to Wall Street Journal reporter Shayndi Raice, startup attendees at the annual music, film, and interactive festival expressed a common worry: “That a more profit-oriented Facebook may eventually demand steep tolls for using the social network to reach end users with software and services.”
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Week in Tech avoids Anon OS, "ladyphones", mobile tech surveillance
At hacking contest, Google Chrome falls to third zero-day attack (Updated): Google's Chrome browser was designed by some brilliant minds, but on Friday it was brought down by a teenaged hacker who calls himself PinkiePie.
Lame hacker tool or trojan delivery device? Hands on with Anonymous-OS: Pulled down by Sourceforge almost as quickly as it was started, the Anonymous-OS "project" is mostly a prepackaged desktop for Anon wanna-bes.
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Getting out more than you put in: an overly efficient LED
Semiconductor
light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been around for decades and they're used in a wide variety of high-tech applications. When an
electrical potential is applied across an LED, work is done to each electron in the system, in an
amount equal to the product of the electron's charge and the potential
difference. This
work excites electrons and creates holes,
and some
of these electron-hole pairs recombine producing a photon that ultimately escapes the device and can be observed. This fraction of leaving photons relative to input energy is an amount referred to as the external quantum efficiency.
LED's have a second efficiency, called the wall-plug efficiency, that's a measure of the ratio of energy that is emitted as photons to the electrical energy that gets put in. If one wishes to write an
equation for this, it would be the
energy of the emitted photon(s) times the external quantum efficiency
(the fraction of hole-electron pairs that combine into photons),
divided by the product of the electron charge and the applied voltage.
Recently, researchers made the news because they managed to create an LED with a wall-plug efficiency that's greater than one—it emitted more energy as photons than the researchers put into it as electricity. Unfortunately, many of the reports were short on details. Have no fear: the gods of thermodynamics have their say, this isn't violating any laws of the Universe. We've taken a look at the Physical
Review
Letter that those reports were based on.
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Week in gaming: Ending Mass Effect 3, starting Wasteland 2
This week, a large, vocal group of gamers took to the Internet to not only protest what they saw as an unsatisfying ending to Mass Effect 3, but to actively demand that BioWare offer alternatives. My coverage of the protest has become the most-commented piece I've written during my short tenure at Ars Technica so far, but the thread is not a place you should even consider going if you're not interested in some massive spoilers.
Readers also showed a lot of interest in my experience going inside Half-Life 2 courtesy of one of the best VR headsets I've had the pleasure to try. Many commenters were incredulous that the experience I had was 1) really that cool or 2) really commercially viable, and while I can't speak with confidence on the second point, I'll definitely loudly argue the first.
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Are Yahoo's patents strong enough to topple Facebook?
In its surprising patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook, Yahoo is taking advantage of several factors to pin its former partner into a position of weakness.
For one, Yahoo has existed longer than Facebook, giving it more time to obtain patents covering Web technologies, even if it didn't put all those patented innovations to good use itself. Second, Yahoo's lawsuit—filed Monday—was strategically timed to occur after Facebook's filing for an initial public offering, but before the IPO actually takes place. To satisfy investors, Facebook may be forced into a costly settlement rather than risk a long, legal battle that could harm the company's perceived market valuation.
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Ion-beam manufacturing halves production cost of PV panels
A small Mississippi solar panel factory that, until this week, had been working in semi-secrecy, claims that its unique manufacturing process allows photovoltaic panels to be produced at almost half the cost of conventional methods. The key, according to Twin Creeks Technologies, is in the thinness of its monocrystalline wafers, dramatically reducing the material required.
Where conventional solar wafers can be sliced down to about 180 micrometers in thickness, Twin Creeks is able to produce laminas only 20 micrometers wide using what it calls its "Hyperion" manufacturing system.
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The week in science faces fears of exploding pigs
One of the recent pieces of science news we've been following is the potential launch of five rockets from a NASA site in Virginia. The launch was supposed to happen earlier this week, but has been delayed—you can find out where to check on NASA for details of the next attempt below. Meanwhile, from the rest of the world of science, we considered resurrecting the mammoth, finding islands that existed far from the shores of Pangea, and the strange mystery of exploding hog farms.
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Insider trading case reveals Apple, Intel secrets leaked on wiretap
An unidentified person at financial services company Goldman Sachs has been fingered for leaking secrets about Apple and Intel to hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, according to Reuters. The details came out as part of a larger insider trading investigation into those involved with Rajaratnam, though the person in question has not been charged as of yet.
A lawyer for one of the parties being investigated, former Goldman board member Rajat Gupta, mentioned the Apple and Intel leak as part of an argument that the unidentified person was more deserving of insider trading scrutiny than Gupta. "[T]he government had a person who provided confidential information to Raj Rajaratnam about Apple and Intel," the lawyer was quoted saying. The alleged Apple/Intel source was reportedly caught on wiretap leaking the info to Rajaratnam.
Gupta himself is accused of leaking information about Goldman Sachs and Proctor & Gamble to Rajaratnam from 2007 to 2009—he is not directly related to the Apple leak except that Gupta and the unidentified person both leaked information to Rajaratnam. "[T]here is a much more circumstantial case that person should be sitting in the box rather than us," Gupta's lawyer said.
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Is Windows 8 a true dual OS? The Ars OpenForum battles it out
The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is continuing to generate reactions from users in the OpenForum, and Ars readers have brought the conversation to the Battlefront Forum, which is dedicated to brutally honest chats about operating systems. Now that the Windows 8 Preview has been humming along in users' desktops (and tablets) for two weeks or so, the reactions are pouring in.
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Week in Apple: iPad launch weekend edition
Are you reading this post from a "retina" display on your brand new iPad? We wouldn't be surprised, since Apple just released its third-generation tablet to the public. That news unsurprisingly peppered our top Apple coverage for the week, but that's not all that happened. We also compared iTunes' new 1080p movies to Blu-ray, reviewed iPhoto for iOS, examined the third-generation iPad teardown by iFixit, and more. Read on if you've been avoiding news all week and need a refresher:
1080p video smackdown: iTunes vs. Blu-ray: Now that Apple is selling and renting movies and TV shows in 1080p, the obvious question is: how do these downloads compare to Blu-ray? Ars investigates.
Review: iPhoto for iOS out-does Adobe for mobile image editing: Apple's image editing and photo organizing software has made the leap from the Mac to iOS with impressive results. Ars goes hands-on on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 to see how well it stacks up.
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Desperate LightSquared claims 5th Amendment violation, demands new spectrum
An increasingly desperate LightSquared today accused the Federal Communications Commission of violating its constitutional property rights by rejecting its application to build a 4G network on spectrum adjacent to that used by GPS devices, and demanded that the FCC either reverse its decision or give LightSquared a new chunk of spectrum.
The bold claims follow the FCC's decision last month to withdraw LightSquared's conditional approval to use spectrum allocated for satellite transmissions for cell towers instead. In a long response to the FCC that was made public late Friday, LightSquared claimed the FCC's action constitutes a "taking of LightSquared’s property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution."
The argument seems unlikely to sway the FCC. The agency has authority over how spectrum is allocated. Moreover, the FCC made it clear to LightSquared in its conditional approval that a final waiver would not be granted unless concerns about GPS interference were eliminated.
LightSquared still disputes the results of government-funded studies that showed interference with GPS devices, but says it will settle for an alternative: a gift of spectrum from the US government. Assuming the FCC's most recent decision is not overturned, LightSquared says the FCC should "identify and engineer a partial or total exchange of alternative terrestrial spectrum rights, which could be used without any impact on existing GPS receivers."
With LightSquared's cellular prospects looking increasingly dim, the company recently bolstered its legal staff by hiring Bush v. Gore lawyer Theodore Olson, as well as former Department of Labor Solicitor (and son of a Supreme Court Justice) Eugene Scalia. There has been talk LightSquared might run out of money within a year or less, but it now has $65 million in new funds from its breakup with Sprint. If LightSquared doesn't get what it wants from the FCC, a lawsuit against the agency could follow.
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Thunderbird 11 arrives with tabs on top, IM coming in future version
Mozilla announced this week the availability of Thunderbird 11, a new version of the popular open source e-mail client. It brings a minor user interface overhaul and a number of bugfixes.
As we reported when Thunderbird 5 launched last year, the mail client has transitioned to the same rapid release model as Firefox. Thunderbird is built on top of Gecko, the same rendering engine that Firefox uses to draw its user interface and render HTML content.
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Walmart buys a Facebook-based calendar app to get a look at customers' dates
A report from the retail technology site StoreFront Backtalk (registration required for full story) suggests that Walmart's recent acquisition of a Facebook calendar application with 16 million users is part of a plan to drive more sales through social networks. The Social Calendar app and its file of 110 million birthdays and other events, acquired from Newput Corp., will give Walmart the ability to expand its efforts to dig deeper into the lives of customers—allowing customers to make purchases on Walmart.com directly from event reminders from the Web or their mobile device.
The buy plays into Walmart's other social media efforts, including a test program that gives customers in-store social recommendations on purchases and allows them to get products not in stock shipped straight to their home. Connecting social media data and Walmart's customer data would make it possible for the company to do even deeper behavior- and relationship-based marketing to customers, linking their Facebook presence with their location and buying habits.
"One of the original points of Social Calendar was, according to its site, 'recognizing that Facebook Wall is now where the action is on someone's birthday,'" StoreFront Backtalk editor-in-chief Evan Schuman reports. "A reminder of a friend's birthday…is a strong psychological gift moment. To then make a truly personalized recommendation at that same instant is going to have huge potential."
Walmart could also use the connections in Social Calendar to derive more information about the people that customers may be buying for—while still staying within the guidelines of Facebook's privacy policies. "Remember that Facebook is diluting privacy issues in a huge number of ways," Schuman wrote. "For example, if a search limited itself to publicly available Facebook pages, what type of legitimate privacy complaint could be made?"
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Suspicions aroused as exploit for critical Windows bug is leaked (Updated)
Attack code privately submitted to Microsoft to demonstrate the severity of a critical Windows vulnerability is circulating on the 'Net, prompting the researcher who discovered it to say it was leaked by the software maker or one of its trusted partners.
The precompiled executable surfaced on Chinese-language web links such as this one on Thursday, two days after Microsoft released a patch for the hole, which affects all supported versions of the Windows operating system. The company warned users to install the fix as soon as possible because the vulnerability allows attackers to hit high-value targets with self-replicating exploits that remotely install malicious software. Microsoft security personnel have predicted exploit code will be independently developed in the next month.
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