http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/15/0026215&from=rss
Court Demands Private Facebook Data
Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 14, @10:17PM from the judge-is-your-new-friend dept.
Defeat Globalism writes in with a Canadian court decision that has ordered a man suing over injuries from a car accident to answer questions about content on his private "friends only" Facebook page.
"Lawyers for Janice Roman, the defendant in the lawsuit, believe information posted on John Leduc's private Facebook site — normally accessible only to his approved 'friends' — may be relevant to his claim an accident in Lindsay in 2004 lessened his enjoyment of life. As a result of the ruling by Justice David Brown of Ontario's Superior Court of Justice, Leduc must now submit to cross-examination by Roman's lawyers about what his Facebook page contains. Brown's Feb. 20 ruling also makes clear that lawyers must now explain to their clients 'in appropriate cases' that postings on Facebook or other networking sites — such as MySpace, LinkedIn and even blogs — may be relevant to allegations in a lawsuit, said Tariq Remtulla, a Toronto lawyer who has been following the issue."
[From the article:
Roman's lawyers found out about his Facebook page in 2007. When they could not get access to it, they went to court, asking that he be ordered to produce its content.
… Last year, however, a Superior Court case management master dismissed the request, accusing Roman's lawyers of going on a "fishing expedition."
… But Brown took a different view.
"Facebook profiles are not designed to function as diaries; they enable users to construct personal networks or communities of `friends' with whom they can share information about themselves, and on which `friends' can post information about the user," he said.
A court can infer that Leduc's Facebook site "likely contains some content relevant to the issue of how Mr. Leduc has been able to lead his life since the accident," Brown said.
Brown said Leduc can't "hide behind self-set privacy controls" on a website that's all about telling others about one's life.
The folks a South by Southwest (SXSW) have some interesting speakers. Still looking for the videos.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/03/14/sxsw-privacy-and-publicness/
SXSW: Privacy (and publicness)
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 10:28 am.
At the privacy panel at SXSW. danah boyd says the issue is control. I always say that but she says it better. Siva Vaidhyanathan (fellow writer of books about Google) wants to beat down the assumption that just because we share a lot we don’t care about privacy. He also wants to beat down the notion that there’s a zero-sum game between privacy and publicity. Alice Marwick of NYU says - bless her - that “there is a value to publicness.” That is my rallying cry. Publicness is social. But publicness, she points out, is also valuable to companies. Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab says public space implies common control; private is under individual control.
Donath discusses the idea of companies making transparent what they know about us. Isn’t that what Google is starting to do by giving us the option to see our profiles, the basis for its targeting of us.
For your Security Manager (because my hackers will read this too)
Free PHP Security Tutorials
Video Series Part 1: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
“My paradigm is better than your paradigm.” New paradigms are always better than old paradigms? Comsumers will use whichever resource best satisfies their “demand.” EOCN101
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020830.html
March 14, 2009
Paradigm Shift for Newspapers - Eliminating Print and Rebalancing Online
Two articles focused on significant changes impacting newspapers and professional journalists:
Clay Shirky - Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead."
The Washington Post Modifies Its Print Editions Newspaper Drops to Four Sections; Finance News Will Now Appear Inside A Section: "This is the latest belt-tightening move by The Post, which, like most newspapers across the country, has been shrinking its print edition and downsizing its staff. Earlier, The Post eliminated the Sunday Source, dropped Book World as a separate section and combined the Sunday Arts and Style sections into one."
Related? Is this how information will be made available? Is there an opportunity here? Is pointing me to the data I need worth anything to me?
Online records: Survey finds many states lagging
By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer – 51 mins ago
Americans can easily learn about their state songs and state flowers with a quick search on the Internet, but most will have a harder time checking whether their children's school buses are safe or a local gas station is charging too much.
A 50-state survey of government information accessible online, conducted as part of the annual Sunshine Week campaign, found that while official records are increasingly available on the Internet, some important information is missing.
… The information least likely to be found online were death certificates, found on the Web sites of only five states, and gas pump overcharge records, available online in eight. Also infrequently posted online were schools building inspections and safety ratings, which are posted by only nine states, and school bus inspection reports, which 13 states posted.
[More information (but not the whole report?) available at: http://www.sunshineweek.org/sunshineweek/state_govt_online_survey_09
It is interesting when completely unrelated events happen at the same time. Both of these appear to be attempts to cut costs. Both will likely cut revenue as well.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/14/2018259&from=rss
Blockbuster Total Access Unannounced Policy Change
Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 14, @06:26PM from the bricks-and-mortar-and-chains dept. Movies Entertainment
NuclearCodeMonkey writes
"Blockbuster Total Access has changed the terms of its user agreement without notice to users. Previously, users could return online (mailed) rentals in-store for free rentals. The next set of online rentals was immediately mailed out. Now, without notice, they have changed their policy so that the in-store free exchanges count against you, and no more online rentals are mailed out until the in-store rentals are returned. No wonder they are closing stores and losing to Netflix! Needless to say I am canceling my account in protest." [Do they own the stores, or are they franchises? Bob]
Related Speaking of Netflix... (Some question if this is Netflix or the ISP. Netflix should find out, pronto!)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/15/020245&from=rss
Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming
Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 15, @02:53AM from the bandwidth-available-but-not-to-you dept. Movies The Internet
rsk writes
"For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis."
Related Sometimes “Free” is too good,
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/15/0056259&from=rss
iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service
Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 15, @05:35AM from the free-as-in-no-longer dept. Google Cellphones Communications
An anonymous reader writes
"A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google's free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google's SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google's own GTalk client."
Entirely too logical? Organizations that can “solve” this conflict for women will thrive!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/15/0049227&from=rss
Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families
Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 15, @08:14AM from the mommy-track dept.
hessian notes a Cornell survey, published in the Psychological Bulletin, of 35 years of sociological studies that concludes that women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science.
"'A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,' said lead author Stephen J. Ceci... The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors in explaining why women were underrepresented in science careers, and that studies on social and cultural effects were inconsistent and inconclusive. They also reported that although 'institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers,' said Ceci."
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