Read more of this story at Slashdot.
These stories are becoming more common as Internet companies operate under the laws of many counties.
In February A Moroccan man was arrested for pretending to be the Moroccan king’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook. Facebook complied with Morrocca information requests about the man, leading to his arrest. The man was granted a royal pardon after his sentencing, and was out of jail by mid March.
Today we’re hearing of another arrest, this time in India. 22-year-old IT professional Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid. His crime was writing in an orkut community named “I hate Sonia Gandhi.” Sonia Gandhi is a prominent politician in India.
Vaid was charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information TVechnology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community.
During investigations, the cyber crime cell of Pune police communicated with Google (which owns Orkut) seeking details about the who formed this forum and circulated the obscene content. It was known that the vulgar message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated through an email address – Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com . The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.
He was thn charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. If he’s convicted, he can be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs one lakh.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed everywhere, but the hot spots right now are areas where extreme laws make what would be legitimate actions in the US or Europe into fairly serious crimes in their jurisdictions. Our companies have to decide if they’ll defy the law and take the consequences. On the upside, users will flock to them knowing their data is secure.
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ReadWriteWeb network blog last100, which focuses on digital lifestyle products and services, is currently running a competition where you could win a top of the line HP HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook valued at around $5,000.
To be in to win, leave a comment on last100 listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services.
They don't need to all be products you own, and they could be digital lifestyle services you use, but they must all be currently available. Here's an example, last100 editor Steve O'Hear's top 5:
- iPod touch
- BBC iPlayer (for iPhone/iPod touch)
- PlayStation 3
- Zattoo (Live TV on a PC)
- Pandora (Internet radio)
My current top 5 is:
- iPhone
- last.fm
- iPod / iTunes
- Playstation 3
- Skype
Percy Cabello / Mozilla Links:
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here — On schedule, according to the latest estimate, Mozilla has released the first Firefox 3 release candidate. For Mozilla it means what says in the label: unless there is some major bug reported for this release, the “release candidate” …
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0:
Dear Web Applications: Where Are My Files? — What's wrong with the “friends connection” programs announced by Facebook, MySpace, and Google? Many people have been trying to explain the principle of data portability as if it were a new concept, but it's actually not. It's been on our PCs for years.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Facebook's Friends Data Has Already Left the Barn — How much are your friends worth? That is the question behind the big debate going on around social networks and data portability. In the last ten days, Facebook, Google, and MySpace have all announced ways to let people access their data …
The janitors for many of tech’s biggest companies decided to walk out on strike today.
I’m not a big union supporter. I generally don’t like the things because, for the most part, I live in a meritocracy. If I don’t get interesting videos, no one will show up and eventually sponsors figure that out and decide to spend their money somewhere else.
In the tech world if you build something interesting you’ll get the money and the job and all that. Yeah, I know there are exceptions and we should talk about those again sometime but that meritocracy works because it’s easy to get noticed in the geek world.
Right now at Google there’s a bunch of geeks coding cool stuff for mobile phones as part of WhereCamp. Are you a geek who knows how to code something cool for mobile phones? Well, you just need to show up. There’s no walls keeping you out. No entry fees. No one saying “your type can’t come in here.”
But, I’m not naive enough to think that the entire world works that way.
Have you ever thought about the people who clean your buildings? They are easy to miss. They usually come in after 10 p.m. — long after you should have left. At Microsoft I got to know a few of them because I was one of the few employees who’d stick around after hours.
I also lived with a guy who was a janitor at a San Jose school for a while, so I got to know a little bit about the profession that most people don’t like to talk about (or even see, which is why most of these people work at night).
But I do notice and it’s criminal that the people who clean the billionaires’ offices only make $23,000 or so, especially when janitors in other areas make more (and the housing costs of those people in those areas are less too, which doubles the insult). Yes, I know that to most people in the world $23,000 sounds like a lot of money (more than half of the world lives on $2 or so a day in income). But in Silicon Valley? That’s way below the poverty line (remember, an average house here costs more than $700,000).
So, it’s time to fix this little problem before Monday and pay them more and get them back to work. Oh, and to the people who work at these companies: why don’t you stick around until 8 p.m. or so, then drop off your trash in front of the CEO’s office? I guarantee if you do that this problem will get solved by Tuesday morning.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When it comes to Web video, CBS has been one of the most promiscuous media companies out there. And no, I am not talking about its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET (which does have some video assets). Rather, CBS has taken a strategy of superdistribution when it comes to spreading its videos across the Web. It wants its videos everywhere. Thus CBS has struck distribution deals with more than 300 sites—including YouTube, AOL, MSN, Joost, Veoh, Bebo,and TVGuide.com. These are collectively lumped together into the CBS Audience Network, against which CBS sells its own ads.
Now the CBS Audience Network also has its own site, where it highlights its top partners and the most popular CBS videos on each of them. You can see how many times each video has been watched and the number of comments for each one. (An iPhone demo and a Borat interview on Letterman are the two most popular, with 8.9 million and 5.7 million views, respectively). Right now, though, only the top videos from YouTube are visible. But it looks like AOL, Bebo, MSN, TV.com, and Joost will be coming soon.
It is not clear how appealing a destination the site will become for consumers, although you can watch the videos without leaving. It feels to me more like a site that CBS is putting up for the benefit of advertisers, almost as brochureware so that they can easily see at a glance CBS’s video reach across the Web. Superdistribution (which basically means putting your content everywhere) sounds good in theory, but perhaps it is not such an easy sell to advertisers who like to see exactly what they are buying.
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