Author: Duncan Geere
Amazon blocks Phorm from scanning its website
Controversial ad-targeting system Phorm will be blocked from scanning Amazon’s website, according to a statement released by the company this afternoon. It’s not alone – LiveJournal, mySociety and Netmums will also be off-limits.
The system, which works by scanning for keywords on pages visited by a user and using that to send more relevant adverts, has been under fire this week, after the European Union declared that it would be bringing legal action against the UK for its data protection laws not preventing such a system.
The Open Rights Group, which works to protect digital rights and freedoms, has written to the privacy officers of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Bebo, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay, asking them to block Phorm. So far, Amazon is the only company in that list to respond, but if the others start following suit then Phorm could be in even greater trouble.
(via BBC)
Google Latitude used to track down stolen mobile phone
Latitude, Google’s stalk-tool that lets you see where your friends are on a map, has saved the day in Silicon Valley after it lead to the successful apprehension of a mobile phone thief.
The perpetrator snatched a woman’s bag and then jumped in a car and sped off, but the lady had installed Latitude as a joke so that she and her sisters could “stalk each other”. Her sister jumped on the service and tracked down the thief, who was immediately caught by the cops.
Nice to hear a positive story about the service, which has come under considerable criticism in the past for violating privacy.
CBS (via TechCrunch)
Behind the scenes at the British Music Experience
There are condom machines in the toilets of the British Music Experience at the O2 in Greenwich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps they think their visitors will be overwhelmed with emotion after seeing Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Thin White Duke’ outfit, or Dave Hill’s “Superyob” guitar. But in actual fact, it’s gadget fanatics that are likely to be the ones excited, because the BME is one of the most gadget-filled museums in the UK.
Almost everything in the museum is interactive. Your ticket comes equipped with an RFID tag that you wave in front of exhibits that interest you. These are logged in a central database, and after your visit you can go to the BME website and view all the exhibits that you looked at online.
There’s also the option to play along on real instruments with songs you know, or record a video of yourself dancing to one of several famous historical dances. That content will be stored and can also be viewed on the website later on, so you can share your embarrassment with people across the world. You get three free iTunes downloads too, to further investigate music that you don’t know very well.
Although it’s a great and well-connected experience, and anyone remotely interested in popular music since 1945 will find something interesting, there’s an ever so slight sense of a lack of use of the technology to its full effect. The tagging system is great, but it’d be nice to be able to explore extra content from home, rather than just reviewing the content you saw.
It’d also be great if you could do more with your recordings, getting the content out of the website. For copyright reasons, it’s impossible to do anything but stream the recording you make in the ‘Gibson Studio’ section. The British Music experience is technologically ahead of any other museum in London, but it’s still got unrealised potential.
Fire Service launches minigames
It seems that the boys in the Fire Brigade have been using their spare time to learn flash coding, because the government’s just put out a flash game that teaches people how to prepare for emergencies.
Aside from the slight insanity of kites blocking your safe path out of your house, it’s really well put-together and quite good fun. I got to about 6,000 points or so before feeling like I ought to get on with some work. How well do you manage? Give it a try right here:
Twitter at work with SpreadTweet
If you work in a big corporate office and you crave Twitter salvation, but it’s been banned by the small-minded IT department, then I’ve got the solution for you. Spreadtweet. It’s an interface for Twitter that looks just like Microsoft Excel.
It comes in several flavours – OSX Office, Office 2003 and Office 2007, and it uses Adobe Air for the backend, but it’s relatively speedy and fully operational as a Twitter client. The developer admits that it’s “probably not” legal, so grab it while you can.
SpreadTweet (via @bryonyb)
Street View gets the all clear from the Information Comissioner
Privacy International’s complaints to the Informational Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about Google’s Street View have been overruled, reports claim.
The introduction of the service to the UK hasn’t been without controversy, but the ICO says that Street View does not break privacy laws – it’s more like a televised football match where obtaining the consent of every attendee is impractical.
To try and quash privacy complaints, Google already blurs faces and number plates from its service, and will take down any pictures on request. The ICO said it would continue to monitor the situation.
(via VNUNet)
Twitter gets the 'all-clear' after a weekend of virus antics
In a metaphorical ‘get your own back’ situation, everyone’s favourite bird-themed microblogging website, Twitter, was assaulted by worms over Easter weekend. Four waves of assaults hit the site, with those infected spamming out a link to a Twitter clone called StalkDaily.
The creator of StalkDaily, 17-year-old American student Michael Mooney, has admitted he was responsible, saying:
“I really didn’t think it was going to get that much attention, but then I started to see all these stories about it and thought, ‘Oh, my God’.”
While the attack could have been considerably worse if it had been more malicious in intent, security experts said they were surprised it had even been possible on the site, as Facebook and MySpace saw similar assaults quite some time ago. Twitter has promised to conduct a ‘full review’ of what happened.
Amazon's Easter Weekend Fail – what really happened
Over the weekend, you might have noticed steam pouring out of Twitter and the blogosphere as Amazon customers reacted furiously to the news that the bookselling colossus seemed to be censoring gay and lesbian content from its bestseller lists and search algorithms.
An early response from customer service seemed to indicate that this was a policy change of some sort – that gay and lesbian content had been recategorized as ‘adult’, and therefore hidden from many parts of the site. A company statement later referred to the problem as a ‘glitch’.
But what really happened, claims an anonymous Amazon employee, was simply human error from an employee in France. He had filled out a field incorrectly in the database and 57,000 items were suddenly tagged as “adult”.
Poor Amazon employees were called back from their Easter break and worked on the issue until midnight on Easter Sunday, when it was handed over to the international team. I imagine there’s a certain French staffer who’s on the receiving end of an awful lot of angry emails today.
In the meantime, let’s have a little calm when this sort of thing happens in the future, shall we? Innocent before proven guilty, and all that?
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Asus Eee PC 1000HE
Netbook fan? Me too! That’s why I was dead excited to try out the latest Eee, and you know what? It’s a bit of a monster. Montrously powerful, by netbook standards, and with a montrous battery life.
Unfortunately it’s also monstrously heavy, weighing in at 1.4kg. I suppose you have to compromise somewhere, but for £329, you can’t complain too much. Watch the video above for my full thoughts.
Facebook hits 200 million users
Today at some stage, Facebook will hit 200 million users – nearly 3% of the world’s population. It’s another massive milestone for the service, which only hit 150 million back in January. The news means that it leapfrogs Brazil to become – if it were a country – the fifth most populous country in the world.
The news has prompted boss Mark Zuckerberg to make a blog post, asking what 200 million means to you. A video’s been put together, too, which you can see here, featuring a heatmap that shows where Facebook is most accessed – proving fairly conclusively that it’s still an exclusively western phenomenon.
If you’re interested in more about Facebook, then have a read of my article the other day which discussed why we shouldn’t forget about Facebook in all our excitement over Twitter and Spotify.
