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FTC Picks Internet Privacy Expert for Senior Adviser

Drew Bowling — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:37:37 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission has drafted Paul Ohm, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and a well-regarded expert on internet privacy, as a senior advisor on mobile privacy and competition issues. Ohm is slated to assume his new position on August 27 of this year.

According to his biography on his website, Ohm is an Associate Professor who specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. Most of his published articles involve different legalities with regard to technology and the internet, such as his 2010 piece, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization,” which took a look at how computer scientists are able to “reidentify” people who had allegedly been made anonymous.

Ohm mentioned his new appointment on Twitter:

@paulohm

I’m very excited to be joining the FTC in DC this August. on.wsj.com/KWGJsu I’ll be taking a temporary leave from Colorado Law

In a press release, Ohm said he was honored to have received the appointment. “The FTC is the focal point for so many of the important information privacy debates taking place today,” he said. “I hope to help the Commissioners and staff of this great agency continue the important work they have done to protect consumers online.”

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz welcomed Ohm’s expertise into the agency’s fold, saying, “Paul’s keen insights on how the law applies to technology and privacy issues will be invaluable to the FTC’s work in these areas.” Given the plethora of privacy issues that permanently persist in the tech world, I imagine there will be no shortage of things to do for Ohm.

Ohm has guest blogged at The Volokh Conspiracy, the online home of another legal eagle, Eugene Volokh. Volokh was actually the author of a recent report commissioned by Google where he argued that the company was entitled to redesign search results because it is owed the same freedom of speech protections as media and publishing companies.

[Via Wall Street Journal.]
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Yahoo! vs. Facebook Patent Battle Escalates Even Further

Rene LeMerle — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:14:36 +0000

The animosity between Yahoo! and Facebook is picking up pace once again as Yahoo! adds two more infringement claims against Facebook taking the total to 12.

These claims come just when the social networking giant is busy with its initial public offering slated for release later this month.

For those who don’t know, about a month back Yahoo! filed a law suit in a San Jose Federal District Court accussing Facebook of knowingly infringing ten of Yahoo’s patents. This lawsuit comes after Yahoo! gave Facebook a final warning to pay a licensing fee to use the technology stolen from Yahoo!. Facebook did not pay much heed to Yahoo’s claim and instead filed a counter lawsuit claiming that it was Yahoo! who has infringed 10 of their patents. Wow, talk about a soap opera!

In its latest petition, Yahoo! has denied any violation of the patents Facebook has cited in its suit and argues that the social networking site is infringing on 2 more of their patents.

Backing its claim with relevant paper work Yahoo! said that

Facebook lacks a good faith basis for most, if not all, of its counterclaims, particularly those patents that it purchased from others.

Yahoo! has reportedly demanded an undisclosed amount of monetary compensation for the use their web technologies in areas ranging from social networking to instant messaging to advertising and privacy.

The 2 patents that are being contested by Yahoo! are “System and Method to Determine Validity of and Interaction on a Network” and the “System and Method Allowing Advertisers to Manage Search Listings in Pay for Placement Search System Using Grouping”, which the Yahoo! alleges is being violated by Facebook Ads.

In an e-mailed statement from Yahoo!, the company said:

Today’s filing underscores the breadth of Facebook’s violation of Yahoo!’s intellectual property. As we have stated previously, Yahoo!’s technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. We intend to vigorously protect these technologies for our customers and shareholders.

Responding to Yahoo!’s claims, Facebook released a statement saying:

We remain perplexed by Yahoo!’s erratic actions. We disagree with these latest claims and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.

Many in the know in Silicon Valley perceive Yahoo!’s decision to sue Facebook as a desperate attempt to grab its stake in the IPO action. But whatever it is, it sure makes for a juicey news saga.

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Oracle Wins Java Patent Claim But What Will Happen Next?

Mike Fossum — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:22:31 +0000

In the heat of Oracle’s court battle with Google concerning copyright infringement, the owner of the open-source Java programming language saw a small victory on April 19th, when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirmed a previously rejected Java patent. In the ongoing case, Oracle seeks to to prove that the manipulation of Java APIs, a practice Google utilized while developing its Android OS, could be perceived as copyright infringement, as certain portions of the code should be considered as protected creative works.

The patent in question, number 5,966,702, which relays a method for preprocessing and packaging class files to improve Java performance, was previously rejected by the courts on two different occasions. Now that the patent stands, it is unclear if and how Oracle plans to use the ruling in court. So far, the proceedings have seen Oracle CEO Larry Ellison looking confused on the stand, as well as Google CEO Larry Page appearing to give Oracle’s legal counsel the runaround. Oracle’s main point of contention surrounds its assumption that Google had pre-knowledge of the fact that portions of Java needed to be licensed, regardless of the language being open-source. It’s unclear how the ruling on patent 5,966,702 would help the case, as Google might just turn around and point out that there was indeed no patent in place while it began building Android.

The case might set a precedent, not only because of the possible 1 billion dollars at stake, but it could change general laws regarding how open-source software is manipulated. As I’d previously reported, the trial could transpire in three stages – copyright claims, patent claims and a third stage to asses any damages to be awarded to Oracle, if the company wins the first two segments. If the final stage is met, damages will depend on whether or not Oracle can prove that Google willfully violated any patents, which automatically triples fines. Check back as the Google/Android, Oracle/Java saga continues to unfold.

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FCC Wants Political Ads Disclosed On Web

Mike Tuttle — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 19:00:32 +0000

Local television stations make big bank during election seasons running political ads. Used to be, you could count on ads from the opponents themselves. Nowadays, in a world where money equals protected free speech, many other concerns have an axe to grind on the airwaves. That leads to even more revenue for televisions stations as they run ads paid for by third parties and “SuperPACs”.

The public deserves to know who is speaking to them on any given political topic. If an ad is not endorsed and approved by a given political candidate – those are easy to spot now – then who aired it? Televisions stations are required to keep a list of organizations that spend for political advertisements. This listing is available for the public to peruse at the station office.

But who drops in to a television station and asks to see the listing anymore? Generally speaking, if we want to know something like that, we jump on the Internet machine. Only, television stations are not required to publish those lists online. Even though it may make sense to you and me that they should, they generally don’t. And they don’t want to. The FCC thinks they should. The television stations are fighting it tooth and nail. The last time it was brought up,lawsuits rained down on the FCC. But here it comes again.

The commissioner of the FCC are convening later this month, and they will take up this topic again at that time. They want the stations to upload those records to an FCC-maintained site. The stations say that would cost them too much to do.

I have mentioned in past articles that I used to work in radio for a bit. The old-timers there told me of all kinds of archaic regulations, hopps to jump through, etc. that existed in the time before Reagan deregulated that industry. Nowadays, it is wondrously easier for them to do their jobs. Of course, two companies now own almost all stations with any power and we have to listen to the same music everywhere we go, but some consider that progress.

My point is this, things have gotten way better for the broadcast industries over the years. Their employees will likely waste more on Facebook each hour than it will take to maintain the FCC-proposed listing of political ad buyers. It’s even going to be an FCC-maintained site, likely with an easy upload interface. 5 minutes a day to upload the already-required public ad buyer list is a pretty decent regulation to have in place to keep the public suitably informed in a 21st-century world.

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The VA And Joining Forces Use Technology To Help Homeless Veterans

Drew Bowling — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:56:44 +0000

It’s beyond debate that homelessness is a pandemic problem across the world. Of the more than 636,000 adults that were homeless last year in the United States, over 67,000 of them were veterans. Great reward for serving your country, right?

Hoping to remedy this problem once and for all, the Department of Veterans Affairs and Joining Forces is trying to coax out some compassion from the tech-savvy and has created a competition for the nation’s community of developers to create a free app that will help caregivers and caseworkers improve assistance to the homeless.

The competition, called Project REACH (Real-Time Electronic Access for Caregivers and the Homeless), is a challenge to developers to create a free and user-friendly web and Smartphone app to be used by volunteers and outreach workers who could provide current and up-to-date information about housing and shelter, health clinics, food banks, and other services available to the homeless. And in case compassion alone wasn’t enough to ignite the engines of developers’ philanthropy, there is also a cash reward of $10,000 for the first five finalists to successfully create an app that meets selection criteria. Once those five have been established, they will complete for the Grand Prize of $25,000 during a two-month phase of beta testing at a homeless shelter in New Jersey.

The VA hopes that by developing technology that will not only make it easier for people to assist the homeless but also allow them to provide valuable and immediate information to them, the initiative will put within reach the Obama Administration’s goal of eradicating veteran homelessness by 2015.

Rules for the competition can be found at the website for Project REACH and the winners will be announced on November 9, 2012.

I must say, the VA’s initiative is a more determined, sophisticated, and effective way to assist the homeless than by, say, callously turning homeless people into computer accessories.

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The Link Between Stock Market Performance And Election Results

Richard Stalker — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:37:02 +0000

Many studies in the past have tried to find a link or commonality as to why a President is elected. A lot of them have tried to use three main things, economic growth, inflation, and unemployment. A recent study came out that looked at elections of incumbents from the last 200 years and seems to have found a link between stock market performance and election results.

As their website states: “We analyze all U.S. presidential re-election bids and find a positive, significant relationship between the incumbent’s vote margin and the prior net percentage change in the stock market. This relationship does not extend to the incumbent’s party when the incumbent does not run for re-election. We find no significant relationships between the incumbent’s vote margin and inflation or unemployment. GDP is a significant predictor of incumbents’ popular vote margin in simple regression but is rendered insignificant when combined with the stock market in multiple regression. Egotropic and sociotropic voting hypotheses fail to account for the findings. The results are consistent with socionomic voting theory, which includes the hypotheses that (1) social mood as reflected by the stock market is a more powerful regulator of re-election outcomes than economic variables such as GDP, inflation and unemployment and (2) voters unconsciously credit or blame the leader for their mood.”

If these guys have actually found a significant link between how the market performs in the first 3 years of an incumbent’s Presidential term, then we should expect more stupid things to come out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth in the next 4 years because Obama will be reelected in a landslide. When Obama took office in 2009, the DJIA was hovering around 9,000. Now we are looking at a DJIA approaching 13,000.

See the chart below from the study that shows the conclusive data. There is only 1 or 2 aberrations in the data.

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Social Media & Politics

Lauren MacEwen — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:57:29 +0000

Links To Help Launch Your Campaign

Today I am giving a presentation to Emerge NM, an organization that teaches democratic women how to run successful political campaigns. My presentation will be on using social media for your political campaign. I will be focusing on Facebook and Twitter. Though I believe that Google+ is a very strong resource, currently the majority of a local constituency will be on either Facebook or Twitter, as G+ is still a new network and mainly being used by early adapters. . We will be talking about effectively using social media for your political campaign. As a part of the presentation I am providing a list of links that go into detail on how to set up your account, create a page, post, tweet, shorten link, etc.

Enjoy the resources.

Facebook

Twitter

Hootsuite

This is a social manager that will help you manage your Facebook and Twitter from one location. This is particularly useful for scheduling posts or for managing Twitter.

Website

WordPress.com
WordPress.org – for a self hosted blog. This site lets you have your custom domain like mysite.com or laurenmacewen.com and you run your site through the wordpress mainframe. This is what I recommend.
Blogger – run through Google
GoDaddy: Register your domain
Hostmonster – Register your domain and host your website

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How Social Media is Changing the 2012 Elections

Kevin Dugan — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:04:01 +0000

There are plenty of ways you can use social media to follow the long march from the Iowa Caucus to the November Elections. Several sites, including Instagram and Tumblr, are being used by candidates for the first time to engage and inform citizens.

From behind the scenes access from the media and each candidate’s content to larger sites tracking how the candidates are doing overall, here are just a few sites to check out.

1) 2012 Elections Site | Google: By far, Google does the best job of a non-news organization tapping its products to bring you a complete destination for bipartisan election content. It’s using search, YouTube, Google+ and even Google Calendar to fuel its efforts. And in addition to covering the elections, it has a toolkit to get voters engaged in the process.

2) Media Mentions | Washington Post: Media Mentions tracks how candidates are doing in news coverage as well as on Twitter. And The New York Times, with the help of Big Data, will tell you that candidates who do better than expected will get more media coverage as a result.

3) Tapping Klout to Rank Candidates? | CNN: CNN using Klout is a big win for the polarizing ranking site. I’m hoping someone also comes back to note how well ALL of the platforms did as a predictor of candidate success. As we’ve already seen, unexpected outcomes are standard fare. And we’re already seeing folks use a single social platform to make assertions about which candidate might/could win.

This is uninformed and it’s already being seen that the correlation between quantity of Twitter followers, Facebook likes and YouTube views does not necessarily correlate to the number of votes. In fact, this gets back to the discussion of influence. If someone has all the social buzz, but not the votes….

4) See the Elections Unfold | Instagram: The “niche photo site” points out three major news organizations using the platform to augment their coverage. And it gives me a wicked idea (evil laugh).

5) Politics & Election News | New York Times: Book-ending our examples is the New York Times who is devoting significant resources above and beyond curating their own news to cover the election. In addition to a mobile app, its bloggers and interactive team are going deep to deliver some interesting insights and examples of social’s impact in the 2012 elections.

Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn

A scan on my part shows nothing of permanent of note from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn just yet. Twitter is showing folks how to live tweet for a better election experience, noting how Twitter and live TV go together like peas and carrots. But based on its White House Town Square effort, I’m sure they’re capable of a more substantive offering.

Facebook is being tapped for live chats as well. It’s good to see an engagement platform being used more for, uh, engaging with voters.

Instant Social Traction
It’s wild to see how quickly and thoroughly single moments in an election, or other nationally broadcast events, can unfold through social media. From Santorum’s unfortunate shared meaning of his last name (no link, just trust me) to his fashion choices.

Social spoofs will be an interesting sideline to distract from the carpet bombing of political ads we’ll see online and offline increasingly over the following year. In a year that election spending is touted as helping to save big media, you know we’re in for some serious political noise this year.

But based on the above alone, I’ll note social is helping bring a new experience to the the 2012 elections — online, offline and on TV. It’s early and we’ll surely see more interesting examples of how it’s used to inform and engage voters.

Open Source Government As A Platform

Glenn Letham — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:05:12 +0000

I’m a firm believer in the concept of Government as a platform and indeed it seems that the idea is much closer to being an accepted reality, even more so recently with the announcement via the Whitehouse blog of the US Government’s Open Government platform and an open source initiative – think data-government in a box. As part of President Obama’s announcement The President also unveiled the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government, which detailed steps the United States will take to help meet the initiative’s goals.

This was reported as a first step with the platform… The first module released is the Data Management System, which provides the tools and capabilities for an automated process for publishing data in the Open Government Platform, an open source product designed to facilitate governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites. Any government adopting the Open Government Platform will be able to download and use the DMS code to submit, approve, and update catalog data electronically on Open Government Platform websites and view management metrics reports. (Source: Data.gov)

See more on the Whitehouse Blog

Suggested Resources:

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Why Is Google Even Involved In The Yahoo! Acquisition Talks?

Pat McCarthy — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:17:38 +0000

There’s been numerous news reports about Google considering “buying” Yahoo!, or at least teaming up with private equity companies to do so.

While most of the articles at least mention in passing that it’d be unlikely for this to pass government review, I haven’t seen many people actually discuss why Google is involved.

Why wouldn’t a Google acquisition of Yahoo! pass government review? Well, if the Department of Justice wouldn’t pass the search deal that Google and Yahoo! worked up in 2008 where SOME of Yahoo!’s search results were powered by Google, then why would they actually let Google take part in buying all of Yahoo!?

In fact, many thought that Google knew in 2008 it wouldn’t pass government review, but tried to do the deal just so Yahoo! would turn down Microsoft and waste a lot of Yahoo!’s internal time (and it worked). I sat in many meetings at Yahoo! that were spent talking about the tests we were running with Google and how we were going to implement the deal.

There hasn’t been enough change in search market share for anyone to seriously even think it could pass. I’m not entirely sure if Google being only part of an ownership group with private equity firms would change the government’s view, but I doubt it.

Which leaves us asking, why is anyone even taking Google’s interest seriously?

I can’t answer why anyone is taking Google seriously, besides the fact that they are one of the only players who actually have the cash to do something around Yahoo!.

It just seems like any major involvement on there part is going to just raise big red flags with the governments of the world and will never pass “go”.

Why would Google get involved then?

I feel like there are two obvious answers to this one.

Google can pretend to at least have interest in Yahoo! to draw out how quickly something happens here. The more time Yahoo! is in limbo, and the more time Microsoft spends figuring out what to do about it, the better that is for Google to continue to separate itself from them.
Google can go as far as even floating prices out there to try and get others (Microsoft) to feel like they have to pay more in order to get Yahoo!. The more money someone spends on Yahoo!, the better that is for Google.

I suppose it is possible that Google really does want to keep Yahoo! out of Microsoft’s hands, but it seems like Microsoft having to acquire and digest Yahoo! would just allow Google to accelerate ahead even further ahead. It’s all just a ruse to waste time by complicating matters and drive up the price. Well played Google.

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