via Declan McCullagh, CNET News Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users’ photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry. The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing … Continue reading
via David Talbot, MIT Technology Review, Mashable Google’s effort to install a blazingly fast, gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service in the two-state metropolis of Kansas City — a speed 100 times faster than the national average — is a radical new business direction for the company, and perhaps provides an unorthodox model for how to rewire … Continue reading
via John Constine, TechCrunch When you’re dealing with 1 billion people’s personal info, security is critical. But Facebook didn’t want to sacrifice speed. That’s why it spent the last two years making infrastructure improvements so that its transition of all its users to HTTPS which starts this week will “slow down connections only slightly.” People … Continue reading
via John Constine, TechCrunch Facebook filters the news feed so you only see the 15% or so of stories it thinks you’ll find most interesting. But a newly discovered “All” link shows you almost everything posted by your friends and Pages you Like. Facebook confirmed to me that http://www.facebook.com/?sk=nf_all ”is an old link that allows … Continue reading
via Nicole Perlroth, The New York Times Not long after I began writing about cybersecurity, I became a paranoid caricature of my former self. It’s hard to maintain peace of mind when hackers remind me every day, all day, just how easy it is to steal my personal data. Within weeks, I set up unique, … Continue reading
via Keith Bradsher, The New York Times The Chinese government swiftly blocked access Friday morning to the English-language and Chinese-language Web sites of The New York Times from computers in mainland China in response to an article in both languages describing wealth accumulated by the family of the country’s prime minister. The authorities were also blocking … Continue reading
via Jeff Ward-Bailey, Christian Science Monitor Last month, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo unveiled the social media company’s new design, and there’s no point in beating around the bush here: Twitter looks a lot more like Facebook now. The biggest design change is that pages now have a big header image at the top — similar … Continue reading
via John Constine, TechCrunch Facebook is expanding to the U.S. the controversial Promoted Posts feature that lets users pay to get their posts more visibility in the news feed. It will cost $7 per post and Facebook hopes it will be used for garage sales, parties, wedding photos and other important announcements. Promoted Posts has … Continue reading
via AP, USA Today Facebook has topped 1 billion users, but the past few months have not been easy. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the company is going through a bit of a rough patch following its rocky initial public offering. Zuckerberg updated his Facebook status on Thursday to announce that the social networking site … Continue reading
via Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Could Facebook Inc.’s new gift service be the early Christmas present that Wall Street has been waiting for? After its disastrous debut as a public company in May, the social networking giant has come under increasing pressure from investors not just to squeeze more advertising dollars from its nearly … Continue reading
via Steve Friess, Politico Microsoft has enjoyed months of great press for its promise to make Do Not Track the default setting on its forthcoming iteration of Internet Explorer, but it has left out one important detail: Users will still be tracked. That also goes for users of Chrome, whose parent Google announced last week … Continue reading
via Somini Sengupta and Kevin J. O’Brien, The New York Times Facebook on Friday confronted a new obstacle over what to do with one of its most vital assets — pictures. The company promised European regulators that it would forgo using facial recognition software and delete the data used to identify Facebook users by their … Continue reading
via Ryan Grenoble, The Huffington Post Most people view Facebook as an ideal time-waster, a way to step back from the hustle and bustle of daily life and click around idly. Need a mental breather at work? Scroll through the News Feed. Insufferable urge to gossip? There’s a relationship rumor out there, somewhere. In one … Continue reading
via Graham Cluley, Naked Security Facebook has released statistics showing that it believes there are more than 83 million fake accounts on its social network. Some 8.7% of the site’s 955 million users are believed to be bogus, according to documents that the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this week. … Continue reading
via Devin Leonard, Businessweek The U.S. Postal Service essentially went broke yesterday. It skipped a $5.5 billion payment to the U.S. Treasury for future retiree health-care payments and said it would do the same early next month when another $5.6 billion is due. This comes as no surprise. The USPS has been losing $25 million … Continue reading
via Josh Constine, Tech Crunch Over the next few months, anyone still refusing to voluntarily switch to the Timeline profile redesign will be automatically migrated, Facebook tells me. Users could choose to adopt the redesign starting in January, but there have been some hold-outs who didn’t want their whole life becoming easier to access, or … Continue reading
via Brian Stelter, The New York Times On Sunday night, MSNBC.com did something that successful Web sites almost never do: it renamed itself. The site became NBCNews.com, signifying the end of a relationship between NBC and Microsoft that dates back to the earliest days of the commercial Web. Early next year, MSNBC.com will be reborn … Continue reading
via Editorial Board, The New York Times Cellphones, e-mail, and online social networking have come to rule daily life, but Congress has done nothing to update federal privacy laws to better protect digital communication. That inattention carries a heavy price. Striking new data from wireless carriers collected by Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and … Continue reading
via Associated Press, The Washington Post If you’ve ever lied to a potential Internet date about your weight, texted your spouse that you were someplace you weren’t or emailed mom to say how much you love that ugly new sweater, you were breaking the law if you did it in Rhode Island. But state lawmakers … Continue reading
via Dan Zak, The Washington Post The rainbow-colored Oreo graphic unveiled for LGBT Pride month proves at least one thing: Gays are just as susceptible to clever marketing as straights. At long last! Equality under commercialization. The graphic was posted Monday evening on Oreo’s Facebook page and drew more than 52,000 shares and 177,000 likes … Continue reading
via Mary Long, Media Bistro The City of New York sent a subpoena to Twitter in February demanding it release all of Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris’ tweets between September 15 and December 31 2011, as well as his email address and any other user information associated with his account. Well, after a lot … Continue reading
via CBS News Food, sex and Facebook posting views. It’s what your brain likes best. The reward given by a person’s brain when a Facebook posting of theirs is viewed, liked and commented on has proven to be comparable in pleasure to the response from food and sex, according to a recent Harvard University study. … Continue reading
via Jessica Hopper, NBC Rock Center When Helen and Jay Stassen’s 21-year-old son, Benjamin, committed suicide 19 months ago, he did not leave a note. If it had been 20 years ago, the Stassens might have looked through diaries, letters or other personal items in an attempt to find clues as to why he decided … Continue reading
via Matt Krantz, USA TODAY Facebook shares jumped 13% to $43 as the stock opened in the frenzied first minutes of trading Friday, but just as quckly the price slid, tas investors stormed Wall Street to trade shares of the world’s leading social networking company. The stock rose $5 from its initial price of $38 … Continue reading
via John Naughton, The Guardian: The Observer Earlier this year, American legal scholar Tim Wu published a sobering book: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. In it, he surveyed the history of the great communications technologies of the 20th century – the telephone, movies, broadcast radio and TV. And in the … Continue reading