Posts tagged possible
FTC Asked To Investigate Possible Facebook Timeline Privacy Violations
Jan 6th
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has sent a letter to the FTC asking it to investigate privacy breaches and the new Facebook Timeline.
“With Timeline, Facebook has once again taken control over the user’s data from the user and has now made information that was essentially achieved and inaccessible widely available without the consent of the user,” writes EPIC to the FTC. It urges the FTC to investigate whether Timeline is “consistent with the terms of the settlement.”
It’s not at all coincidental that shortly after launching Timeline to the world, Facebook decided to ramp up its ad services.
This request comes less than two months after the November 29, 2011 settlement with the FTC in which Facebook agreed to obtain express consent from its users before changing privacy settings. It will also undergo privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years.
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Timeline also happened to launch around the same time that Facebook announced ads a.k.a. “sponsored posts,” would start appearing in the news feed.
Before Timeline, Facebook users posted status updates, links, videos or images, and just expected them to disappear over time. Back then, the only way one could find old content was to keep scrolling down on their profile until it appeared.
Of course, Facebook had previously started surfacing the “old status updates” feature, angering many users.
Facebook Timeline surfaces all of a user’s past posts. The good news is that after profiles transition to Timeline, users still have seven days to “clean up” what they don’t want to share with their Facebook friends.
The letter from EPIC goes on to mention correlations between the Facebook Timeline “Health and Wellness” item, which suggests that users should update their profiles with life events related to medical data. Facebook has already partnered with major pharmaceutical companies to market drugs and medical treatment.
By exposing one’s entire life to Timeline, users “become more vulnerable to stalkers, government agents and potential employers,” writes EPIC.
Timeline is Facebook’s latest attempt to collect as much information about you as possible, er, to make it easier for *you* to share your life story with all of your Facebook friends.
Timeline is Facebook’s latest attempt to collect as much information about you as possible, er, to make it easier for *you* to share your life story with all of your Facebook friends.
During the November 2011 FTC settlement, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had “made a bunch of mistakes in regards to privacy,” but it’s clear that Facebook does not want to truly be held accountable. As our own Scott Fulton writes, “It’s hard to establish a standard of care for property that so many millions of individuals willingly give for free.”
Like Spotify and frictionless sharing, Timeline is yet another attempt at getting users to share as much information as possible. What information is too sensitive to share with a Facebook friend network? That is up to the user.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Managing HP Thin Clients Using HP Thin Clients: It’s Possible
Dec 5th
A growing number of embedded systems – devices with built-in firmware and non-PC form factors – are running Windows, including point-of-sale terminals, kiosks, and digital signage. But up to now they’ve required a server capable of running Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM).
This morning, Hewlett-Packard announced that for the first time, it will offer thin client PCs – systems that run Windows Embedded Standard 7 already – that have Embedded Device Manager 2011 (EDM 2011) pre-installed. This way, out of the box, customers that run Windows Embedded 7 (based on the Windows 7 kernel) don’t have to install a separate server PC (even if it’s just a virtual or cloud-based one) to monitor and maintain devices such as cash registers.
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Usually the pre-installation of software on a system is not enough to merit an entire story, but this is an exception due to 1) the system involved, and 2) the relationship of this software to that system. Embedded systems have historically been more difficult to manage and maintain than PCs. Until recently, their firmware kernels haven’t really been large enough to merit an abundance of graphical tools, so an embedded Linux admin finds himself having to be a master of command-line tools and scripting languages for automating scary processes like system updates.
For Windows Server, the SCCM 2007 software typically manages processes such as operating system updates, security configurations, and device inventory, though it was made for full-fledged Windows. But since last March, Microsoft has made EDM 2011 available for implementing SCCM to manage embedded devices… from a PC (or remote device). Now that EDM comes pre-installed on a thin client like a t5570e (right) or t5740e (above) costing somewhere in the mid-three-digit range, depending on configuration, admins can use a thin client to capture and redeploy fully configured system images to a collection of clients.
According to HP documentation released today, “SCCM Software Update Management simplifies the complex task of delivering and managing updates to IT systems across the enterprise. IT administrators can deliver updates of Microsoft products, third-party applications, custom in-house line-of-business applications, hardware drivers, and system BIOS to a variety of devices.”
Embedded devices such as HP’s thin clients utilize a Microsoft feature called enhanced write filtering. It’s a way of using local memory as a cache for storing the images of changes that software running on the client may try to make to the disk – for example, when a Web browser stores cookies. For a system whose real function is point-of-sale, you often don’t want permanent disk changes, so write filtering lets the disk’s original contents be instantly restored by simply rebooting and “forgetting” the changes.
That’s nice, until you – the admin – want to make permanent changes to the operating system like security patches or service packs. You might have had to write a script that turned filtering off, applied the patch, then turned filtering on again. And someplace in that scenario, you worked in some time for praying it all worked right before re-engaging the filter.
One of the benefits of using EDM is that it knows how to programmatically disengage enhanced write filters prior to deploying updates. Another is being able to enroll multiple like devices (e.g., all the front registers) as a single collection, and roll out changes to the entire collection on a manageable itinerary.
Microsoft announced System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (the successor to System Center Configuration Manager 2007 – that’s right, the year got kicked from the end to the middle of the name) last month, though it may yet take some time for SC2012CM to make its way into the field. For now, HP’s solution supports SCCM 2007 and EDM 2011.
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Amazon Teases With Possible Tablet Release
Sep 23rd
Amazon issued a press release moments ago that may put to rest rumors of a tablet thought to be forthcoming from the e-retailing giant.
The company is holding an invite-only event in New York on September 28 but they are not saying what the event is about.
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It could be about the two Kindle e-readers that we have reported on before.
We have also written before on whether Amazon could scale this effort.
We will let you know more when we dig up some info from our sources.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Clues to HP’s Possible Future From Meg Whitman’s Past
Sep 23rd
“Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community. By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications,” announced eBay’s CEO in September 2005, Meg Whitman, “we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net.”
By 2005, what Meg Whitman had learned about “ecosystems,” such as they are, would have had to have come from her tenure as president of Stride Rite Shoes, the maker of Keds; and later as chief of Hasbro’s Playskool division, where she directly oversaw the marketing of Mr. Potato Head. Inspired by the reintroduction of the toy brand into popular culture with Pixar’s Toy Story, Whitman’s innovations included the licensing of the brand to television, leading to the 1998 premiere of Fox Kids’ “The Mr. Potato Head Show.”
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You may laugh. But assume for a moment that you were in charge of a nearly defunct plastic toy brand in the electronics era. If you had managed a deal with Fox TV, you’d be credited with a stroke of genius, even if the show bombed.
Meg Whitman’s career (aside from her failed run for the California governorship in 2010) has been around leading consumer products. This fact alone will send a signal to both HP’s investors and customers, both consumer and enterprise, that HP’s most recent change of course (which followed former CEO Mark Hurd’s change of course) is changing course. She is not a technologist. She believes in obtaining cumulative advantage, which includes accumulating assets where necessary, in order to build a larger foundation for the brand. (Hopefully stronger, but for the meantime, larger.)
A great deal of attention has already been paid to Whitman’s now-historic comment from October 2005, following eBay’s acquisition of Skype, that the cost of voice transmission will trend toward zero. It was such a polarizing comment at the time that not much attention was paid to what she said immediately afterward, which speaks more to her business philosophy than anything she’s ever said:
Our belief is that the winner in this space will be those that have the largest ecosystem, and what I mean by that is, the largest number of registered users, the largest number of voice minutes, the largest number of developers who develop against the platform, the best product, and the best array of value-added services that users of a certain network are willing and want to pay for. And we think that this that the way ultimately four or five, six years from now, maybe it will be a little sooner is, that the value-added services will be the way that Skype and many other of these providers are monetized. And we think we have a huge lead in that regard. One of the things we understand now better than ever is how far ahead Skype is in users, in usage minutes, and in the product capability that Skype brings to market, and the size of the ecosystem. The hardware ecosystem, the developer ecosystem, the build out of the APIs. So we subscribe to your thesis. I don’t think it is this year or next year, but I believe the ultimate monetization method of voice communications on the net changes from a revenue per minute to, you know, based on the size of the ecosystem.
During Whitman’s run for the State House last year, the opposition dragged a number of damaging incidents into the open. Some of those were taken largely out of context, and several actually took place before her watch. But the Skype acquisition, and the way in which eBay almost immediately began starving the growth out of that property, is a failure so colossal that it dwarfs most attempts at context. How Whitman handled that failure as it was happening was unique. First, she acknowledged that her initial tactics were wrong. Second, she repeated the tactics in a new context.
At eBay’s Q3 2007 conference call with analysts, she introduced a catch-phrase that she might have heard first from someone at Microsoft: “delighting the user.” Freely admitting that her initial analysis of the trend-toward-zero in voice communication was flawed, she replaced one goal with another, but her method for achieving that goal was essentially the same: conglomerate with something big, even if that something big doesn’t fit.
Over the next several months, we will work to improve the way we engage and delight Skype users. For example, yesterday’s announcement about the MySpace/Skype partnership is the next phase in our plan to make Skype available across multiple platforms. We also want to fully develop our nascent e-commerce services, like Skype Prime and Skype Find. Additionally, delivering the synergy with eBay and PayPal that we had always envisioned will be a renewed priority. We are also looking forward to the next generation of the Skype client, which has some fantastic features and will debut next year.”
There had been too much incentive, Whitman admitted to a Citigroup analyst, to monetize the Skype acquisition right away with programs that cut into the service’s value proposition. Given that customers were expecting free communication from Skype, why charge for it with services like SkypeIn and SkypeOut? Correcting her company’s course, she said, would involve turning its attention toward delighting the user, through combination deals like the one announced with MySpace.
FOR MORE: “Will Meg Whitman Succeed as HP’s CEO?” by David Strom
Step 1 for Meg Whitman at eBay was to collect and acquire resources; Step 2 was then to find some way of stitching them together into a platform. Step 3 became remedial: Unstitch the pieces when they don’t fit, and try another way. It’s Step 3 with which she has the greatest experience, for better or worse. Whitman has given a name to this tactic. In a speech to the George W. Bush Presidential Center last April, she dubbed the process of making many disparate pieces fit together under a guiding principle “BHAG” – Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
“And you know what? The BHAG works time and time again, because what happens is it becomes more than a goal,” Whitman told the Bush Center. “It elevates itself and embodies what we stand for, and what we strive for as an enterprise. It becomes a rallying point. And at eBay, we often found that BHAG to be our North Star, focusing and directing all of our efforts. And if something didn’t keep us directly on the path to that goal, then we had to question whether or not it was worth doing.”
It’s here where the following important and curious observation is worth noting: Last March, Meg Whitman joined the financial firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a strategic advisor. Raymond Lane is a managing partner of that firm, and today Lane was named HP’s new Executive Chairman. Kleiner Perkins was one of the early investors in Handspring, the innovative spinoff company from Palm that engineered the early Treo device, and was later spun back into Palm. In many ways, Palm was one of Kleiner Perkins’ babies.
If Whitman’s strategy as CEO of HP becomes a repeat of her approach to eBay, she may be less likely to spin off the Personal Systems Group responsible for PCs. And she may at least partly reverse course on HP’s webOS tablets, whose production was suspended by predecessor Léo Apotheker. But it may already be too late for HP to undo the process of acquiring Autonomy, the British software maker building a “Universal Search” platform – certain breakup costs would be incurred. Search is something that has appealed to Whitman before at eBay, at least by name.
So if history is any guide, Meg Whitman may try to stitch together these unlikely partners: touchscreens, business consulting services, ink production, and universal search algorithms. When they won’t fit together the first time, she’ll try another route, and then another. Big, hairy, and audacious. Like a certain Hasbro toy she helped resurrect.
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Is it Really Possible to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score with Google +1?
Sep 16th
This week I have listened to some exciting presentations and had a few conversations with Google AdWords product evangelists regarding Google +1. The prospect for social integration with both SEO listings and paid search ads is intriguing and hold…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Is Pre-Cognition Possible & Can It Beat Twitter on Breaking News?
Jul 22nd
Recorded Future is a startup technology company that described itself as a “temporal analytics engine.” It tries to uncover and analyze very faint signals, basically in order to predict the future. It’s backed by Google Ventures and the data-loving VC firm IA Ventures.
Today, Recorded Future articulated its vision of the future of news. By news they don’t just mean what’s broadcast on TV at 5 and 11, they mean current events of interest to people seeking actionable information. The gist of the company’s argument is this: real-time web publishing, best exemplified by the news-breaking social network Twitter, is ultimately a race to the bottom. Eventually the time between things happening and their entering the cycle of news recycling that goes on for days or weeks will drop from the 10 or 20 minutes that it’s at right now…to zero. That’s a losing proposition for competitive news gatherers, the company says, and will be replaced in the future by an endless competition to get better at predicting the news earlier and earlier, before it happens. It’s a compelling argument, I think, and well worth considering.
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Above, Recorded Future’s map of what it calls “the extended news cycle.”
Is it really possible to predict the future based on a giant index of digital information? Google has said it aims in the future to serve up what you want before you even ask for it. And people have always said that those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. (There’s some very interesting discussion on this topic going on over on my Google Plus account right now.)
I’m apt to believe that there is a good chance that with enough data, analyzed smartly enough, many events are predictable with enough accuracy that it would be useful. Is that where the next arms race of analytics software will be fought? I wouldn’t be surprised. I am willing to bet that Google in particular will offer in the not-so-distant future, if it can pull it off, prediction or recommendation technologies based on the massive swaths of data it is ingesting and analyzing from the web and search, from web traffic, from spoken word analysis, from sensors in self-driving cars and other signals. I was very surprised that the company shut down its Smart Meter platform last month, but perhaps it’s focusing on data collection in industries where it can own more of the technology stack than in energy.
Walmart is already fine-tuning how it stocks the shelves across its empire of stores based on what it learns from peoples’ posts to Twitter. So is this stuff for real? I think it’s only a question of how truly useful it ends up being.
Below: In the future, people will be impressed by impressive videos.
Compare this with the real-time web of today. Twitter is famous for breaking news of earthquakes, political scandals and developments in many industries (especially technology).
From News to Pre-News
From Recorded Future:
“The early nature of such signals obviously makes them very attractive. At the same time, these are subtle signals, and it will take judgment, statistical rigor, or the like, to take advantage of effectively and confidently.
“Tricky issues also remain in identifying prescient signals. These range from the technical (efficiently and accurately organizing references to time in news) to the psychological (how we go about researching and analyzing information that may indicate a future event).
“In summary, the nature of news continues to change, and the game of analyzing it for actionable information as is shifting from news to pre-news to early event detection – that’s where the future is and the value lies.”
“There are opportunities to detect this event, whether from a Taiwanese blogger seeing the semiconductor factory exploding or a sudden co-occurrence of tweets or inferred information in a collection of option trades, and being early here can certainly capture value,” Recorded Future writes. “However, we can expect the delay from event to news story to keep shrinking rapidly. This is frankly yet another race to the bottom.”
I know in my own personal experience using the real-time web to find early news, that’s been the case. Years ago I was one of the first news writers to subscribe to company RSS feeds from key vendors in my beat through SMS and IM. I would get updates in minutes, automatically, and write up the news before anyone else. That strategy grew my early career fast, but now almost everyone I compete with does the same thing. That’s why when one of the major companies online puts up an important blog post, you’ll see 5 blogs publishing coverage of it within the next 15 minutes.
Time to detect that news after it happens is, arguably, no longer a competitive advantage. Companies like Recorded Future believe they know where and how to look before events happen – to try and discern clues about what will happen in the future.
I would argue though that same strategy is true of after-action real-time news discovery. There is still a competitive advantage in knowing where to watch for news updates, even if there’s no longer any competitive advantage to consuming widely-watched sources faster.
Pre-cognition service providers might argue that they know how to show you where to go in order to “skate where the puck will be,” but I’m not convinced there’s not still plenty of advantage to be found in strategic determination of where to watch for real-time events.
“It goes without saying,” Recorded Future says none the less, “that the ability to capture value (be it economic, strategic, tactical) is directly proportional to how early one can detect and execute.”
Of course that’s true – but we’ll see how well the predictors can execute their detection and thus provide opportunities for the rest of us to execute our responses. I’m not quite ready to give up on real-time news as too slow, yet.
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Google, ICANN’s Dot-Anything-Goes and Its Possible Effects on SEO – Business 2 Community
Jun 22nd
 USA Today |
Google, ICANN's Dot-Anything-Goes and Its Possible Effects on SEO
Business 2 Community How Google reacts to the new domain suffix ruling in their algorithm will either create new barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, a $185000 barrier, or just merely add a new wrinkle in the SEO work being done currently. The weight Google attaches to the … What The New ICANN Domain Names Mean For Google Rankings & SEO: Nothing SEO Marketers Shrug at ICANN's Move My One Concern with ICANN Domain Suffix Expansion |
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Possible past photos of Seo Woo shock netizens – allkpop
Apr 22nd
 allkpop |
Possible past photos of Seo Woo shock netizens
allkpop by VITALWARNING on April 22, 2011 at 6:00 pm Screen captures of actress Seo Woo and gagman Ji Sang Ryul from an old TV show have been gaining great interest within the online world as of recent. Recently, a netizen uploaded still captures of the … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
