Posts tagged Won’t
Twitter Won’t Hand Over Data on Occupy Wall Street Protester
Mar 23rd
Barely two weeks after the New York District Attorney asked Twitter to hand over data about an Occupy Wall Street protester, the company says it will not comply with the request, at least for the time being.
The D.A.’s office had sent a subpoena to the microblogging service’s headquarters seeking information about the account belonging to Jeffrey Rae, one of several hundred activists arrested during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York on March 1.
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Paul Mills, the attorney representing Rae, filed a motion to quash the subpoena on March 15 on the grounds that the request was in violation of California’s requirements for out-of-state subpoenas. Twitter’s legal department then informed the D.A.’s office that they would not comply with the request until the motion was resolved, Mills tells ReadWriteWeb.
Earlier this week, the D.A. offered Rae what’s known as an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which effectively lifts the subpoena and may lead to the charges being dropped all together.
“When I received the subpoena, I was pretty shocked,” says Rae. “The District Attorney was subpoenaing my Twitter account over small charges like disorderly conduct and blocking traffic.”
Curiously, most of the data authorities sought, like a copy of Rae’s tweets from within a certain range of dates, was already publicly available. This fact lead him to believe that the motion was made “purely for intimidation and harassment.”
Other information sought in the original request included his name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, which devices he used to access his Twitter account and any IP addresses from which he connected.
The New York District Attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Where Social Media Meets Activism, a Legal Gray Area Emerges
This case illustrates something of a legal gray area that has emerged as social media has converged with political activism. As tools like Facebook and Twitter continue to play an increasingly prominent role in how demonstrations are organized and documented, exactly what types of information law enforcement has rightful access to remains unclear.
Before Jeffrey Rae, there was Malcom Harris. As he detailed for Reuters, Harris had his Twitter account subpoenaed for reasons related to his involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. As in Rae’s case, Harris’s lawyer filed a motion to have that subpoena quashed.
Similar requests for data from companies like Google and Twitter have been made in the ongoing U.S. investigation of Wikileaks as well. As incidents like this pile up, they continue to raise eyebrows among digital privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
Just heard a report that 400 are marching south on Broadway from Times Sq. #OWS #OccupyWallSt
— Jeff Rae (@jeffrae) March 22, 2012
For now, the threat of Rae having his Twitter data handed over to authorities is lifted. Despite the headaches caused by the affair, he says his level of commitment to the Occupy cause hasn’t changed. Last weekend, his Twitter stream buzzed with updates from the ground in Union Square in New York, where Occupy demonstrators began reconvening after a relatively quiet Winter.
“It’s nice knowing the subpoena is gone, if only because it’s one less thing to deal with,” says Rae. “I’ve been pretty active with Occupy from the beginning and something like this is not going to stop me from being involved.”
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Twitter: We Won’t Hand Over Data on Occupy Wall Street Protester
Mar 23rd
Barely two weeks after the New York District Attorney asked Twitter to hand over data about an Occupy Wall Street protester, the company says it will not comply with the request.
The D.A.’s office had sent a subpoena to the microblogging service’s headquarters seeking information about the account belonging to Jeffrey Rae, one of several hundred activists arrested during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York on March 1.
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Paul Mills, the attorney representing Rae, filed a motion to quash the subpoena on March 15 on the grounds that the request was in violation of California’s requirements for out-of-state subpoenas. Twitter’s legal department then informed the D.A.’s office that they would not comply with the request until the motion was resolved, Mills tells ReadWriteWeb.
Earlier this week, the D.A. offered Rae what’s known as an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which effectively lifts the subpoena and may lead to the charges being dropped all together.
“When I received the subpoena, I was pretty shocked,” says Rae. “The District Attorney was subpoenaing my Twitter account over small charges like disorderly conduct and blocking traffic.”
Curiously, most of the data authorities sought, like a copy of Rae’s tweets from within a certain range of dates, was already publicly available. This fact lead him to believe that the motion was made “purely for intimidation and harassment.”
Other information sought in the original request included his name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, which devices he used to access his Twitter account and any IP addresses from which he connected.
The New York District Attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Where Social Media Meets Activism, a Legal Gray Area Emerges
This case illustrates something of a legal gray area that has emerged as social media has converged with political activism. As tools like Facebook and Twitter continue to play an increasingly prominent role in how demonstrations are organized and documented, exactly what types of information law enforcement has rightful access to remains unclear.
Before Jeffrey Rae, there was Malcom Harris. As he detailed for Reuters, Harris had his Twitter account subpoenaed for reasons related to his involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. As in Rae’s case, Harris’s lawyer filed a motion to have that subpoena quashed.
Similar requests for data from companies like Google and Twitter have been made in the ongoing U.S. investigation of Wikileaks as well. As incidents like this pile up, they continue to raise eyebrows among digital privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
Just heard a report that 400 are marching south on Broadway from Times Sq. #OWS #OccupyWallSt
— Jeff Rae (@jeffrae) March 22, 2012
For now, the threat of Rae having his Twitter data handed over to authorities is lifted. Despite the headaches caused by the affair, he says his level of commitment to the Occupy cause hasn’t changed. Last weekend, his Twitter stream buzzed with updates from the ground in Union Square in New York, where Occupy demonstrators began reconvening after a relatively quiet Winter.
“It’s nice knowing the subpoena is gone, if only because it’s one less thing to deal with,” says Rae. “I’ve been pretty active with Occupy from the beginning and something like this is not going to stop me from being involved.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google: No, New TLDs Won’t Give You A Ranking Boost
Mar 16th
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said on his Google+ page that using the new TLDs will not give you a ranking boost in Google. Matt Cutts said, “I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the…
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Why I Still Won’t Buy an Apple TV
Mar 8th
Apple prefaced yesterday’s launch of the third generation iPad with a minor update to a product that makes up a much smaller proportion of the company’s sales. The Apple TV still sports the same external design and price point, but with an overhauled interface and crucially, the ability to playback videos at 1080p high-definition resolution.
For current owners of the Apple TV and those who are accustomed to buying content from iTunes, the new device is a worthy purchase. Although I have high hopes for whatever Apple is planning on the TV front in the long run, their connected set top box has never wowed me. That isn’t to say there aren’t a few enhancements that could change my mind, though.
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When it comes to Internet video streaming boxes like the Apple TV, a few of its competitors bring distinct advantages to the table. Sure, Google TV’s first iteration may have bombed (Google’s working on that), but even that has a few features Apple doesn’t. Both Roku and the Boxee Box offer something in terms of either content or functionality that Apple hasn’t managed to build out yet.
Content Limitations and No Web Browser
There is, to be sure, a pretty large selection of content that’s available on the Apple TV. In addition to television shows and movies in the iTunes Store, there’s Netflix, YouTube and a few other apps like WSJ Live and some sports-related content channels. Still, there could be more.
One major advantage that Roku owners have is the ability to access Hulu Plus and Amazon’s streaming video library from the device. Boxee and Google TV have both been promising Hulu Plus for quite some time, and neither of them has videos from Amazon.
On Boxee, the number of content apps is virtually limitless. Granted, most of that content is free, Web-only stuff like podcasts and Internet TV programming. It’s not the premium content from TV that most people are clamoring to watch, but much of it is actually quite good and often has high production value.
One way to easily expand the breadth of content that’s accessible from a device like this is by including a Web browser. The Boxee Box and Google TV both allow users to browse the Web from within the box’s UI. Granted, this has its limitations. As Google TV and Boxee users are all too aware, websites can block those devices from accessing their content if they so desire. Some networks have done this with Google TV, and attempting to access Hulu.com from the browser on a Boxee Box returns an error message.
Even so, offering a Web browser on a streaming set top box dramatically increases the breadth of content available to watch on one’s TV. For Apple, such a feature is probably not a priority, since the Apple TV is largely a vehicle for selling content via the iTunes Store.
There are also design considerations. Apple prides itself on its sleek, simple product design. Including a Web browser would force them to rethink the simplicity and small size of the remote control. They would have to build a QWERTY keyboard into the back of the remote like Boxee did. The Remote app for iOS could easily be optimized with Web browsing controls, but it wouldn’t be feasible to require a second device in order for the Apple TV to function properly.
No Third Party App Store
This kind of goes hand-in-hand with the content limitations overall, but it’s another thing many users have been dying to see on the Apple TV. Just as iPhone apps are scaled up to fit the iPad, select iOS apps could be redesigned for TV screens and Apple could distribute them through the iTunes App Store.
To be fair, this is almost certainly coming in the future. One major hang-up is rumored to be the ongoing discussions with content providers, with whom Apple is allegedly negotiating about content distribution and pricing.
Once the App Store has a section for TV apps, suddenly Apple starts to look a lot more like the Boxee platform, in the sense that that any Web video service, podcast or Internet TV series could have its own app. It will probably be much more effective than Boxee or any other platform, both because of Apple’s strict user experience guidelines and because developers will have a heightened incentive to produce apps for a platform built by a company with the reach and reputation of Apple.
While Apple TV may have some growing to do, it’s not as though any of its competitors single-handedly blow it out of the water. The entire market for streaming set top boxes is young and evolving and Apple is widely understood to have much, much bigger plans in mind for TV in general. It remains to be seen what those plans are, but if anybody can shake things up, it’s them.
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Nebula Cloud Pioneer at RSA: OpenStack Won’t Secure Itself
Feb 27th
He is as great a contributor to the concept of cloud computing as any individual alive today. Today, Chris Kemp, the co-architect of the pioneering NASA Nebula project – the first to encapsulate a cloud server into a shipping crate – told a meeting of the Cloud Security Alliance Monday morning at the RSA Conference in San Francisco that OpenStack is, and will continue to be, designed to support other security architectures, but not to serve as one itself.
“OpenStack was really designed around common, open source technologies,” Kemp told an overflow session, “so that if you have familiarity with securing these underlying technologies, you’re going to have a fairly easy time writing security plans and implementing security and controls and monitoring around these technologies.”
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Now the CEO of the commercial Nebula firm that bears the name of the NASA project he helped lead, Kemp mentioned the newest of the various components that are all integrated into the OpenStack project. OpenStack is, after all, a stack – a conglomeration of tools, resources, and techniques that collectively, and openly, enable businesses to pool compute and storage resources into private cloud architectures. One component is the Keystone identity service – which for OpenStack has been an on-again, off-again business. Just last week, Kemp said, it was on again, with a complete rewrite that includes new back-end products.
“If you’re in the identity management business, and you’ve got products in that area,” said Kemp, “we’re trying to make OpenStack much more out-of-the-box compatible with these products.” But to do this, he went on, OpenStack has adopted a plug-in architecture, so as to specifically avoid placing itself in the role of identity provider – as an authoritative source of credentials. “The intent is for OpenStack to exist in an environment where you already have some sort of identity management provider. We’re not trying to authenticate anything outside of the rest of the APIs, and we’re definitely trying to provide a common security framework for role-based access control in all the different components of OpenStack.”
Openness means friendliness – at least, that’s what implementers expect, as Kemp pointed out. Friendliness, in a technical sense, means integration. So any existing component with the facilities to integrate with Active Directory or LDAP, such as monitoring API accesses, successful and failed attempts to authenticate, logging, and correlation, should be capable of being integrated with OpenStack. He advised attendees to plan their implementation of OpenStack around how best to use their existing security information management (SIM) tools, not to change their processes to make way for it. A best-practices implementation of OpenStack, he said, would introduce no new management domains.
Knowing that, Kemp warned that OpenStack certainly does not add security where little or none exists. “Out of the box, it’s a framework and a reference implementation. It is not secure out of the box.
“Just like installing BIND on a Linux box doesn’t give you a secure DNS infrastructure, installing OpenStack out-of-the-box does not give you a scalable, secure OpenStack-based private cloud,” he emphasized. “It’s not intending to, either.” That should not dissuade careful implementers from implementing OpenStack, he added, because it does contain the building blocks for a private cloud which – when combined with best practices – can improve security and reliability.
The Cloud Security Alliance holds its annual Summit event as part of the RSA Conference, complete with its own panel session, keynote speaker, and innovator awards.
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Why Comcast’s New Streaming Service Won’t Deter Cord Cutters
Feb 21st
Cable companies know the threat that lies ahead of them. The percentage of consumers who “cut the cord” and cancel their cable subscriptions isn’t a huge one, but it’s growing. Meanwhile, a new generation of TV watchers is growing accustomed to watching shows online, even if it’s the next day or they’re catching up on a series months after the fact on Netflix. That contingent of “cord never getters” is what’s really going to eat away at big cable’s business model over time.
To preempt the threat, companies like Comcast have been moving aggressively in the digital space. From testing out streaming live TV on the Web to developing tablet apps that make a subscription more compelling, big cable is wasting no time repositioning itself for the future.
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The latest weapon in Comcast’s arsenal is Streampix, a streaming service that digs deep into the archives of popular television shows and makes episodes available across multiple devices. It’s being framed as the company’s answer to Netflix and Hulu. At $4.99 a month, Streampix is priced competitively against Netflix and Hulu and it even narrowly beats the monthly cost of an Amazon Prime membership, which comes with a growing library of streaming video content.
The thing about Streampix, however, is that it’s being bundled with Comcast’s traditional cable subscription packages. So it’s cheaper than the online-only streaming services only if one overlooks the ever-rising cost of a proper cable subscription, something consumers often cite as a reason they cut the cord.
Initiatives like StreamPix and Xfinity TV Everywhere may make cable packages more convenient and appealing to consumers, but they don’t make them cheaper or eliminate the customer service gripes or all-or-nothing content selection that annoys some consumers.
Cable’s disruption at the hands of Web-only streaming services is real, but it’s moving very slowly. Not only are viewers turning more to the Web, but statistics show that they’re going back to broadcast as well, buying up antennas to pull in HD terrestrial broadcast signals to supplement Web-based content.
At the end of the day, cable companies are trying to preserve their traditional business model while building up a new one. It’s a cautious, sensible move for a company that makes so much money through a legacy model, but it’s not always an approach that works flawlessly. Just ask newspapers.
That isn’t to say that the Web and mobile streaming offerings offered by Comcast and their competitors couldn’t one day be spun off into stand alone services and offered to consumers at a cheaper rate. But in the meantime, the risk of cannibalizing what brings in most of their revenue isn’t one they’re willing to take.
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CEO: Twitter Won’t Be Ready For IPO For “A Couple Of Years”
Feb 14th
Don’t expect a initial public offering of shares of Twitter anytime soon.
CNN is reporting that the company has placed restrictions on employees who hold shares, forcing them to keep 80 percent of the shares they own. The cable news outlet cited company emails about the policy, which has been in effect for a year, and said at least one high-level employee resigned because of the policy.
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There has been widespread speculation that Twitter would follow Facebook and float an IPO, perhaps as soon as 2013. But, officially, the company has made no public comment about its plans.
The restriction, according to CNN, is primarily in place because it helps keep Twitter under 500 shareholders. While companies can remain private after they hit that threshold, they are required to publicly disclose certain financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook was reportedly nearing that number, which may have factored in its decision to file an IPO earlier this month.
In August, Twitter’s senior technical engineer, Evan Weaver, sent an email to the entire company saying he was resigning over policy differences, according to CNN. Later that same day Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sent out an email explaining the policy and the main reason for it.
“We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years.”
We’ve asked Twitter for comment and will update if we hear back. The company declined CNN’s request for comment.
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Fabled Google Drive Won’t Be Another Dropbox
Feb 9th
The Wall Street Journal has revived rumors about Google launching a cloud storage service called Drive. The comparison everybody wants to make is to Dropbox. The thinking is that Google will challenge everyone’s favorite start-up by releasing a native desktop and mobile Drive app with the same syncing features Dropbox users know and love.
Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they’ve always conformed to the understanding of “The Cloud” that has prevailed at the time. If it’s not like Apple’s iCloud, which is integrated into Apple’s devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don’t. There’s room for a third, stand-out option here.
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Google Docs
Google already has a browser-based file system, Google Docs. It originated as a sort of word processor in the cloud, but it can actually handle and store many kinds of files, such as PDFs, JPEG images, MPEG audio and video, and it’ll handle pretty much anything containing text. That does make it a pretty compelling stand-in for Dropbox when it comes to simply storing files.
It even has a nice disk drive icon now, after last year’s Google makeovers. Google Drive, indeed:
Are people already using Google Docs as a cloud drive? Spanning, a company that provides backup for Google apps users (not just Google Apps users; free customers, too), took a look into how thousands of people are using it, and it studied their use to better optimize its services. Consequently, it has some insights into Google apps users to share.
Spanning has found that over half of the files in their customers’ Docs accounts were not Google Apps-created. They were PDFs, audio, video, photos and Microsoft Office files. By file size, non-Google files comprised over 85% of the stuff people stored in their Docs accounts.
So, at least for the use case of storing files, lots of people are already using Google Docs instead of Dropbox. What Docs does that Dropbox doesn’t is allow users to create and edit certain kinds of files. If you use Google Docs as your cloud document service, you’re probably using it to make and work on documents, too. That’s more than Dropbox can offer, standing on its own. (We’ll get to apps built on top of Dropbox in a minute.)
Search, plus Your World
There’s a new Google product that didn’t exist last time the Google Drive rumors surfaced. It’s Google. Or rather, it’s Google+. On January 10, Google revealed Search, plus Your World, which threw everybody for a loop. If you don’t understand that Google+ is the user-centric backbone of Google itself now, it doesn’t make sense that this one side of Google search has stuff from this weird social network in it.
While this early stage of Search+ is definitely about putting Google+ in users’ faces, that’s not what the message is. “Your World” does not consist solely of YouTube videos shared on social networks. Google’s personalized search also tries to figure out what a search means to you, so it can return something more meaningful. It’s two modes of search: Global mode searches the indexed Web, and personal mode tailors it to you.
How much more useful would this be if Google’s personalized search had your files in it? If your Google Drive contained your documents and music and other local files, they could show up in your personalized search results. If you couldn’t remember whether you read something online or in a document you downloaded, Search+ could find both. Now we’re giving meaning to the “Your World” part.
Dropbox has search, but it only contains part of what you’re looking for when you search “your world.” It’s more useful as one of many services in a third-party cloud search app like Greplin, which also logs into Google apps and searches across. Google’s new social signals run through all its services now, so if it’s in your Google cloud, Google search will find it, period.
Dropbox Is A Platform. It’ll Be Fine.
Between Docs and Search+, whatever Drive Google eventually ships (whether it’s in a few weeks or another X years) will have lots of unique capabilities that make it a different beast from Dropbox.
That’s exactly the way Dropbox wants it.
Dropbox turned down insane amounts of money from Apple, because it didn’t want to get rolled in as a feature of one integrated system. That’s why iCloud doesn’t work like Dropbox. Apple wanted cloud syncing that was just there, so users don’t have to know where their files are. Developers in the Apple ecosystem can just hook into iCloud. Their applications become Apple-specific. In exchange, they get free marketing in the App Store, and if Apple is feeling generous it features their apps as the App Of The Week or something.
Dropbox said “no” to all that. It wants to be the next Apple or Google, and its valuation seems optimistic about that possibility. Apple’s cloud is totally integrated with its devices, using hardware as the platform. Google’s cloud is integrated with its services, using the Web as a platform. Dropbox is a platform.
Dropbox lets different clients on different systems read and write to it. Dropbox doesn’t have a Google Docs because anyone can build a word processor on top of it. We can build a thousand word processors on top of it, and if they can all read the same file format, they can all work together. Dropbox’s platform ubiquity is what it’s all about, and that’s why Google (and Apple) can’t copy it.
Lead photo: AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.com
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Google Won’t Pause New Privacy Policy – Should They Have To?
Feb 3rd
Google refuses to bend to EU regulators, who have asked the company to hold off on rolling out their new privacy policy. In the U.S., Google responded to a letter and attended a closed-door privacy briefing with members of Congress.
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Why Petitions Won’t Change Apple’s Labor Practices Anytime Soon
Feb 1st
Not even 24 hours after Apple reported its jaw-dropping Q1 financial results, the company found itself as the target of some relentless investigative journalism by the New York Times. In particular, as part of an ongoing series about Apple, the Times published a detailed investigation of some of the tech giant’s biggest overseas suppliers, ugly labor abuses and all.
From deadly plant explosions and poisonous screen-cleaning chemicals to unsafe working conditions and long hours, the report was anything but forgiving. In response, there is a small but growing chorus of consumers asking Apple to do more about these issues. A petition demanding a more ethically-built iPhone 5 and other products is said to have amassed 40,000 signatories in its first 24 hours.
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Apple has already made some efforts to improve labor practices among its suppliers, something the Times article acknowledges. It has thoroughly audited its suppliers, in many cases pressuring them to change more egregious practices. This year, the company even published a list of its suppliers for the first time, in an effort to be more transparent. Still, as the Times report illustrates, many abuses persist.
The company, like others that make consumer electronics, remains in an awkward position as its quest to meet growing demand clashes with the ethical concerns that naturally arise when the manufacturing is done in countries that lack the U.S.’s labor laws. Apple has stated that achieving the level of efficiency they now boast simply wouldn’t be possible in the United States, where manufacturing has waned, labor is costly and regulations too strict to allow for lightning speed turnaround on last-minute changes. To stay competitive, it needs to keep its operations in places like China.
E-Signatures vs. Wallets: Which Votes Count More?
Forty thousand signatures may sound like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to 37 million. That’s how many iPhones Apple sold in its last quarter, in addition to more than 15 million iPads. The pressure from consumer and human rights groups may well ramp up in the coming weeks and months, but for the time being the number of people voicing their concern is only .07% of the number that bought iPads and iPhones in the last quarter. That’s not counting iPods and Macs.
To make a substantial impact, there would need to be an actual boycott of Apple products widespread enough to make a noticeable dent in their sales numbers. Some may decline to buy the iPhone 5, iPad 3 or iTV in protest, but probably not enough to make a difference.
Alternatively, the issue would need to turn into a much bigger PR problem for Apple, leading consumers to think twice or forcing the company to preempt an exodus by pressuring suppliers to shape up.
This isn’t to suggest that a concerted enough Web-fueled protest couldn’t generate the pressure required to encourage change. We saw it happen in more ways than one with the SOPA and PIPA debate. Still, this is Apple we’re talking about. Rather than asking citizens to phone their representatives, such a protest would be asking millions to break their addiction to some of the most popular consumer electronics products of all time. These are devices that have woven themselves deeply into our day-to-day lives.
If people were to flee Apple, where would they go? To one of Apple’s competitors? They’re not exactly innocent either.
What do you think? Are labor rights issues enough to cause you to reconsider buying devices like smartphones and tablets? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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