Archive for the ‘CNET’ Category
MySpace wins $234 million antispam judgment | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 14, 2008
- In: $234 | antispam | CNET | judgment | million | MySpace | News.com | Tech news blog | wins
- Leave a Comment
The social-networking site MySpace has won a $234 million antispam judgment, according to the Associated Press.
On the losing side of the award–believed to be the largest ever under the 2003 Can-Spam Act–were defendants Walter Rines and Sanford Wallace, the so-called spam king. MySpace won the case against Wallace after he failed numerous times to turn over documents or even to show up for court.
“MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam told the AP. “We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.”
In March of last year, MySpace filed suit against Wallace alleging he launched a phishing scam to fraudulently access MySpace profiles. Wallace was also accused of spamming thousands of MySpace users with unwanted advertisements and luring them to his Web sites.
MySpace said Wallace and Rines sent 735,925 messages to MySpace members. Under Can-Spam, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted “willfully and knowingly,” according to the report.
He has been sued by the Federal Trade Commission and companies such as AOL and Concentric Network Corp. In May 2006, Wallace and his company Smartbot.net were ordered by a federal court to turn over $4,089,500.
Google begins blurring faces in Street View | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 14, 2008
- In: - | begins | blurring | CNET | faces | Google | in | News.com | Street View | Tech news blog
- Leave a Comment
Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.
(Credit: Google)
BURLINGAME, Calif.–Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant’s all-seeing digital camera eye.
The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google’s image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.
Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.
Dealing with privacy–both legal requirements and social norms–is hard but necessary, Hanke said.
“It’s a legitimate issue,” he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, “It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out.”
Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’ | The Social – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 10, 2008
- In: 'Facebook Connect' | - | CNET | Facebook | gates | News.com | Open | The | The Social | To | with
- Leave a Comment
This post was updated at 1:56 p.m. PDT.
Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability.
The formal announcement was made through a post on Facebook’s developer blog by senior platform manager Dave Morin, who has been one of the company’s most visible evangelists in the developer community over the past year. Facebook Connect will launch within the next few weeks.
Through Facebook Connect, members will be able to use their Facebook identities across the Web–profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook profile content, for example, could appear on other social sites, and Facebook event listings could theoretically connect with external event and invitation services.
Facebook will handle the authentication process, and while privacy controls have not been made clear, the company has stressed that user security will be a priority. And there’s reason to believe Facebook will be particularly careful: The company already partners with outside services to share data in its Beacon advertising program, and the PR missteps surrounding Beacon’s launch are something that Facebook likely does not want to repeat.
It’s a big move for the site. Until this point, Facebook has had a reputation for keeping its cards close to its chest–even banning the account of popular blogger Robert Scoble when he used a script to export his Facebook contact list to Plaxo. But Facebook has a representative in the Data Portability Workgroup, and executives have said that Facebook has wanted to bring its information outside the site eventually.
Memo to Jerry Yang: How to make Yahoo great again | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 6, 2008
- In: - | : | Again | CNET | great | How | Jerry Yang | make | Memo | News.com | Tech news blog | To | YAHOO | |
- Leave a Comment
Re: Getting your company back on track
Now that Yahoo appears to be on its own path, it’s time for the company to find in its past what could again make it great.
Contrary to popular opinion, the key to the future isn’t becoming a technological marvel to rival Google. Instead, Yahoo should home in on what it made it special before the dot-com bust: The Yahoooooo! (cowboy twang inserted) of yesteryear.
Yahoo was an Internet media pioneer. The company built or bought every massively popular feature on the Web today–think Broadcast.com (video), Launch (music) and Groups (social networks). It also developed an advertising engine that could deliver on the dream campaign of any marketer with the data to back up that promise. You could argue Yahoo failed to take advantage of many of those assets in recent years, but the shortcomings haven’t been in vision, they’ve been in execution.
So how does Yahoo move forward? It needs to rebrand itself an Internet media company, quit chasing Google on Web search, and get damn good at selling brand advertising to Madison Avenue once again. And it has to get it done before Google figures out how to turn the creative ad process over to robots. Does technology play a role in that future? Of course. But the emphasis should be on technology that makes ad sales possible, not ad sales that make the technology possible.
“Yahoo was basically built for brand advertisers before brand advertisers came online in a big way. Now that they have come online, Yahoo has to have better technology to allow for better targeting and scale,” said Rishad Tobaccowalo, CEO of the futures-consulting company Denuo, a unit of advertising agency holding company Publicis.
Yahoo certainly has been selling technology, but not in the way Tobaccowalo is talking about. Earlier this year, executives started beating the drum about getting back to the technology roots with new products like advanced e-mail, mobile-search technology, and a universal log-on for Yahoo members across services like Flickr, Mail and Address Book.
Those initiatives are worthwhile, but Yahoo should be selling a bigger story to Madison Avenue, particularly as Google tries to build a division for selling brand advertising alongside search. Sure, Yahoo has advertising platforms like Panama, but the company still isn’t reaping the full value of its media network. Quite simply, it isn’t showing the swagger of its younger years among advertisers. (Note: avoid the cockiness that turned some advertisers off in the early years.)
Valleywag - valleywag.wordpress.com 
Recent Comments