Sickening

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One Michigan woman's horrible experience about being racially profiled by some goober passenger on the plane and then having her rights violated by federal agents:

Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we’d all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago. But then armed officers stormed my plane, threw me in handcuffs and locked me up.

How Bad Is News Corp?

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Michael Wolff:

Well-sourced information coming out of the Department of Justice and the FBI suggests a debate is going on that could result in the recently launched investigations of News Corp. falling under the RICO statutes. RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, establishes a way to prosecute the leaders of organizations—and strike at the organizations themselves—for crimes company leaders may not have directly committed, but which were otherwise countenanced by the organization. Any two of a series of crimes that can be proven to have occurred within a 10-year period by members of the organization can establish a pattern of racketeering and result in draconian remedies. In 1990, following the indictment of Michael Milken for insider trading, Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm that employed him, collapsed in the face of a RICO investigation. Among the areas that the FBI is said to be looking at in its investigation of News Corp. are charges that one of its subsidiaries, News America Marketing, illegally hacked the computer system of a competitor, Floorgraphics, and then, using the information it had gleaned, tried to extort it into selling out to News Corp.; allegations that relationships the New York Post has maintained with New York City police officers may have involved exchanges of favors and possibly money for information; and accusations that Fox chief Roger Ailes sought to have an executive in the company, the book publisher Judith Regan, lie to investigators about details of her relationship with New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik in order to protect the political interests of Rudy Giuliani, then a presidential prospect. Well worth the read.

Draconian ISP Copyright Enforcement Coming Soon To Your Computer

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Greg Sandoval writing for CNet:

After years of negotiations, a group of bandwidth providers that includes AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are closer than ever to striking a deal with media and entertainment companies that would call for them to establish new and tougher punishments for customers who refuse to stop using their networks to pirate films, music and other intellectual property, multiple sources told CNET. The details... Participating ISPs are given plenty of leeway to choose how to proceed. They can select from a "menu" of responses outlined in the plan, such as throttling down an accused customer's bandwidth speed or limit their access to the Web. For example, a suspected pirate may be allowed to visit only the top 200 Web sites until they stop illegal file sharing. The subscriber may also be asked to participate in a program that educates them on copyright law and the rights of content creators. And the part that really pisses me off: In addition to the NCTA, the White House was also instrumental in encouraging the parties to reach an agreement, the sources confirmed. President Obama has vowed to step up the fight against piracy and counterfeiting, and his administration has lobbied Congress the past several years to pass new pro-copyright legislation while instructing federal law enforcement to make antipiracy a priority. Not why I voted for you, Mr. President. It's becoming more and more clear to me that both political parties are the enemies of consumers & technology.

Sony Hacked Again: 1 Million+ Accounts Compromised

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The same group became infamous for hittin PBS earlier this week has just announced that they've now hit Sony with a SQL injection which allowed them full access to various Sony databases. LulzSec statement:

Our goal here is not to come across as master hackers, hence what we're about to reveal: SonyPictures.com was owned by a very simple SQL injection, one of the most primitive and common vulnerabilities, as we should all know by now. From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING. Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks? What's worse is that every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it. Rob Beschizza, writing for BoingBoing: Sony traditionally is run as a set of 'silos', independent departments, divisions and joint ventures that have much autonomy from one another. This might be why there are so many different attacks: there is always another Sony silo which runs its own web infrastructure, where hundreds of dollars worth of web development can go down the drain, just like that. Ouch. As I said last week on Twitter, friends don't let friends create user accounts on Sony networks.

Chevy Dealers Selling New Volts to Each Other, Pocketing $7500 Tax Credit

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Jonathon Ramsey, writing for autoblog:

Speaking of dealers, a new story by Mark Modica on the National Legal and Policy Center site suggests that Chevy dealers are selling Volts to one another and claiming the car's $7,500 federal tax rebate for themselves, then selling the cars to private buyers as used sans rebate. According to Modica, a Chicago dealer selling a Volt with 10 miles on the odometer flat-out admitted that it would be seeking the credit for itself: "When I asked if I was eligible for the $7,500 tax credit, I was told that I probably wasn't, since the dealership was applying for the subsidy." Even stranger, a Kia dealer in California was selling a Volt that had just 30 miles on it, and Modica was told that "the Volts offered at that dealership were rental cars with higher mileage on them." Used Volt, great condition! Less than < 30 miles on it! Pre-depreciated for you!

Twitter Declares War on 3rd Party Clients

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Well, it's official. Twitter has declared war on its 3rd party client developers. Ryan Sarver, Platform lead for Twitter posted a message to developers this afternoon outlining Twitter's policy change. Dave Winer reminds us all that he warned us that one day we would wish we had decentralized from Twitter. I thought he was right then, and still do. The problem is it's hard to move the community. MG Siegler, at Techcrunch, writes:

For much of the past year, the Twitter ecosystem has been in a state of flux. Ever since Twitter bought Tweetie and turned it into their own native iPhone app, third-party developers have been wondering where this would leave them. Further moves by Twitter into Android, iPad, Mac, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and other spaces have only compounded some of this fear. So Twitter has taken some time today in their developer forum to talk a bit about the state of the ecosystem and give some guidance. It’s blunt, but necessary. Specifically, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has a fairly lengthy outline of Twitter’s line of thinking with regard to third-party clients and services. And while there’s a little bit of dancing around the topic at first, it quickly gets very clear: third-parties probably shouldn’t be creating straight-up Twitter clients any further. Sarver notes that Twitter views a “consistent user experience” as very important to them. And it’s something they’re going to hold third-party developers to a very high standard to maintain. But they don’t want them to mimic Twitter’s own experience with their native apps in order to do this. They’ve updated the API Terms of Service to reflect all of this. “Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no,” Sarver writes very matter-of-factly. “If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service. We have spoken with the major client applications in the Twitter ecosystem about these needs on an ongoing basis, and will continue to ensure a high bar is maintained,” he continues. Sarver notes that according to Twitter’s own data, some 90 percent of active Twitter users now use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis to access the service. “We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking,” he writes. The biggest third-party client in the space is TweetDeck, which was in the process of being acquired by UberMedia when Twitter suspended their apps a few weeks ago for TOS violations. I’ve reached out to Twitter to see where TweetDeck and UberMedia stand now with the new rules. So where should third-party developers look towards in terms of developing for the ecosystem? Sarver highlights the following areas: * Publisher tools. Companies such as SocialFlow help publishers optimize how they use Twitter, leading to increased user engagement and the production of the right tweet at the right time. * Curation. Mass Relevance and Sulia provide services for large media brands to select, display, and stream the most interesting and relevant tweets for a breaking news story, topic or event. * Realtime data signals. Hundreds of companies use real-time Twitter data as an input into ranking, ad targeting, or other aspects of enhancing their own core products. Klout is an example of a company which has taken this to the next level by using Twitter data to generate reputation scores for individuals. Similarly, Gnip syndicates Twitter data for licensing by third parties who want to use our real-time corpus for numerous applications (everything from hedge funds to ranking scores). * Social CRM, entreprise clients, and brand insights. Companies such as HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6, Seesmic, and Crimson Hexagon help brands, enterprises, and media companies tap into the zeitgeist about their brands on Twitter, and manage relationships with their consumers using Twitter as a medium for interaction. * Value-added content and vertical experiences. Emerging services like Formspring, Foursquare, Instagram, and Quora have built into Twitter by allowing users to share unique and valuable content to their followers, while, in exchange, the services get broader reach, user acquisition, and traffic. Sarver highlights Twitter’s “diverse ecosystem” of more than 750,000 registered apps. But that ecosystem definitely just got altered quite a bit today. I think that Justin Williams, iOS developer of the popular Elements app sums it up nicely: (paraphrased) "Anyone building a product around a platform in which they have no control, should be wary of the platform, especially a platform that is VC funded." My theory? It's all about the Dickbar. Twitter to users, "Here, have a Dickbar!" Users to Twitter, "We don't like the Dickbar! It covers up our timelines!" Twitter to users, "Okay, we made the Dickbar less sucky!" Users to Twitter, "But it's still a Dickbar! Fine then, we'll switch to Twitteriffic, Echofon, Tweetdeck, Hibari, etc". Twitter sees a large amount of people quit using their client. In-your-face trends ad bar plot foiled! Devises new plan... Twitter to developers, "You can't make clients anymore that don't have our 'user experience' (1)". (1): 'User Experience' = Dickbar. Brent Simmons chimes in as well:

Did Twitter just tell client-app developers to stop?

I’m seriously disappointed by this. Not as someone with a Twitter client, but as someone who likes the service and wants my fellow developers to do interesting things. One of the cool things about Twitter is that the service sparked a bunch of UI innovation on the part of some very talented client-app developers. I want to see that continue. But it’s as if they said: no more. Stop. We’ll take over now. Craig Hockenberry also makes the good point that the reason third-party Twitter clients are so important to the Twitter ecosystem is that they innovated when Twitter did not. One question though...did Twitter release this bombshell on the community on a Friday afternoon where they thought that their userbase would be distracted? On the 1st day of SXSW? On the iPad 2 launch day? I can't decide whether I think the existing news stories of the day (earthquake/tsunami, iPad 2, SXSW) will drown out the news or if SXSW will help to amplify it. I'm hoping for amplification. C'mon nerds, gather ye pitchforks and torches.

Justice Department Report Notes Defense Department Sucks At Protecting Whistle Blowers

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As large segments of the US government go ballistic over the Wikileaks issue -- potentially caused by a military whistleblower -- is it any surprise to find out that the government is admitting it sucks at protecting whistleblowers? The Justice Department has put out a report saying that the Defense Department has pretty much failed in its effort to protect whistleblowers in the military. The report also found that the military has also seen nearly double the amount of "retaliations" for whisleblowing as it had in the past.

Of course, what's most interesting about this is that this is the sort of thing that leads to situations like Wikileaks. If the Defense Department can't protect whistleblowers who go through the official process to report problems, those whistleblowers are going to go to third parties... like Wikileaks.