links for 2009-06-05

"The Library Board on Tuesday night unanimously rejected efforts by a local citizen group to restrict access of young adults to books depicting sex among teenagers or those describing teenage homosexual relationships." Good to hear.

"Sean Hannity edited a clip of President Obama's speech in Cairo to claim that Obama "decided to give 9-11 sympathizers a voice on the world stage." In fact, the context of Obama's words makes clear that Obama was condemning those who would "justify the events of 9-11." Sean Hannity making up headlines for his benefit.

"After months of uncertainty about Steve Jobs's health, the Apple Inc. chief executive appears on track to return from medical leave this month, said people familiar with Apple." Good for both him and Apple.

How much business can one store generate from Twitter?

"France's unemployment rate has risen to a two-year high as it continues to be hit by the global recession." Oh France.

StackOverflow has a dump of all the data they generate, play around with it.

"Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that on CNN, "[o]nly Anderson Cooper at 10 o'clock covered the story" of the slaying of Army recruiter Pvt. William Long. In fact, in addition to the coverage on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN covered Long's shooting on 15 shows from June 1 through June 3."

"A deep sea treasure-hunting company has been ordered by a US judge to hand over half a million gold and silver coins to the government of Spain." I found this story interesting when it first popped up, today not so much.

"Debris recovered from the Atlantic by Brazilian search teams does not come from a lost Air France jet, a Brazilian air force official has said."

"A federal appeals court on Wednesday stayed a Texas court’s order that would have forced the satellite pay-TV provider Dish Network and its set-top box division EchoStar to disable millions of digital video recorders that infringe a patent held by TiVo." And the story keeps going.

"Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball franchise is suing Twitter claiming that someone is pretending to be him on the site. Of course, he could have just asked the service to take that fake account down — something which it does fairly regularly — but instead, the suit filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco seeks “unspecified damages.” Twitter has since taken down the fake account." Stupid people, stupid lawsuits.

Two big reasons, first not allowed to hold an audience captive to your religious texts and second the book is far more likely to the parent's vision for what should the child's favorite not what it is.

"Angelo Mozilo, former boss of Countrywide Financial, has been charged with civil fraud and insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is the highest profile executive to face charges relating to the US sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007." Anybody else going down for this?

"Page Speed is a tool we've been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages — it's a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug." Thanks Google.

"ICANN will work with the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and VeriSign on the goal of an operationally Signed Root Zone as soon as feasible in 2009." Yes.

"Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system." Pretty cool.

"Twenty years after Chinese troops shot their way into the center of Beijing, killing hundreds of people and wounding many more, Mr. Chen provided a rare window into the military crackdown that re-established the Communist Party’s supremacy after six weeks of mass unrest and then, for most Chinese, disappeared in an official whitewash." Interesting read.

Sun Research lab on the changes we have to make in how we think about a problem when programming in parallel.

"I'm not arguing for carte blanche craziness with your brand. American Express can do travelers checks and credit cards and could have done PayPal… but no, they probably shouldn't launch a line of whiskey any time soon. I am, however, arguing that once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow." Indeed.

"IT security is about trust. You have to trust your CPU manufacturer, your hardware, operating system and software vendors — and your ISP. Any one of these can undermine your security: crash your systems, corrupt data, allow an attacker to get access to systems. We've spent decades dealing with worms and rootkits that target software vulnerabilities. We've worried about infected chips. But in the end, we have no choice but to blindly trust the security of the IT providers we use." Bruce Schneier on some of the drawbacks of cloud-computing.

"The representatives of 18 religious orders named in the Ryan report into abuse have said they will pay victims further substantial compensation. The orders met the Irish Prime Minister, Brian Cowen, on Thursday. They had been told they would have to increase their contribution to a compensation fund of over 1.3bn euros. The Ryan report revealed a catalogue of abuse stretching back decades at institutions the Roman Catholic orders had run on behalf of the Irish state." Wow.

"Project Natal is the vision of gaming that's danced through people's heads for decades—gaming without the abstraction of controllers, using your body and natural movements—which came more sharply into focus when Nintendo announced the Wii a few years ago. I haven't been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft's keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that'll happen soon enough." That's impressive.

"A recruiter who left Google last year says that the company had maintained a "do not touch" list of companies including Genentech and Yahoo, whose employees were not to be wooed to the Internet search giant. That revelation could be significant in light of this week's disclosure that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent."

"Mark Rasch, a former cyber crime prosecutor for the Justice Department and a principal at the Arlington, Va., based Internet Law Group, said the FTC's authority gives it the power to shut down companies that appear to be engaged in unfair and deceptive practices, whereas criminal law enforcement agencies have a much higher standard for proving wrongdoing in order to convince a court to shut down an ISP." This is going to be an interesting story.

It's looks like something Apple would have created.

W3C agrees we need a sarcasm tag.

"A senior Cuban official, Ricardo Alarcon, has welcomed a decision by the Organisation of American States to lift the 1962 ban on Cuban membership. Mr Alarcon, the Speaker of the Cuban parliament, said it was a major victory – but added it did not mean Cuba actually wanted to re-join."

"Venezuela is preparing to nationalise petrochemical projects as part of President Hugo Chavez's campaign to limit the private sector."

A public tracker devoted to legal uses of BitTorrent.