Facebook may be denying any wrongdoing, but a California judge is disagreeing with the social networks' disagreement to the tune of a $9.5 million dollar settlement today.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the settlement comes in response to a class-action lawsuit over Facebook's Beacon program that published what users were buying.

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The decision allocates $6 million of the settlement to a "digital trust fund" that will go to organizations that study online privacy, says the Times article. The Times explains the bit of controversy hovering around this final decision:

While some people are saying that the settlement is unfair in a few ways, Justin Brookman, a senior resident fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, seemed to disagree. The general contention has been that Facebook will have one seat on the three-member board for the "digital trust fund" and that it was already required to pay money out to promote online privacy, as our own Sarah Perez discussed when the settlement was first announced last October.

Brookman said that today's decision is "a really good settlement for consumers", explaining that "there are really very few settlements that come up with that type of monetary figure."

He also contended that, while Facebook will have a seat on the board, it will be a minority member, as a majority vote requires two out of the three parties to agree. He said that the other two members, Hoofnagle and Magid, were both good choices who will act in the public's interest.

"We have a lot of confidence they'll make wise awards of the money," he said. "They both criticized Facebook when Beacon came out."

According to the Times, however, this may not be the end of the appeal process.

Brookman noted, however, that a settlement like this for privacy issues was relatively unprecedented.

Barnes & Noble's Nook ebook reader will further expand its capability with the “More in Store” program which enables current Nook owners to access new exclusive content from bestsellers as well as budding authors, apart from special offerings/savings and weekly bestseller and new release lists. All you need to do is head to a Barnes & Noble store, take advantage of the free in-store Wi-Fi service and tap the Nook’s “Shop” button to explore exclusive content from authors including Mitch Albom, Alexander McCall Smith, and Rebecca Skloot. If you're a Nook owner, have you given it a go yet?

Permalink: More in Store program for the Nook from Barnes & Noble from Ubergizmo | RSS Sponsor: Win a Fellowes Microshred Paper Shredder!

Today’s the day the Google announces this year’s participant organizations in the Google Summer of Code. If you’re not tied down to a job this summer we hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity to learn by doing and contribute code to a great open source project all at the same time. Note: We’re still waiting for the list to be published but we assure you, today’s the day. Perhaps there was too much of St. Patty’s influence last night resulting in a late arrival this morning.

A lot of our favorite software has benefited from GSoC in the past. XBMC has participated before, as well as WordPress, Asterisk, MySQL, Bluez, Natural User Interface Group, and many more.

Student applications are accepted between March 29th and April 9th. If you’re accepted in the program and excel at your work with passing grades at mid-term and final project dates, you’ll see your pockets grow by $5000. Get out there and put your mad coding skills to good use while you have the chance.

webcamXP is a powerful webcam utility that allows you to share your webcam with everyone without having to set a web server on your computer. The web server is integrated to the software and needs only a few configuration parameters such as server port and local directory.

This is a brand new project (aka wLite) that will replace webcamXP 2008. The interface is much simpler to use for nearly the same features. It targets Vista OS but works fine on XP and 2003 Server and doesn't require administrator rights. A service version should be available shortly and the CPU requirements should not be as high as webcamXP 2007/2008 and can be installed on older computers. It also includes the IP Camera DirectShow filter and webcamXP Mobile for PocketPC.

Note: This program is free for private use. The Private and Pro versions are available for a fee.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

James White

Filed under: Performance, UK

Gallery: McLaren MP4-12C

Continue reading McLaren Automotive officially launches itself and MP4-12C supercar [w/video]

McLaren Automotive officially launches itself and MP4-12C supercar [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Security, Social Software

• It has an attachment: big, reputable sites like Facebook never send out emails with attachments -- especially not on password or account alerts
• It's addressed to "user of facebook": Facebook knows your real name, and they use it when they email you.
• The tone is too casual: an actual "safety alert" from Facebook would be written in a much stronger tone.
• It's too short: warnings from popular sites tend to be wordy. Bad guys, on the other hand, are usually lazy and won't bother to write a lengthy message.
• "facebook" isn't capitalized: that's a stylistic gaffe you'd never see on an official Facebook message.
• Facebook doesn't email new passwords: when you do a reset, for example, they'll send a random code to your inbox and a link to a form where you can create a new password.

Facebook users hit by password-stealing attack: here's how to stay safe! originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

DARPA sets sights on cameras that understand originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Mammals, birds and fish living in the High Arctic experienced an average 26 percent drop in their populations between 1970 and 2004 due to the loss of sea ice, according to a new report from The Arctic Species Trend Index, "Tracking Trends in Arctic Wildlife ."

The 2010 report, commissioned and coordinated by the Whitehorse, Yukon–based Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP), was presented Wednesday at the State of the Arctic Conference in Miami. It covers 965 populations of 365 species, representing 35 percent of all known vertebrate species found in the Arctic.

Last week I had an urgent support call to attend to as an e-commerce site I'd developed for a customer had stopped taking payments. You can imagine I jumped on to it pretty sharpish.

The problem soon became apparent - the payment-processing terminal wasn't running. The server had been re-booted and, although Domino re-started as a Service, as expected, the payment terminal didn't. This is because I (stupidly) had put a shortcut to the program in the "All Users" Startup Folder and assumed it would load if ever the machine re-started for any reason.

It turns out programs in the Startup folder only launch if a user logs in. In this case nobody did and so they never launched. Seems so obvious. What was I thinking!

As a quick fix I had them log in to Windows. I then went about finding a way to have the terminal launch without them needing to log in.

It turns out it's not as easy as you might imagine to run a program when Windows starts but before a user logs in. The only solution I found was to create your very own Service.

The process of creating your own service to run a batch file is documented in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

However, it only allows you to run one BAT file and it has to be called AutoExNT.bat. Whereas, in my case I wanted to run two different BAT files. One for each payment terminal (one live and one for testing). It turns out you can do this by calling the two (or more I guess) batch files directly from inside the AutoExNT.bat file.

Here's what my AutoExNT.bat file looks like:

The first line tells the existing command prompt to launch a new instance and load the first batch file in it. The second line then goes on to run the other batch file. The result being two command prompts running the code in the relevant batch file. Et voila.

Don't forget to install the Service with the /interactive flag set to On if you want to see the prompts yourself when you log in. Oh, and to check the Service is set to Automatic.

April 2010: The Perfect Pairings Menu Campaign brings together 50 of Los Angeles’ most talked about chefs and restaurants to raise funds for the nation's largest Meals on Wheels program. Throughout the month, participating restaurants will feature delicious food + beverage pairings on their menus tagged with the Perfect Pairings fork-and-bottle logo. When these exceptional items are ordered, a portion of proceeds is directly donated to Los Angeles' St. Vincent Meals on Wheels. (PRWeb Mar 18, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/perfectpairings/losangeles2010/prweb3715004.htm

Silicon Valley has long been heralded as the Mecca for startups, but it isn’t the only city in California to give rise to promising tech companies. Los Angeles has a growing startup community, and is home to startups like DocStoc and a few much larger businesses, like MySpace and CitySearch. One program looking to help foster  that community is Launchpad LA, which has just opened applications for the second round of its mentorship program.

The program was created by Mark Suster of GRP Partners, who previously founded BuildOnline (acquired by SWORD Group) and later Koral (acquired by Salesforce, where he became VP Product Management).  The criteria for interested companies: startups have raised more than $1 million (or institutional venture capital), and are willing to move to Los Angeles, where the program is based.

As with incubator programs like Y Combinator and Techstars, Launchpad LA invites VCs and other mentors from the area to help mentor participating companies.  But unlike those programs, it doesn’t directly invest in the companies — it’s purely for mentorship. That said, many VCs and angel investors in the Los Angeles area have some involvement, so it has played a role in those companies getting funding down the road.

Mentors for the last program included Mike Jones, who is now co-President of MySpace, DocStoc’s Jason Nazar, and Adam Bain of Fox Media Interactive. The last program included 13 companies, including Mobile Roadie,  Movoxx , and GumGum.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has announced that the US Government has ended funding for a controversial "virtual fence" along the US-Mexico border.

The program, called SBInet, will have $50 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that was allocated to it withdrawn in favor of investment in other, immediately available technology for the purposes of security along the border. The program will also have all further funding immediately frozen; as a result, all work will halt on the project beyond two small test projects in Arizona. Officially, the move is in light of a pending reassessment of the program, though it is likely that it signals the end of the five-year project, which has come under mounting criticism based on cost and the time taken to complete the project.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll occasionally hear me talk about “audience atomization overcome.” I’ve been using this phrase to describe something that has changed in our word because of the internet.

The people formerly known as the audience, once connected up to big institutions and centers of power, but not across to one another, have overcome their own atomization, which was a normal condition during the age of mass media. With the rise of social media they are now connected horizontally, peer to peer, at the same time as they connect vertically: to the news, the program, the speaker, the spectacle. Simple example: Tweeting during the Academy Awards. More intricate example: Pet lovers find each other on affinity sites when the major media isn’t attentive to their concerns.

The horizontal flow changes the situation for speakers and producers in any communication setting that retains the trappings of one-to-many. The change is especially dramatic in an arena I know well: the professional conference where I might sit on a panel or attend a presentation. The popularity of the backchannel—years ago it was IRC, today it’s Twitter—has empowered those in the audience to compare notes and pool their dissatisfaction during a performance that misfires. Audience atomization has been definitively overcome, raising the bar and increasing the risk for speakers who walk in unprepared.

Especially at risk are “big name” speakers whose online or offline status is such that they may complacently assume their presence alone completes the assignment and guarantees success. Organizers may be so delighted to have landed the CEO of the hot company or the thought leader in a particular space that they fail to ask for much in the way of new material or a carefully thought-out ideas. This was always a problem at conferences; what’s different is the audience is able to do something about it, and they will savage you on Twitter if you falter.

These facts were clearly in view for me and my colleagues as we prepared for our recent panel at South by Southwest: The future of context. We were acutely aware that the bar had been raised, especially at a conference like SXSW where everyone is wired. When Twitter CEO Evan Williams appeared at South by Southwest for a keynote interview, the answers felt so thin to so many that he had to post this after.

Here are ten things we did in recognition that audience atomization has been overcome. I must say: our plan worked. The Future of Context was the most well-received panel I have ever been on. (A good live blog of it is here, a reaction post here, a sample tweet here. The room—Hilton H, a big one—was full and people were turned away.)

How to avoid getting killed in the backchannel

1. Unfamiliar to them, super familiar to you. First, you need a subject that hasn’t been picked to death at conferences. But it’s got to be something you grok. I wrote my first post on background narratives vs. newsy updates in 2008; I’ve been thinking about it since then. Co-panelist Matt Thompson introduced the phrase “the future of context” in 08, as well. He spent a year on the problem as a fellow at the University of Missouri. In a sense, we had two years prep time.

2. Go for intellectual diversity. We had a mainstream journalist (Matt Thompson of NPR) an academic (me) a software developer and entrepreneur (Tristan Harris of Apture.com) and a tech writer and reporter (Staci Kramer of paidcontent.org.) The youngest panelist was less than half the age of the oldest. We had an African-American and three whites, a woman and three men. People notice.

4. Get serious about advance planning. One conference call (“So Sally…what do you want to talk about?”) is not what I mean by serious. We had five calls over four months. We worked out a beginning, middle and end that made sense to all of us: Frame the problem, drill down on a few specifics, float possible fixes, then go to the crowd.

5. Blog it first. Eight days before the SXSW panel I posted News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at South by Southwest. A few days later Matt Thompson posted The Case for Context: My Opening Statement for SXSW and Tristan Harris came in with Context: The Future of the Web. By blogging it first we could promote the event with something juicier than “come to my panel!” We could use early reactions to hone later presentations. We had three comment threads active before the panel started. Here’s how I curated the discussion my pre-post engendered. This pre-tweet told me to underline a key distinction between informative and informable.

6. Create a dedicated site for the panel. Welcome your crowd to it. See futureofcontext.com, which Matt Thompson pulled together. Anyone can post at it or comment. And it says to the audience: welcome, we set a place for you.

7. The title you pick should be “write once, run anywhere.” (Why that phrase?) Thus: the future of context is simultaneously the name of the SXSW panel, the domain name of the site, the hashtag on twitter and the search term we wanted to claim.

8. Watch the backchannel like a hawk during the event. This chart shows that the hashtagged tweets were coming in at a rate of almost 300 an hour. It’s your moderator’s job to monitor that flow, sense where it’s going and react when necessary by talking directly to the backchannel. This takes someone who can scan posts and type quickly. Staci Kramer did that. After the five phone calls and the three blog posts and the dinner the night before to go over the plan, she already knew what we were going to say, which allowed her to focus on the incoming.

9. Leave at least 40 percent of the time for Q and A. Anything less than that and people start resenting you for hogging the mic. It’s amazing to me how many panels cannot manage this simply feat of timing.

10.Arrange a meet-up directly after for those who want to continue the discussion and interact with the participants face-to-face. This was something I wish we had thought of. (It was suggested to me by Jeremy Zilar of the New York Times, who attended.) That way no one walks away wishing there was more time.

Now if you’re thinking that none of these ideas is particularly original or ingenious— well, I agree. My point is you need a complete approach to avoid getting killed in the backchannel and give demanding conference-goers what they have come to expect.

Of course there’s another alternative: the unconference, where the room is the panel.

InfraRecorder Portable 0.50 Rev 3 has been released. InfraRecorder Portable is the popular InfraRecorder CD/DVD burning program packaged as a portable app, so you can do your disk burning on the go. It has all the same great features of InfraRecorder including the creation of custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and recording them to physical discs as well as disc images. This new release fixes an issue in InfraRecorder itself which hides desktop icons on Windows 7. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

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GameStop still evaluating customer 'loyalty opportunity' program originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

GameStop still evaluating customer 'loyalty opportunity' program originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

DVDStyler Portable 1.8.0.2 has been released. DVDStyler Portable is the popular DVDStyler program packaged with a PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your DVD creation tool settings with you. This release updates DVDStyler to the latest version. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

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The NYTCo’s local content efforts are getting a quick boost from hyperlocal newswire Fwix. In a sense, the deal with Fwix can buttress the NYTimes.com’s New York metro area blogs program, The Local, which it began last year. The deal enables the distribution of Fwix’s technology and hyperlocal content across any of NYT’s Regional Media Group properties, as well as other properties such as Boston.com and NYTimes.com. For now, the deal will center on the various small properties belonging to the NYTCo (NYSE: NYT), not the NYTimes.com itself—at least not right away, at least. The first NYTCo paper to take advantage of Fwix’s newswire is the Press-Democrat in Santa Rosa, Ca.

The NYTCo’s local content efforts are getting a quick boost from hyperlocal newswire Fwix. In a sense, the deal with Fwix can buttress the NYTimes.com’s New York metro area blogs program, The Local, which it began last year. The deal enables the distribution of Fwix’s technology and hyperlocal content across any of NYT’s Regional Media Group properties, as well as other properties such as Boston.com and NYTimes.com. For now, the deal will center on the various small properties belonging to the NYTCo (NYSE: NYT), not the NYTimes.com itself—at least not right away, at least. The first NYTCo paper to take advantage of Fwix’s newswire is the Press-Democrat in Santa Rosa, Ca.

Panda Security is reporting a second incident of malware on Vodafone's HTC Magic, a Google Android smart phone. it provide a clear example for how smartphones are prime targets to become botnets once connected to a user's personal computer.

The incidents provide real-world examples of how companies can inadvertently spread malware. It also raises questions about the quality assurance testing done by manufacturers and the carriers.

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After the first discovery earlier this month, Vodafone said it was an isolated incident. But two days later the company announced the HTC Magic would be discontinued. Vodafone also deleted questions about the issue from its forums.

A Panda employee discovered the "Mariposa," virus after connecting it via USB her PC. Her Panda Cloud Anti-Virus software detected the malicious code, revealing that the smart phone was infected and spreading the virus to the PC.

Mariposa is a program that turns infected machines into botnets. it has infected more than 13 million computers, stealing credit card and bank log-in information.

In the second incident, an IT security expert who had bought the phone learned about the virus discovery. He decided to test his phone, using AVG anti-virus protection. Sure enough, his device also showed it had malware on it.

According to Panda Security:

The HTC Magic has historically been sold in Europe.

Filed under: Car Buying, Coupe, Performance, Japan, Lexus

Gallery: First Drive: 2011 Lexus LFA

Continue reading Lease the Lexus LFA for $12,400 per month, $298,000 due at signing

Lease the Lexus LFA for $12,400 per month, $298,000 due at signing originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like Mercurial and Git.

In that podcast, I said, “To me, the fact that they make branching and merging easier just means that your coworkers are more likely to branch and merge, and you’re more likely to be confused.”

This is what Taco looks like nowWell, you know, that podcast is not prepared carefully in advance; it’s just a couple of people shooting the breeze. So what usually happens is that we says things that are, to use the technical term, wrong. Usually they are wrong either in details or in spirit, or in details and in spirit, but this time, I was just plain wrong. Like strawberry pizza. Or jalapeño bagels. WRONG.

Long before this podcast occurred, my team had switched to Mercurial, and the switch really confused me, so I hired someone to check in code for me (just kidding). I did struggle along for a while by memorizing a few key commands, imagining that they were working just like Subversion, but when something didn’t go the way it would have with Subversion, I got confused, and would pretty much just have to run down the hall to get Benjamin or Jacob to help.

And then my team said, hey you know what? This Mercurial bug-juice is really amazing, we want to actually make a code review product that works with it, and, and, what’s more, we think that there’s a big market providing commercial support and hosting for it (Mercurial itself is freely available under GPL, but a lot of corporations want some kind of support before they’ll use something).

And I thought, what do I know? But as you know I don’t really make the decisions around here, because “management is a support function,” so they took all the interns, all six of them, and set off to build a product around Mercurial.

I decided I better figure out what the heck is going on with this “distributed version control” stuff before somebody asks me a question about the products that my company allegedly sells, and I don’t have an answer, and somebody in the blogo-“sphere” writes another article about me junking the sharp.

And I studied, and studied, and finally figured something out. Which I want to share with you.

With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part.

The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions.

That’s a very zen-like thing to say, I know. Traditional version control thinks: OK, I have version 1. And now I have version 2. And now I have version 3.

And distributed version control thinks, I had nothing. And then I got these changes. And then I got these other changes.

It’s a different Program Model, so the user model has to change.

In Subversion, you might think, “bring my version up to date with the main version” or “go back to the previous version.”

In Mercurial, you think, “get me Jacob’s change set” or “let’s just forget that change set.”

If you come at Mercurial with a Subversion mindset, things will almost work, but when they don’t, you’ll be confused, unhappy, and unsuccessful, and you’ll hate Mercurial.

Whereas if you free your mind and reimagine version control, and grok the zen of the difference between thinking about managing the versions vs. thinking about managing the changes, you’ll become enlightened and happy and realize that this is the way version control was meant to work.

I know, it’s strange... since 1972 everyone was thinking that we were manipulating versions, but, it turned out, surprisingly, that thinking about the changes themselves as first class solved a very important problem: the problem of merging branched code.

And here is the most important point, indeed, the most important thing that we’ve learned about developer productivity in a decade. It’s so important that it merits a place as the very last opinion piece that I write, so if you only remember one thing, remember this:

When you manage changes instead of managing versions, merging works better, and therefore, you can branch any time your organizational goals require it, because merging back will be a piece of cake.

I can’t tell you how many Subversion users have told me the following story: “We tried to branch our code, and that worked fine. But when it came time to merge back, it was a complete nightmare and we had to practically reapply every change by hand, and we swore never again and we developed a new way of developing software using if statements instead of branches.”

Sometimes they’re even kind of proud of this new, single-trunk invention of theirs. As if it’s a virtue to work around the fact that your version control tool is not doing what it’s meant to do.

With distributed version control, merges are easy and work fine. So you can actually have a stable branch and a development branch, or create long-lived branches for your QA team where they test things before deployment, or you can create short-lived branches to try out new ideas and see how they work.

This is too important to miss out on. This is possibly the biggest advance in software development technology in the ten years I’ve been writing articles here.

Or, to put it another way, I’d go back to C++ before I gave up on Mercurial.

If you are using Subversion, stop it. Just stop. Subversion = Leeches. Mercurial and Git = Antibiotics. We have better technology now.

Because so many people dive into Mercurial without fully understanding the new program model, which can leave them thinking that it’s broken and malicious, I wrote a Mercurial tutorial, HgInit.

Today, when people ask me about that podcast where I dissed DVCS, I tell them that it was just a very carefully planned fake-out of my long time friend and competitor Eric Sink, who makes a non-distributed version control system. Like that time he started selling bug-tracking software, and, to punish him, we sent him a very expensive Fog Creek backpack with a fake form letter that made it look like we were doing so well that expensive backpacks were the standard Christmas gift we were sending every FogBugz customer.

I seem to have run out the clock on this site. It has been an extreme honor to have you reading my essays over the last ten years. I couldn’t ask for a greater group of readers. Whether you’re one of the hundreds of people who volunteered their time to translate articles into over 40 languages, or the 22,894 people who has taken the time to send me an email, or the 50,838 people who subscribed to the email newsletter, or the 2,262,348 people per year who visited the website and read some of the 1067 articles I’ve written, I sincerely thank you for your attention.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.