No news is good news?

A few days ago Rupert Murdoch (of News Corp) announced to Sky News Australia, that he was going to remove all of their news content from search engines (including Google News). News Corp owns a number of newspapers (notably the Wall Street Journal) and is presumably frustrated with giving away its valuable news content for free. I understand the challenge that newspaper publishers face in the Internet age, but there are (at least) two problems with this strategy: News Corp doesn’t hold a monopoly on news coverage, and people don’t like to pay for content at all.

You can find the story in numerous places online. Here’s a short story from the BBC (a news organization!) and a more humorous account from Wired.

Are you addicted…

…to the Internet? BoingBoing has an interesting post about Internet addiction – a condition that has yet to be well-defined. Before you snicker (as I did), recognize that 20% of people who check themselves into an addiction rehab/recovery program are there for Internet addiction (and some psychologists have been treating it since 1994). Maybe you’re addicted too. Dr. Kimberly Young has put together a quiz at netaddiction.com – of course, you’ll have to hop on the Internet to do the quiz.

Read more from BoingBoing.

Men and women *are* different

Here’s an amusing story reported by the BBC about how men and women take different approaches to technology. According to the company Gadget Helpline (a tech help service in the UK), 64% of male callers had not read the instructions first (compared to 24% of female callers). Women spend 32% longer on the phone with the help staff than the men, but the staff actually preferred talking to women. Here’s my favourite part of the article: “In general terms men treat technology as something to be understood and conquered while women are more motivated by appliances that benefit them.”

Read more on the story from the BBC.

Change of Addresses

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently voted to allow for non-Latin characters to be used in top level domain names (.com, .jp, .cn, etc.). Previous to this announcement Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other non-Latin characters could be used before the ‘dot,’ but the URL always ended with letters from the Latin alphabet. Now, an entire URL can be written in non-Latin characters. The hope is that this will make the Internet more accessible to millions of people. Some are concerned that allowing other languages in the domain names will make it harder to fight cyberattacks, but ICANN seems to think such concerns are unwarranted.

For more statistics and opinions you can find the story from the NYT.

Facebook from the Grave

Facebook has recently announced that when people pass away, their profiles can be “memorialized” by friends and family. It’s an interesting concept. What should we do with online information about our loved ones? Facebook has taken some care to remove more sensitive issues (status updates, contact information, suggested friends list, etc.), but I’m not sure that’s a perfect solution. When someone dies–particularly if it’s a tragic situation–people deal with their grief very differently. Certainly, some people will like the fact that they can remember the person via Facebook, while others will not wanted to be reminded of the loss at all. As we migrate more and more of our lives online, questions like these are going to become even more difficult.

Read more from the BBC or from the Facebook blog.

Atlanta mapathon (no it’s not a fundraiser)

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is attempting to make the capital city of Georgia the most digitally mapped city in the world. Their ambitious plan is to map everything from emergency phones to police precincts. The main difference between this project and others (e.g. Google maps) is that the data will be freely available. Developers who want to use the information will not be restricted by Google’s Terms of Use or have to license the content from elsewhere (which costs lots of money). The hope is that free data without restrictions will create entirely new and innovative applications. How are they getting this data? Well, they’ve organized a mapathon. About 200 volunteers will wander around the city with GPS devices locating everything of interest (and potentially some things that aren’t). Geo-nerds unite.

Read more on the story from the BBC.

An interesting ring(tone)

In a rather strange royalty case (at least in my opinion), the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) sued some cell phone carriers in the US over the public performance of ringtones. Their argument went like this: When a cell phone with Lil Wayne’s “Way of Life” ringtone rings in public, it constitutes a public performance of the song and therefore the artists (and the record companies) deserve to be compensated for the work. Yes, you read that right: they’re trying to claim that every time your phone rings in public your cell phone company should be paying few pennies in royalties.

There are a couple of problems with this argument: 1) Cell phone companies can’t distinguish between when a phone rings in public and when it rings in private (or when the ringer is turned off) 2) Ringing phones can only be heard by a small group of people (it’s hardly equivalent to a public concert). Based on these arguments (and some other previous cases), the judge ruled that ringtones were not public performances and, therefore, ASCAP does not deserve extra compensation.

Read the full story from Ars Technica.

Canadian-American (po-TATE-o/po-TAH-toe)

I’m sure you’ve heard how some Americans claim to be Canadians when they’re travelling abroad because Canadians usually have a more favourable reputation than Americans (in some countries anyway) - well now it’s the Canadians doing the impersonating…

The CBC had a story last Friday detailing how an increasing number of Canadians are posing as Americans online to get services and content that aren’t currently available here. Canadians who want an Amazon Kindle, for example, have one shipped to a border town in the U.S. and then drive across the border to pick it up. When it comes to new products Canada is always behind because it is such a small market and, not surprisingly, Canadians don’t like that.

Read more on the story from CBC.

Yes, ICANN

The BBC is reporting that the US government will relinquish some (not all) of its control over how the Internet is run. Currently, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the not-for-profit organization responsible for the top-level domain name system (among other things). They make decisions related to domains like .com, .ca, .uk, etc. ICANN was established in 1998 and has been under the oversight of the US Commerce department ever since.

Even though the Internet is essentially an American invention developed with government funding (through the Department of Defense), it has grown to the point where more nations want some say in how it’s run. While the US won’t back out completely (which makes complete sense to me), they are allowing other panels and committees to review ICANN’s work.

In other words, instead of having just one country looking after ICANN, we’ll have multiple committees, panels and representatives – I’m not sure if this is good or bad.

Read more on the story from the BBC.

Social (gossip) networks and patient confidentiality

Recently the Journal of the American Medical Association found that some doctors in training are posting unprofessional content online. Sure, there were the usual examples of drunkenness, drug use and other debauchery, but most concerning is that some people were posting revealing details about their patients online. In a couple of cases, there was enough clinical information posted to potentially identify the patient. So much for doctor-patient privilege.

Let this be a lesson to you: be careful what you tweet, Facebook, or blog about – it might hurt your professional aspirations.

Read more from the BBC.