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Business
The US Supreme Court has ruled (.pdf; 258KB) that corporations can use contracts that include a clause forbidding customers from forming groups for class-action lawsuits and group arbitration. In order to avoid a class action, all a business need do is include a clause requiring disputes to be settled only through arbitration and that only singular claims can be brought. Brian T. Fitzpatrick, a Vanderbilt law professor, told Adam Liptak, writing for the New York Times, “The decision basically lets companies escape class actions, so long as they do so by means of arbitration agreements.” The underlying case, between a California couple and AT&T relied on a 2005 California Supreme Court ruling that barred such contract waivers as unconscionable. The Supremes’ decision was 5-4 with the usual suspects (Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito) in the majority.
Square — the credit card processing service for everyman with an iOS device — has received a substantial investment from Visa and has announced that it would add a new level of encryption to its card reader. VeriFone, who is justifiably fearful of Square’s distribution of card readers for iPhones and iPads at no charge and rock-bottom credit card processing rates, was quick to issue a statement indicating that the Visa investment would have never taken place without Square’s additional encryption, and that was its intent all along. That’s patently false. While Square’s additional encryption complies with Visa’s best practices, Tricia Duryee, writing for the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital, reports there’s no evidence it was any sort of requirement.
Intellectual property
Apparently you, too, can take down a corporate Facebook presence with nothing more than a fake email address. Just fill out Facebook’s form accusing your prey of misappropriating your copyrighted work on its Facebook presence. Facebook will take the alleged infringing work down first, under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and ask questions, maybe, later. That’s what happened to Ars Technica who, as an imprint of Conde Nast, has lots of friends in lots of high places. Sara Perez, writing for ReadWriteWeb, reports it has happened to several corporate Facebook presences. Oh, you’re still on Facebook?
Internet
Storify launched the public beta of its web-based curation service this week. The service allows anyone to aggregate and filter news flowing from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media services to create a story stream. National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin is probably the leading practitioner of this curation of a story stream. He sits in a Washington, DC office filtering the flood of Twitter streams of people on the ground at the uprisings in the mideast.
A short while ago I encrypted and closed our previously wide open wireless network. By doing so, I contributed to what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is calling a tragedy of the commons. Unsecured wireless networks were once plentiful; now they’re getting harder and harder to find. EFF cites an Associated Press story a Buffalo, NY man’s door was broken down and law enforcement assault rifles were trained on him while he lay on his living room floor. He’d installed a new wireless router and couldn’t figure out how to set a password. Something similar happened to a Sarasota, FL man last year. I locked down our wireless network because our network was getting so congested I couldn’t get work done. EFF is calling for a political and technological “Open Wireless Movement” to restore this particular piece of the commons. “Part of the task will simply be reminding people that opening their WiFi is the socially responsible thing to do, and explaining that individuals who choose to do so can enjoy the same legal protections against liability as any other internet access provider,” writes Peter Eckersley. Unfettered wireless internet access ought to be ubiquitous by now. There are currently seven wireless routers broadcasting their identity — all of them encrypted — that are reachable from my office (not counting the routers — including mine — that don’t broadcast their names). If each of these unlocked their routers, chances are my network could be unlocked and actually remain usable.
Media
Jeff Jarvis, writing for BuzzMachine, spells out the hard economic lessons for news entities. Jarvis pulls no punches and everyone in media should study his bullet points. He also astutely offers several workable opportunities: Scaling local sales, increasing engagement, infrastructure efficiencies, and collaboration efficiencies, among others.
Jay Rosen has been teaching journalism at New York University for 25 years. He’s also one of the best minds on the subject just now. Rosen has written “What I Think I Know About Journalism” summing up what he’s learned in that time. It boils down to four simple but very deep concepts: The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be; The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere; The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people; Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us. Written with remarkable clarity.
Politics
For the first time in history, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, held a press conference this week. As Andy Kroll and Nick Baumann, writing for Mother Jones, report, the Fed “controls the flow of money in the economy and often acts as a lender of last resort for crumbling banks. Bernanke was scheduled to take 45 minutes of reporters’ questions but not one of the questions posed by Kroll and Baumann were asked (or answered).
Privacy
There continues to be much hand-wringing about data practices and personal privacy in the US. Especially this week with the realization that Apple and Google are using our smartphones to collect location data and Sony’s partial acknowledgement that its PlayStation network had been hacked and user data compromised. The solution has always been quite simple and there’s even an existing model that works quite well. In the European Union, data collected about a person — for any reason — is owned by that person and data collected for a specific purpose can be used only for that specific purpose and nothing else. Simple and effective, but not the best deal for corporations who exist solely to collect information on individuals. This week the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a data-mining case that’s about medical privacy on the surface but has broader ramifications for privacy and informed consent. Vermont passed a law allowing individual doctors to decide whether pharmacies can sell prescription records linking the doctors to the drugs prescribed for marketing. Three corporations challenged the law, on the grounds that it restricted commercial free speech. Natasha Singer, writing for the New York Times, reports that consumer advocates are hanging their hats on the anonymous Big Data compilers in the case. Singer cites American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Christopher Calabrese’s US Senate testimony from last March: “Without government intervention, we may soon find the internet has been transformed from a library and playground to a fishbowl and that we have unwittingly ceded core values of privacy and autonomy.” The US could do worse — much worse — than adopt the EU solution.
Publishing
Possibly figuring that writers actually make up most of the book publishing market, Penguin Group USA is launching Book Country, a website for genre fiction writers in the areas of fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and thriller. Authors will be able to publish their work on the site and receive criticism from other users on “points like character development, pacing, and dialogue,” according to Julie Bosman, writing for the New York Times. This summer, authors will be able to self-publish their work for a fee. “One of the things I remember really clearly from my early editorial experiences was this feeling of guilt,” Molly Barton, director of business development for Penguin and president of Book Country, told Bosman. “I would read submissions and not be able to help the writer because we couldn’t find a place for them on the list that I was acquiring for. And I kept feeling that there was something we could do on the Internet to really help writers help each other.”
In a surprising about-face, AOL’s Patch is asking its editors to recruit 8,000 bloggers to write for free on the various Patch local sites. A Patch spokesperson, told Sam Gustin, writing for Wired, “The benefit of blogging on the Patch platform is reaching the local audience that comes to Patch for the most important professional news and information as well as other local voices through the blogs. It’s for people in our communities who have something to say and want a broader platform from which to say it, where more people will see it.”
Spirituality
Kirti Kalari Gon Tashi Lhundrub monastery in the Sichuan province of China was founded in 1472 by Rongpa Chenakpa, is an exceptionally important site to Tibetan Buddhists, and home to some 2,500 monks. There have been regular and ongoing protests of further Chinese incursion around the monastery and according to a non-bylined piece for Agence-France Presse (AFP), the Chinese have confirmed a crackdown and re-education campaign at the monastery. Chinese officials refused to confirm allegations that two Tibetans were killed in the crackdown. AFP reports, “‘In recent days, a small number of monks in Kirti Monastery in Aba county, Sichuan have disrupted social order and disobeyed Tibetan Buddhist rules,’ foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters. They have ‘disrupted local normal order, defamed the image of Tibetan Buddhism and harmed the feelings of Buddhist followers.'” Hong Lei explained the re-education program was necessary to fulfill China’s “religious freedom” policies and to “strengthen the administration of religious affairs in accordance with the law and maintain normal religious order.”
Sustainability
Monsanto — the company solely responsible for almost every genetically modified crop — will be allowed to conduct its own environmental impact studies as part of a two-year USDA experiment. As Ariel Schwartz, writing for Fast Company, reports, the USDA assesses the environmental impact of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and has been exceptionally lax in its policing duties. In 2005, for example, the USDA allowed Monsanto to release its genetically modified sugar beets without preparing an environmental impact statement. GMO crops are known to cause environmental problems: Pesticide-resistant superweeds, for starters. And GMO cross-pollination makes is difficult for organic growers to stay organic.
Technology
It’s getting more and more difficult to justify the use of Dropbox. First it misrepresented the security measures used to store users files on the service and now it has attempted to kill an open source project. As Dan DeFelippi, writing for Razor Fast, reports, Dropship “allows users to exploit Dropbox’s file hashing scheme to copy files into their account without actually having them.” Dropship saves the hashes of a file in JSON format, allowing anyone to share private files by simply distributing the JSON string. Dropbox contacted the creator of Dropship requesting that the open source program be removed from distribution. Other sites distributing Dropship received similar requests. DeFelippi received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice for the open source project. Dropbox later claimed the takedown notice was a “mistake.” More than ever, this incident points to the pressing need for an open source, decentralized alternative to Dropbox.
Apple responded to allegations about its tracking iOS users in the form of a FAQ. It’s clearly written and addresses the issues. Apple is not, has not, and will not track users. The data is used to provide quicker and more accurate location services. That devices continue to log locations when Location Services is turned off is a bug and will be fixed. Apple is also collecting anonymous traffic data in order to provide a traffic service in the future. Move along; there’s nothing to see here.