Teen arrested after offering to sell his vote on eBay

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Many people are looking forward to this November’s presidential elections.   Some are looking forward to voting in a new president and ushering in a new era, but others are looking forward to it for other reasons – financial opportunities.   A teen has been arrested and charged after allegedly offering to sell his vote on eBay.

Now that he’s been caught, what’s his defense?   “It was a joke”.

If so, Minnesota prosecutors are apparently not seeing the funny side.   They are charging Max P. Sanders with a rarely used 1893 state law that makes it illegal to buy or sell a vote.   If he is convicted (and I fail to see how he can get off this charge), the maximum penalty is 5 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

The prosecutor’s office said : “There are people that have died for this country for our right to vote, and to take something that lightly, to say, ‘I can be bought.'”

So I guess the moral of this tale is, think twice before listing that “funny” auction on eBay.   You might end up with a cop and a prosecutor at your front door quoting a 115 year old law at you.



Google finally surrenders & posts a privacy link

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Google Privacy Link

After constantly refusing to do what other big websites had already done – post a privacy link to their front page – Google has finally surrendered and done the big move.

No-one knows why they suddenly caved in, but Techcrunch speculates that it was probably government pressure or the fact that the absence of a privacy policy may have been illegal under California law.

Now that the privacy link is finally there, you have to ask yourself why Google was making such a fuss over it in the first place.   It is such a tiny link, it takes up hardly any space at all on the page, and realistically, how many people are actually going to click on it?   Is this tiny little link the cause of all the hoo-hah?

If you do click on it, you’re taken to Google’s “Privacy Center” where there are links to the full privacy policy as well as “privacy practices” for certain products and privacy videos at YouTube.   Quite an extensive and well thought out effort but again, how many people are actually going to take the time to read it all?



Google Must Divulge Video Viewing Habits Of Every YouTube User, Says US Court

Viacom vs GoogleThis is potentially huge. Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, has been involved in a legal battle with YouTube (and now Google) over what Viacom alleges is massive copyright infringement of their property. Viacom claims to have identified 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes.

Now, a US court has told Google that it must hand over the a detailed log – some 12 terabytes of data – which contains the log-in ID of all users, as well as their IP address and information on all the video clips they have ever watched. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, has called the ruling “a set-back to privacy rights.”

And it is. I mean, there’s nothing really explicit or illegal on YouTube (I think), but the idea that a corporation has the right to snoop around the viewing habits of everybody, just because 160,000 clips, out of an estimated 1.5 billion YouTube video clips, may or may not contain copyright material, is pretty scandalous.

It’s not just Viacom, either; the UK’s Premier League is also filing a lawsuit against Google claiming that YouTube has been used to show football highlights. I mean, really – highlights? What’s the big deal?

YouTube has responded by initialising new filtering tools to prevent copyright materials being uploaded to their site. Last time I looked, they didn’t appear to be working too well.

A spokesman for the EFF said, “The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”

How long until YouTube ‘does a Napster’, and becomes a shallow, big business-friendly version of itself (i.e., with no users), or disappears altogether? All it’s going to take is a Viacom victory – or whoever else decides to go to bat against Google. Until then, be careful what you watch – do you really want Viacom to know that you’ve seen the laughing baby ten thousand times?

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How HDTVs will destroy mankind

Ok, I have to admit I went a little over the top there with that headline. Nonetheless, it seems that LCD TVs could soon become an environmental hazard when people start sending them to the landfills to replace them with shiny new models.

For now, they’re not really dangerous, but eventually, when people start dumping them in their garbage bins, a deadly gas named Nitrogen Trifluoride (NF3) contained in LCD panels will start dissipating in the environment. NF3 is apparently 17,200 worse than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. And on top of this, it seems that the gas is highly harmful to the liver and kidneys if inhaled. Better be careful next time you decide to smash that LCD display while inside your house.

[Via CrunchGear]

Stanford’s STARMAC: The surveillance drones of tomorrow?

Stanford’s STARMAC, short for Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control, is probably one of the coolest remote-control helicopters we’ve ever seen.

This is not a toy, remote-driven helicopter. The primary goal of the STARMAC project is to test and develop algorithms that will be implemented in future autonomous flying devices, such as the little flying cameras you see everywhere in Half-Life 2.

< TinFoilHatMode >Paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists will soon want to take up permanent residence in their underground lairs, because in a few years, individual privacy will be a thing of the past. These robots will be everywhere, looking at you and recording your every move, and the thing is, your probably even won’t notice because of new cloaking technologies that are being developed right now!< /TinFoilHatMode > Video after the jump.

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Verizon Offers Geek 101 Classes

Blackberry BoldGeeks, as we all know, rule the world. Would you like to be one, too? Maybe you’re not quite geek enough. Maybe you know somebody who is crying out to be a geek, but they don’t know where to start.

Maybe – heavens, say it ain’t so – you don’t own a Blackberry. Or – and it’s best to whisper this part – even know what one is.

You’re in luck. Verizon, the US telecom company, is offering a series of classes for consumers that will not only reveal what their Blackberrys, PDAs and smartphones can do, but encourage them to use them, too. The program is based in NYC, appears to be free, but may be limited to Verizon clients (check with your supplier).

Now, king of the mountaintop geeks like you and I probably won’t be in need of such a class, but as mobile technology becomes more and more advanced (and feature-packed) it is having the potentially negative side-effect of alienating a lot of the older demographic. Verizon have realized, like many others will do if this turns out to be a hit, that that older demographic is extremely cash-rich, but are less than likely to part with their hard-saved dollars on a Blackberry Bold – and that cash-cow of a monthly contract – if they can’t even figure out how to turn the darn thing on.

The classes, which promise tips on texting, music synchronisation and mobile-based email, could be a potential goldmine, and potentially the start of a mass re-education of the populace. Free classes could be made available for everything. If Google spent ten minutes a week teaching people how to use just their search function properly, let alone all of their other features, I’m pretty confident the world would be a happy, shinier place.

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