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OTTAWA — The global credit crunch has now become a full-blown and rapidly deepening financial crisis that central banks are scrambling to contain, analysts say.
With the U.S. Federal Reserve taking more extraordinary measures over the weekend to mitigate the crisis and set financial institutions on a more stable footing, markets are on edge, with a wary eye on the U.S. dollar, financial stocks, and credit conditions around the world.
“It is very important for everyone to understand that we are making the transition from crisis prevention to crisis management,” said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch.
The Bank of England also moved quickly Monday morning, offering £5-billion in three-day securities to grease the wheels of the British banking system.
Friday's bailout of Bear Stearns, through a unique combination of help from J.P. Morgan Chase and the Fed, was followed on the weekend by a sudden announcement from the Fed of more flexible lending arrangements for brokerages.
The Fed also announced an inter-meeting cut in its discount rate — not its key interest rate, but one that helps determine the price at which financial institutions can access credit.
Then, on Sunday night, J.P. Morgan Chase said it would buy Bear Stearns for the rock-bottom price of $2 (U.S.) a share.
The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.
The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history - what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data. The Representatives
Google will be represented by Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, who today runs the Facebook platform. Ling defected from Google three months ago, where he ran Google Checkout, to join Facebook. Also joining the workgroup is Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, probably the catalyst for all of this after his company scraped Robert Scoble's Facebook account and set off a huge debate about Data Portability and privacy.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday.
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.
"Sure, we're going to investigate and make sure that no consumer is going to be blocked," Martin told an audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show.
In an investigation last year, The Associated Press found that Comcast in some cases hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. The findings, first reported Oct. 19, confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with other file-sharing applications.
Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged after the AP story that it was "delaying" some of the traffic between computers that share files. The company said the intervention was necessary to improve the surfing experience for the majority of its subscribers.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is a common way to illegally exchange copyright files, but companies are also rushing to utilize it for legal distribution of video and game content. If ISPs hinder or control that traffic, it makes them important gatekeepers of Internet content.
A University of Alberta researcher is calling on Canadian beer drinkers to go green and toss their energy-guzzling beer fridges, found in one of three households across the country.
"A reduction in the use of 'beer fridges' or a movement towards the use of newer and smaller energy-efficient models in Canada would lead to lower levels of energy use in the residential sector and, in some regions, lower emissions of greenhouse gases," says researcher Denise Young in the November issue of the journal Energy Policy. The study was commissioned by Natural Resources Canada.
Beer fridges tend to be older, vintage units that consumers keep to store beverages even after they've upgraded to a more energy-efficient model to store their food. In addition to costing the consumer as much as $150 a year to operate, the older appliances also place significant demands on energy resources, the study said.
According to the Canadian Appliance Manufacturers Association, a 1985 vintage fridge uses about 1060 kilowatt-hours of energy annually. By comparison, current Energy Star refrigerators use 380 to 440 kWh annually for large models and 275-300 kWh for smaller units.
Young suggests the energy savings would total 1,165.7 million kWh annually if a substantial number of Canadians threw out their beer fridges or upgraded to a newer model. The study notes the effect on greenhouse gas emissions would be insignificant in regions that rely on hydroelectric and nuclear electricity generation.
The study says financial incentives in Canada have not proved successful, while government-operated pickup programs have managed to educate and win over consumers.
To people who believe that computer hackers are nerds sequestered alone in a tiny basement typing away furiously on their keyboards, someone like Ira Winkler may come as a complete shock. Winkler began his career as an intelligence and security analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency and is now president of his own company, the Internet Security Advisors Group, and he spends more time smooth-talking receptionists and security guards than in front of a computer.
He has been dubbed a modern-day James Bond for his espionage-like tactics, which he uses in employ of major corporations as a "white-hat social engineer" — a hacker who breaks into a company both physically and technologically to test its security. Winkler was one of the keynote speakers at the first SecTor conference in Toronto on Nov. 20 and 21, which brought together numerous well-known white hats to share their thoughts and experiences with IT security professionals.
After his speech, Winkler spoke with CBCNews.ca about the dark art of hacking for the good guys.
Manalapan, NJ - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a Superior Court judge in New Jersey today to preserve the free speech rights of an anonymous blogger facing legal threats from local government officials.
The blogger, writing as "daTruthSquad" on a site hosted on Google's Blogspot service, has criticized a controversial lawsuit filed by the township of Manalapan, as well as the officials who decided to pursue the case. The township subpoenaed Google for "daTruthSquad's" identity -- as well as for any emails, blog drafts, and other information Google has about the blogger -- claiming that the defendant in the case is actually writing the posts. The defendant, however, has already sworn under penalty of perjury that he is not "daTruthSquad."
"Bloggers, as well as everyone else, have a First Amendment right to speak anonymously," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Litigants don't get a blank check to pry into the private lives of critics when they say things the litigants don't like. The fact that it is the government trying to abuse the discovery process makes this attempted invasion of privacy all the more repugnant."
In a motion to quash the subpoena filed today, EFF asked the court to block the township's attempt to uncover the identity of "daTruthSquad" and allow the blogger to continue to write about this or any other issue without being forced to identity him or herself.
"Attempts to intimidate critics into silence need to be confronted whenever and wherever they occur," said Zimmerman. "Governmental entities simply cannot be permitted to investigate critics because they dare to voice disapproval of public officials. It remains our sincere hope that the Township will abandon this intolerable legal strategy."
NEW YORK (AP) — Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.
Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on "No Thanks." It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.
Users are given a second notice the next time they log on to Facebook, but they can easily miss it if they quickly click away to visit a friend's page or check e-mail.
"People should be given much more of a notice, much more of an alert," said Matthew Helfgott, 20, a college student who discovered his girlfriend just bought him black leather gloves from Overstock for Hanukkah. "She said she had no idea (information would be shared). She said it invaded her privacy."
The girlfriend was declining interviews, Helfgott said.
An Overstock.com Inc. spokesman said no one was immediately available for comment Wednesday.
"My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile," says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone's profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed -- a major privacy violation. If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.
Facebook has a history of protecting profiles from outsiders. The site once sent cease-and-desist letters to two of Valleywag's sister blogs for publishing certain student profiles.
The site does not allow regular users to see which profiles other users have seen. While one third-party application lets users voluntarily make their profile-visiting known, no application allows one to "spy" on the activity of an unknowing user.
Checking who's viewed a profile may be how Facebook found the tipster who violated their terms of service by sending Valleywag Steve Ballmer's profile. But were they violating their own terms?
Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery -- it's one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program, and even AOL apologized for releasing semi-anonymous search data and violating its privacy policy.
We have no idea what else employees can see. Do they look at your messages? Your private gifts? Who knows?
The Google Phone has arrived, sort of, but not in the long-rumored embodiment that many had expected. Google announced this morning that it has developed a new mobile OS called "Android"—a result of its acquisition of a mobile software company of the same name in 2005—that will allow the company to get Google's mobile apps into as many hands as possible starting in mid-2008. Android is Linux-based and open source, and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license.
Google's handset partners upon launch will include Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and LG, confirming many of the recent rumors that Google would not be developing the hardware on its own. Google has a number of carrier partners worldwide as well, such as T-Mobile and Sprint in the US, T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom in Europe, and China Mobile in China, to name a few. The whole thing comes as part of the Open Handset Alliance—also announced by Google today.
Google has chosen to launch Android in this way is because it wanted to put its focus on the platform for development of its mobile applications. Although Java is widely available on many handsets worldwide, it still operates differently from phone to phone and can't provide the type of flexibility that Google wants for itself and its partners. In addition to rolling out its own suite of mobile apps, Google also plans to make a "full" SDK for Android available next week, making the platform even more attractive to third-party developers (and perhaps delivering a slight ice burn to Apple on the side). And the more third-party apps there are available for the platform, the more attractive it will be for customers.
Over the years we've heard plenty from both sides of the filesharing lobby - those against and those for.
Both sides have used a variety of weapons, not least statistical analysis and research. Now you can pick and choose the studies you want (numbers can say pretty much anything) but the pro-filesharing lobby has had to rely on one major study for most of its ammunition - the Oberholzer-Strumpf documents of 2004 (there's a PDF here.
We wrote about that study, but now it's been backed up by another - this time commissioned by the Canadian government.
The new review - which was conducted by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, two researchers based at Birkbeck College in London - is available online... and it comes up with some interesting results:
" We are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada... That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing."
A couple of Canadian commentators, Michael Geist and Mathew Ingram, chipped in over the weekend with their thoughts.
I can honestly say that in the years since Napster, I've enjoyed a musical renaissance - listening to (and crucially buying) more music across more genres than ever. But are people like me mainstream examples, or just edge cases?
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