Facebook, Farts & Bowing to Censors Here & There & Everywhere

Hello - AFAIR its kosher to post this here - the sly tech/cultural/business buffet -
from my favorite ( sorry /.  ) daily read, Silicon Valley's GMSV from McKlatchy - the only news
service brave enough to report so much honest news that they .... [go learn yourself]

	http://www.siliconvalley.com/gmsvnewsletter Good Morning Silicon Valley Article Launched: 01/03/2008  By JOHN MURRELL .../...   YouTube doesn't operate under a Chinese license, but the government has shown it has only to pull a lever or two to cut off access to selected outside connections (see "Remember, bowing is just another word for bending over"). And that remains the bigger point. However rich their visions and noble their intentions, companies making commitments in China simply cannot be sure that the rules won't change overnight, and change in a way that forces a new set of compromises. [story shifted to bottom]
	Q  U  O  T  E  D "It's a bit like breaking wind in the elevator. Everyone suffers." -- Peter Martin of the University of Utah's Traffic Lab, author of a new study showing how drivers distracted by cell phone conversations (hands-free or not) clog up the road.
	Face plant -- data portability and Scoble's slapstick scrape: There's an important issue at the core of today's brouhaha between high-profile blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook, but the advocates of data portability may want to wait for a better case to use in pressing their point. Scoble, who proudly amassed the social site's maximum 5,000 "friends," was interested in seeing how much overlap there was between that mob and the people on his Plaxo contact management list. Facebook, like other social sites, has a vested interest in keeping you in the fold and so does not make it easy for a user to extract contact information. So Plaxo invited Scoble to alpha-test an upcoming feature for its Pulse social sharing service -- a robot script that can grab specified data fields from your Facebook friends' profiles and export them. Next thing you know, Scoble gets a form letter telling he's been tossed off Facebook for violating the terms of service and all traces of his presence have been excised from the site. As the folks at DataPortability.com will be happy to explain, there is a crying need for some open and standardized format to allow social Web users to manage and move their data around. But before we get to that, it's necessary to sort out exactly what data is whose. The data you enter yourself? That sounds like yours. The data that your "friends" enter about themselves? Well, they've shared it with you, but is it yours to export? And since you've entered into an agreement with Facebook to voluntarily add information to Facebook's database, does the company have some kind of claim as well, (not to mention some obligation to prevent one of your "friends" from exporting your contact information without letting you know)? Unfortunately, the present case is too muddled to offer any clarity. Plaxo's approach went beyond using the Facebook-supplied application interfaces in order to grab e-mail addresses, presented as an image in Facebook profiles to prevent massive harvesting for spam purposes. Plaxo employed some graphical scraping and optical character recognition to get around that, and Facebook can't have that sort of third-party programming gumming up its system. As Michael Arrington reports, the Plaxo folks knew they were playing with fire and went ahead anyway. As for Scoble, he violated terms of service he may not agree with but which have some legitimate purpose. He got caught and he got booted, and now, after promising to be good, he's back in. Such is life on the edge.. Comment on this post And if you could snap a few updates for Google Earth on the way, that'd be great: Ever since word emerged that the Google guys had cut a $2.6 million deal with NASA to base their private air force at conveniently located and uncrowded Moffett Field (see "And wait till we pay the state to add the gLane to 101"), cynics have wondered just what the public gets out of the bargain. There was some vague talk about research cooperation and putting scientific instruments aboard the four aircraft -- a Boeing 767, a Boeing 757 and a pair of Gulfstreams -- but it still looked to some like Google had just bought its way into a sweet parking spot. This afternoon, however, one of those Gulfstreams will take a handful of NASA scientists and their instruments on a 10-hour trip to the Arctic and back to observe what is expected to be a particularly bright Quadrantid meteor shower. Sergey and Larry are said to be especially interested in the data on burnout rates. Comment on this post Off topic: The winners in the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest for 2007 and the Materials Research Society's Science as Art competition (exploding nanowires!). Comment on this post
	Good Morning Silicon Valley Article Launched: 01/03/2008 02:44:15 PM PST China squeezes the tubes a little tighter By JOHN MURRELL Some big tech companies have a lot at stake in trying to extend into China and help integrate that country into the rest of the digital world, and they can argue eloquently that the benefits of their involvement outweigh the accommodations they must make to operate in a totalitarian state. Trouble is, China keeps making those justifications harder and harder. In a development sure to be of interest to Google's YouTube, the Chinese government announced today that as of Jan. 31, it will restrict the broadcast of online videos to sites owned or controlled by the state. Such sites wishing to display or allow uploads of video content can apply for a permit and must monitor the content for material that reveals national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography. According to the rules, "Those who provide Internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism ... and abide by the moral code of socialism." Those in the line of fire are trying to figure out the implications. According to the Wall Street Journal, most of China's popular video sites are privately run, and while some, like Tudou.com, are optimistically viewing the regulations as a needed clarification, Duncan Clark, chairman of advisory firm BDA (China) Ltd., said, "This directive, if implemented, would be bad news for the streaming sites. ... It's clearly a question of control of information, with political content being the No. 1 concern." The situation is even less clear for companies like YouTube, whose servers are outside of China (as opposed to those of Google's Chinese search engine, which complies with government censorship). YouTube doesn't operate under a Chinese license, but the government has shown it has only to pull a lever or two to cut off access to selected outside connections (see "Remember, bowing is just another word for bending over"). And that remains the bigger point. However rich their visions and noble their intentions, companies making commitments in China simply cannot be sure that the rules won't change overnight, and change in a way that forces a new set of compromises. Comment on this post http://www.siliconvalley.com/gmsvnewsletter  [no default date indexed there yet, ooops]
	Hey, this blends with yesterday's manifesto. Fair Use Unnoticed: nobody comes here anyway and I've provided full attribution, plus I love their output and have raved about it to many friends, colleagues and even "enemies"!  Ciao, Comrades,  from Kenneth Cowtowne