ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Charles Koch, the ultra-right-wing nutbag who opposes government and holds the checkbook for the teabaggers has just purchased Florida State University’s economics department. For a US$1.5 million donation, Koch gets to “screen and sign of on any hires for a new program promoting ‘political economy and free enterprise’” according to Kris Hundley, writing for the St. Petersburg Times. But wait, there’s more: Koch’s foundation can withdraw its funding if its “hires don’t meet ‘objectives’ set by Koch during annual evaluations.” More? This happened in 2008 but didn’t bubble up until two professors complained to the Tallahassee paper on academic freedom grounds. Disclosure: My nephew is a student at Florida State University and pitches for its baseball team (go ‘noles).

At 3M’s annual meeting in Saint Paul this week, George Buckley, the company’s chief executive was forced to answer nearly identical questions from a handful of students and faculty members from Macalester and Carleton College. Susan Feyder, writing for the Star Tribune, reports the students and faculty members were acting as proxies for Walden Asset Management. The question revolved around 3M’s continued support of ultra-conservative causes, including a US$100,000 contribution to MN Forward to support the gubernatorial candidacy of Tom Emmer in the last election cycle. Buckley’s answer to all the questions was the same: 3M doesn’t factor social issues when it decides which political contributions to make. Oh, really? Almost a third of shareholder votes were in favor of more accountability from 3M on its political contributions. Disclosure: Over the course of my career, I’ve contracted at 3M several times, most recently during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Cryptography

A graduate student, Christopher Soghoian, has filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (.pdf; 496KB) charging that Dropbox has continually deceived its users about the security and encryption of its services. Dropbox, until recently, claimed that users’ files were securely encrypted and that no one—not even Dropbox employees—could see the contents. Soghoian offered proof in April 2011 that Dropbox could, in fact, see the contents of users’ files. Ryan Singel. writing for Wired, has the best coverage of the issue.

ESRD

Health insurance companies are raking in record profits across the US because in the economic downturn, people have stopped getting checkups and have begun putting off procedures. Meanwhile, Republicans are claiming they can either kill or save (depending on your political perspective) Medicare by making it just like the health insurance available to federal employees, including Congresscritters. Except the Republican Medicare plan is nothing at all like the insurance available to federal employees. In the federal employee health insurance program, the government pays a certain share of the premiums which rises as healthcare costs rise. But that critical bit is absent from the Republican Medicare program as Robert Pear reports for the New York Times. What everyone conveniently forgets about Medicare is that it’s almost impossible for it to “go broke.” It’s an open-ended entitlement. Instead of a fixed budget, Congress defines benefits and payment rates.

Rob Stein, writing for the Washington Post reports on unprecedented drug shortages in the US endangering patients. Stein reports that “211 medications became scarce in 2010—triple the number in 2006—and at least 89 new shortages have been recorded through the end of March….” The shortage has led to drug rationing and postponed surgeries in some places. The problem appears to be consolidation within the pharmaceutical industry with very few companies wanting to produce older, less profitable drugs.

Intellectual property

As of 4 May 2010, if you use TwitPic, you have granted it the right to sell your images. If that’s not bad enough, it’s unilaterally claiming the right to sublicense and prepare derivative works. Want more? TwitPic will also retain any images that you’ve removed and goes on to claim that the license you granted it by using the service are perpetual and irrevocable. Oh, but wait. TwitPic clarified things—sort of—on its blog confirming that users retain copyright on any material they upload to the service and that this is all to protect users from media organizations that are stealing their content and using it without permission. It’s important to note that it’s entirely possible for you to retain copyright on your work while simultaneously allowing a service like TwitPic to sell your work and claim a perpetual and irrevocable nonexclusive license; these two aspects of intellectual property are not mutually exclusive. TwitPic users discovered this mid-week when WENN announced it had been picked as TwitPic’s exclusive photo agency partner, as reported by Olivier Laurent, writing for the British Journal of Photography. As Laurent reports, it remains unknown if TwitPic users can opt out or share in the revenue generated by WENN sales and sublicenses of their work.

Law

Like a bad penny, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) proposed internet censorship legislation in the US Congress has returned under a new name. According to Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica, The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT-IP) proposed legislation goes even further off the rails by requiring payment processors and advertising brokers to refrain from working with internet sites the entertainment cartel doesn’t like. Action can be taken to force these businesses to play ball in a private court without government oversight. Additionally, PROTECT-IP would force search engines to de-index offending sites. Like COICA before it, PROTECT-IP proposes to create a blacklist of offending sites that will be unreachable by internet users.

Media

In what will surely turn out to be a stunning blow for the music labels, Google has gone ahead with its Google Music Beta service without cooperation from the major music labels. Google Music Beta is a cloud-based music player allowing users to upload and store their music on the web and stream that music to their electronic devices. Google had been negotiating for months with the music labels on a cloud-based music service. Jamie Rosenberg, Google’s director for digital content for Android, told Clair Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, “A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable basis. So we’re not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult.” Ouch, sucks to be the labels. The position of the labels has consistently been that they want to get paid for each use of a piece of music—just like needle-drop fees.

Facebook apparently hired a public relations firm to pitch “Google invades your privacy” stories to news outlets. The PR firm then offered to help a blogger write an anti-Google op-ed it said it could get published in the Washington Post, Politico, and the Huffington Post. That’s what Dan Lyons is reporting for the Daily Beast. And he’s got the emails to prove it. Facebook, when confronted with the evidence, confirmed the action and said it did it because “it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.” Pot. Kettle. Black.

Politics

CityPages, the Twin Cities’ alt-weekly, has been producing some surprisingly well done journalism lately, and Hart Van Denburg’s brief bit on the Sunlight Foundation’s recent spotlight on former US Senator Norm Coleman. Coleman recently joined the DC law firm of Hogan Lovells as a non-lobbyist lobbyist. Basically Coleman launders political money through the American Action Network. Van Denburg reports that in the last election cycle, American Action Network “spent US$20 million on campaign ads for Republicans while legally shielding contributors from public view.”

Republican US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker is taking a job at Comcast as a top lobbyist four months after she voted to approve the cable company’s US$13.75 billion takeover of NBC Universal from General Electric Company. Craig Aaron, president and chief executive of Free Press had a typical take: “This is just the latest—though perhaps most blatant—example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating. ... No wonder the public is so nauseated by business as usual in Washington—where the complete capture of government by industry barely raises any eyebrows. The continuously revolving door at the FCC continues to erode any prospects for good public policy.”

Publishing

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism released its 146-page report on the state of digital journalism (.pdf; 4.4MB). No need to slog through it; Felix Salmon, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, does a good job of blurbing it. As Salmon points out, the meat starts after 100 some odd pages when the matter of moving away from an advertising-adjacency into leveraging and monetizing a publication’s reach and credibility is considered. Salmon goes off the rails, though, when he suggests publications consider republishing content from others. Bad idea. The web is all about links, not republishing. Any act of republication diminishes the information authority of the original work. Besides, the level of monetization from selling nonexclusive republication rights are minimal and short term almost certainly to come back and bite you in the long term.

I was going to ignore this bit, but because it’s getting a lot of electrons from people who should know better, I can’t. iFlowReader was a second-tier ebook app for Apple’s iOS devices. This week, the company that produced it announced it was closing because Apple had forced it out of business. Apple charges developers 30 percent for in-app sales and also employs an agency model with regard to ebook sales (publishers set prices; sellers get a flat 30 percent). There were two options for the company producing iFlowReader: Build an HTML5 version or ditch the digital rights management (DRM) and sell your wares in an open format like ePub on your website.

Matt Taibbi’s latest screed—“The People vs. Goldman Sachs”—is available on the Rolling Stone website. It’s most excellent and raises a lot of questions. One of the foremost is why is important work like this being published in a rock culture magazine instead of one of the nation’s leading newspapers or thought leader magazines? Most likely because Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner doesn’t have to worry about alienating his advertisers with a story like this. That’s something the publishers of the other papers and magazines can’t say. While Wenner publishes demands for the jailing of Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, the meeker of the national publications will wait for it to actually happen and then cover it only meekly. Here’s Taibbi’s breathtaking lede: “They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.”

Technology

Microsoft has purchased Skype for US$8.5 billion cash. Om Malik at GigaOm broke the news and has the best analysis, reckoning that Skype will give Microsoft a leg up in enterprise collaboration against Cisco and Google as well as a working relationship with the telecommunications carriers. And then there’s the Microsoft/Nokia mobile partnership. As Doc Searls points out, it won’t be long until the only version of Skype that really works will run only on Nokia’s Windows Mobile devices. Searls also adroitly points to the inevitable: “Add involvements by the ITU (a Microsoft site, Silverlight and all) and governments that like tariffs on calls and data services, and we’ll see the Internet further subordinated to the same telecom business we’ve had since telegraphy. Same meatloaf, new gravy.”

User experience

Appropriate typography is all about ratios and modular scales according to Tim Brown writing for A List Apart. For example, expressing the golden section as a modular scale by multiplying by 1.618 results in pleasing ratios.