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FTC threatens fines, jail for online check service operators
The Federal Trade Commission has charged those behind the shady online check service Qchex with contempt, and wants daily fines imposed on them until they give up the ghost. The group has launched a new site—a Qchex clone—with the same questionable policies that made Qchex a “dinner bell for fraudsters.” This has left the FTC fuming, and it wants the site’s operators to quit helping criminals rip people off— now . You may remember Qchex from a court order earlier this year —in February, a US District Court ordered the company to halt its illegal operations and to cough up its ill-gotten gains.
Continue reading »Ethics leaks spur House bill banning P2P apps on .gov PCs
Peer-to-peer filesharing applications have been wildly popular, especially among those interested in accessing pirated software, music, and media. But not everyone who operates a P2P client knows how to properly configure the software, and some clients may share entire directories unless explicitly directed not to. Apparently, some government employees have exhibited this sort of carelessness, as private and secret government documents have shown up on P2P networks.
Continue reading »SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP
On the Chromium blog , Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon write about an early-stage research project called SPDY (“speedy”). Unhappy with the performance of the venerable hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), researchers at Google think they can do better.
Continue reading »Google book digitization prompts the EU to rethink copyright
The legal settlement that would sanctify Google’s book digitization efforts may be on hold, but that hasn’t stopped the sniping over digitization in general, and Google’s specific role in vending e-books. The Frankfurt Book Fair , a major publishing event, is playing host to the latest skirmishes over what role Google and other organizations should play in controlling access to digitized material. Google continues to insist that it’s doing the world a favor by preserving knowledge and bringing lost books back to the public, but at least some European academics are blasting the company’s statements as propaganda.
Continue reading »Ad group: FTC blog rules unfairly muzzle online media
The Federal Trade Commission’s new “blogger rules” may be unconstitutional, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The IAB, one of the Internet’s largest advertising organizations, published an open letter to the FTC Friday urging it to rescind the rules because of their “dubious” differentiation between online and offline media and how they dance around the First Amendment protections of the media. The FTC announced its controversial guidelines earlier this month, essentially saying that bloggers must explicitly disclose if they are being compensated by a manufacturer, advertiser, or service provider when they review an item.
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