Author: Serkadis

Tucked within the computer science deparment at the University of California, Berkeley, there’s an institution called AMPLab that’s making a name for itself by — among other things — essentially rebuilding the Hadoop platform, only faster.

AMPLab’s most well-known product in the big data space, called Spark, is an in-memory parallel processing framework that’s comparable to Hadoop MapReduce except, its creators claim, it is up to 100 times faster. Because it runs in-memory, Spark might be comparable with something like Druid or SAP’s HANA system, too. Spark is the processing engine that powers ClearStory’s next-generation analytics and visualization service.

Like Hive as a data warehouse for Hadoop? Then you’ll love Shark, which is short for “Hive on Spark.”

Even as Hadoop gets more flexible thanks to new features such as YARN, which would technically allow it to run an alternative framework like Spark, AMPLab has its own cluster-management project called Mesos. Twitter is a big fan of Mesos, which is also an Apache Incubator project.

AMPLab’s latest target is the Hadoop Distributed File System, or HDFS. HDFS has long been criticized for availability and speed, so AMPLab created an alternative called Tachyon (hat tip to High Scalability for calling my attention to it). According to the Tachyon homepage, “it offers up to 300 times higher throughput than HDFS, by leveraging lineage information and using memory aggressively. Tachyon caches working set files in memory, and enables different jobs/queries and frameworks to access cached files at memory speed.”

AMPLab isn’t the first to question the cult of HDFS, though. There are numerous commercial options available, and Quantcast built its own open source file system that it claims is faster and more efficient when running at massive scale.

But it’s probably unfair to call AMPLab’s projects competitors to Hadoop. They’re certainly alternatives, but they’re also complementary, as Twitter’s heavy use of Hadoop and Mesos demonstrates. And Spark, Shark, Mesos and Tachyon are all compatible with their peer projects from the Apache Hadoop project.

Really, AMPLab is doing what any research institution does by pushing the limits of the current commercially available software. If it happens to disrupt the status quo, then so be it. For users, though, it’s just providing some new options to play around with as they try to find the right tool for their particular jobs. Its partners and sponsors, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, certainly have an interest in finding the best-possible technology, or creating it if necessary.

Other related AMPLab projects include PIQL, a SQL-like query language that sits atop a key-value store; MLBase, a system for doing machine learning on distributed systems; Akaros, an operating system for manycore and large SMP systems; and Sparrow, a cluster-scheduling system designed for low-latency computing.

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Aereo’s approach to letting consumers access broadcast TV content on their mobile devices and computers is nothing if not disruptive, and Wednesday at our paidContent Live conference in New York, CEO Chet Kanojia upped the ante even more. Discussing how the company will be able to expand its channel offerings without falling into the old traps of cable pricing, he suggested that a free or low-cost news package is likely on the horizon.

It’s part of a bigger plan to figure out how to address consumers’ base needs first and foremost, before then adding the nice-to-have features for a price. Aereo sees the future of television content as being what Kanojia calls “skinny live, deep library,” so the live parts are only for the content people really need in real time — stuff like news and sports.

“(The consumer is) the one constituent in this industry that’s unserved,” Kanojia said. “Everyone’s businesses are stacked to take advantage of the consumer, not to serve the consumer.”

If on the other hand, the value-add of a movie channel (oh, Aereo’s probably going to add one of those, too) is to watch stuff on your own time, people will probably willing to pay 50 cents or a dollar a month, he said. The same thing goes for programming from, hypothetically, a content provider like Viacom has a broad range of shows that people don’t really need or want to see only while they’re airing.

The only way to do this correctly, though, is to avoid traditional licensing models that have jacked cable prices through the roof and have led to a lot bloat because consumers are getting way more channels than they ever would want to watch. Kanojia wants Aereo to provide 50 percent of the value for 10 percent of the cost of cable, and then let partners and services like Netflix or Amazon Prime fill in the rest.

“The last time I checked,” he joked, “there’s no need to have Desperate Housewives or the Real Housewives of Orange County running on four channels at the same time.”

As for those lawsuits that have plagued the company since its inception, Kanojia said he’s not surprised but he’s disappointed by threats from companies such as Fox and CBS to pull their stations off the public airwaves (the spectrum on which is provided for free because stations are supposed to operate in part in the public interest).

“I just don’t understand the logic behind that,” he said. “I think it’s disappointing to say the least.”

But with significant legal victories already behind it, the future looks a little clearer. He expects the company model could realistically net the company 20 percent of the American television market, and the company is expanding fast outside of New York. It’s supposed to be in 22 more cities by July.

“The one thing that would float by boat more than anything else,” Kanojia said, “is I get a chance to put my product in front of consumers and be judged by the consumers.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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The really surprising thing about a conversation with some of the blogging world’s most celebrated names is how little they actually have in common — in terms of their motivations, strategies and business models. At paidContent Live on Wednesday, Brain Picking’s Maria Popova, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, The Dish’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and web marketing guru Tim Ferriss, discussed the various reasons why they blog, and how (if at all) they monetize their web work.

Sullivan, who earlier this year took his popular Dish blog independent, has been using a metered paywall but has been tweaking that a bit in recent weeks, adding in a monthly subscription service, too. “Once you’ve gotten past the surge of Dish-heads, getting others to cough up online is new and difficult,” said Sullivan. He told the audience that the Dish blog is approaching $700,000 raised out of their goal to raise $900,000, and they have 25,000 subscribers. On the latter number, Sullivan compared it to the size of “a great little magazine.”

For Popova, who has amassed a huge audience through her tweets and blog posts linking to interesting topics, blogging isn’t actually a business, it’s something she would do even if she didn’t make money off of it. “I created it for an audience of one, it’s just grown from there,” said Popova.

Author, investor and media personality Tim Ferriss uses his blog to test out ideas that he then uses for his best selling books. “The blog is where I experiment,” explained Ferriss. It’s also a community builder and communications platform, and Ferriss said that he’s connected with quite a few startups through his blog, which he later went on to invest in.

And for the New York Times’ Ross Sorkin, the DealBook blog, which he edits, is just one of the mediums that he uses to tell stories. The journalist also hosts a TV talk show, writes columns and features, and has written a best-selling book. “I wanted to create a site about a sensibility, not about me,” said Ross Sorkin, and he wanted it to be able, in theory, to live on for decades without him, he added.

The one thing the group did have in common seemed to be a love of creating content, a desire to share and connect with readers, and a drive to experiment with new ways to do this. Popova has another job that pays her bills; her blogging is her passion. Sullivan said he isn’t taking a salary for his new venture and put his own savings into it. He also said sometimes the sheer passion and mass intimacy can become so engrossing that you are sucked into it: “If it turns out that blogging kills people, I will be the first to go.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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I highly recommend two-step verification for major online accounts, even though the process sometimes is a real hassle. I’ve long ago applied the security measure to my Google account, but Microsoft offered no option. Hell, even Apple beat the software giant with the measure. That starts changing today.

“Over the next couple days we will roll out a major upgrade to Microsoft account, including optional two-step verification to help keep your account more secure”, Eric Doerr, Microsoft Account group product manager, says. The logistics are similar to Google’s — two-step verification most places, application-specific passwords elsewhere and tool for generating authentication codes.

In fairness, two-step authentication isn’t completely new, just widespread availability across Microsoft products and services. Where fully supported, process is simple. Jack Consumer logs into his account and is stopped for additional verification, which can be a code dynamically generated using the Microsoft Authenticator app or one sent to a pre-designated cell phone. Entering the code provides access, which typically is a one-time process per device or app running on it. However, devices not used for 60 days will trigger new verification.

Microsoft released Authenticator for Windows Phone last week.

“The advantage of authenticator applications is that they use advanced cryptography to generate codes to access your account without the need to be online”, Doerr says. This is especially helpful if you’re on vacation and don’t want to pay high roaming fees to receive text messages or phone calls”. But you’re out of luck if among the majority of people using Android or iPhone. “There are excellent authenticator apps that already exist for those platforms and are compatible with Microsoft account two-step verification”, he adds without identifying what they are.

Using the feature is “your choice whether you want to enable this, but for those of you that are looking for ways to add additional security to your account, we’ve worked hard to make set-up really easy”, Doerr says. I’d like to see a day where two-step verification is required.

Consider that Google and Microsoft now require a respective account to access devices running their software, such as Chromebook, Google TV, Windows PC or Xbox, and services like Drive, Office 365 or SkyDrive. Two-step verification protects your single sign-on account, as well as apps, devices and services, since someone seeking unauthorized access would generate a code sent to your phone that you see and they don’t.

There is also huge end-user risk if the security mechanism isn’t properly managed. Doerr explains:

It does require you to be careful to keep your account up to date. If your security information changes (phone or alternative email), it’s important to update your Microsoft account before you get rid of the old info.

If you know your password but lose access to your secondary security proof, customer support cannot update it for you. Your only option is to go through a recovery process that enforces a 30 day wait before you regain access to your account — to ensure someone malicious hasn’t used this as a way to take over your account. And if you lose access to your password AND all your security info, you will not be able to regain access to your account.

I’ll set up two-step autentication as soon as Microsoft enables the feature for my account. Will you?

Photo Credit:  Phase4Photography/Shutterstock

For all the concerns over mobile phone logs, video footage and other data collection that could potentially be used to survail American citizens, it’s times like this that I think we see their real value.

According to a Los Angeles Times article about Monday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the FBI has collected 10 terabytes that it’s sifting through in order to seek out clues about what exactly happened and who did it. Maybe I’m just a techno-optimist, but I find this very reassuring.

According the Times, “The data include call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and surveillance footage collected by city cameras, local businesses, gas stations, media outlets and spectators who volunteered to provide their videos and snap shots.”

Lots of data means lots of potential value

It’s reassuring because I’ve spoken with so many smart people over the years who can do amazing things with data. Ten terabytes isn’t a huge data set by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plenty to work with if it’s of high quality. It’s very possible there are some needles in that haystack of call logs, and I’m optimistic the analysts within the FBI — possibly with some outside help — will be able to find them.

Techniques around video analysis and facial recognition are better than many people think, too. If there’s a way to stitch together hundreds — maybe thousands — of videos into a single truth of what happened, then I’m confident it will happen. By tracking faces and objects over time and place, we can recreate a crime and track down suspects without relying on after-the-fact accounts by witnesses who weren’t paying any attention until the bomb actually went off.

It’s not that witnesses are lying, it’s just that an attack like this might artificially color certain observations as being more nefarious than they really were. A Middle Easterner standing nearby might seem suspicious in hindsight, for example, but a witness might not have seen that guy cheering on a friend beforehand, stop to get a soda, and then meander over to the area where the bomb went off.

I have no clue what really happened, of course, I just know that cameras — especially hundreds of them at different angle and shooting over different timeframes — don’t suffer from selective or incomplete memories.

Can we crowdsource some surveillance?

I also find all this now-surveillance data reassuring because — if it proves useful — it might actually help to preserve our civil liberties going forward. We don’t necessarily needs drones flying overhead and cameras on every corner if we can crowdsource (at least from densely populated areas or big events) relatively high-resolution videos and photos during the investigation phase. We don’t necessarily need all orders of mobile call and location-tracking if we can collect what we need from the relevant area afterward.

This does little to prevent attacks, of course, and intelligence agencies will no doubt continue to trace phone calls and generally do what they do. That’s fine by me. If airports want to use facial recognition to flag known threats as they walk in the door, I’m not sure I can take issue with that either.

But by and large, it seems there’s precious little that surveillance — especially video — can do to predict crime unless an agency already knows what it’s looking for and has the means to act fast enough to make a difference. (IBM Fellow and general identity analytics guru Jeff Jonas wrote a great blog post in November about what’s actually possible to predict given the data on hand.)

So to the extent anyone thinks additional surveillance is going to help solve crimes that we didn’t see coming, I think I’d rather leave the data in the hands of hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses rather than a handful of city, state and federal governments that might be tempted to overstep the bounds of what’s acceptable.

Really, though, the notion of how to prevent terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crimes is a complex issue, and I’m not sure there are many ethically right or wrong answers. But when we get past the tragedy and criminality of what happened in Boston, we have to look at it as part of the bigger picture that’s shaping up around all the data we’re generating, collecting and analyzing. If terabytes of geospatially targeted call records and crowdsourced audio-video surveillance can help solve this type of crime and save all the time, money and privacy concerns of more-intrusive and expansive government efforts, then maybe there’s something worth considering.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Faraways.

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Lemnos Labs, the San Francisco hardware incubator, is setting itself up for a busy spring. The hack space has a named Eric Klein (pictured) as a partner and brought startups Sproutling and Pantry in house. This brings the number of Lemnos startups to 11 and the number of partners to three.

The news also showcases how the evolution of the internet of things is moving beyond deep tech and connected gadgets into everyday life.

Connecting parents and stomachs

The two startups deal with issues near and dear to my own heart: parenting and food. Pantry, a startup that was created 16 months ago, provides a refrigerated kiosk to offices that uses RFID to track the meals stored in the kiosk. Yes, the internet of things is creating a resurgence of interest in RFID. Art Tkachenko, the founder of Pantry, is trying to use its kiosks as a source of new revenue for food companies and a way to deliver healthy food to office workers.

The kiosks work by having workers swipe their credit card to unlock the door. Then they choose between a few dozen meals, snacks and drinks available. As the worker removes the item, the RFID reader tracks the item removed and bills the customer’s card. Pantry also offers a dashboard for the food company tracking expiration dates, empty slots and analytics for future demand. The dashboard can help plan the best route for delivering replacement food to the kiosks around town, essentially using a connected device to create a service that expands the market for food wholesalers.

On the parenting side, Sproutling offers a sensor system for babies that wraps around an infant’s ankle and monitors its vital signs. The resulting data is sent to a parent’s smartphone and is aimed at augmenting (or even replacing) the baby monitor. As Sproutling co-founder and CEO Chris Bruce pointed out, a baby monitor isn’t an ideal experience when most parents just want to know that their baby is safe. Instead of actively watching a video monitor or listening to every cry, the Sproutling device would notify parents when something is wrong.

Both startups have received an undisclosed amount of funding from Lemnos as well as space in the facility. As hardware heats up a lot of entrepreneurs are pulling together cool projects with Arduino boards and cheap radios. But moving beyond the duct tape stage into something that could be both manufactured at scale and make money is a big leap. That’s one reason both founders are excited about Lemnos.

It’s also the reason that Klein, a former Nokia and Apple product executive, has decided to join as a partner as opposed to building his own hardware startup.

“Where do you learn that art of manufacturing and product design?” he asked. “I was blessed to work at Apple in the early 90s and built hardware teams. It’s a profession that you learn on the job and there aren’t as many people who learned at the big schools of Palm, Apple and Sun. But now it is so easy to get into hardware but there aren’t quite as many people who have been building [manufacturable] hardware for 15 years to help.”

Klein decided he wanted to help. Not just his own startup, but the 11 at Lemnos and the hardware community in general. Eventually he’d like to write a book that helps expand the knowledge farther afield, but Lemnos Labs is a good first step.

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Wikipedia suggests that you download the entirety of the website on your Android device using an app called Kiwix.

The Wikimedia foundation posted to its blog today, recommending the app, which lets you download the millions of article contained within Wikipedia to your device, so you can read any article any time, even when you’re offline or when you don’t want to use your data plan).

The app can also be used to download special selections of pages. Wikimedia’s Renaud Gaudin writes:

In places where connectivity is a difficult (at least 30 countries on the sole African continent), the only way to access Wikipedia content is Kiwix Desktop, but it still requires a computer and electricity. Cheap Android devices might spread more quickly, and we really want to facilitate access to free content everywhere.

That said, Kiwix for Android can also be just as useful to Westerners who want to walk around with the entirety of the world’s largest encyclopedia in their pocket (if they have a big enough SD card), accessible at no cost or data fees.

You can find the app in the Google Play store.

Google posted a new Webmaster Help video today. This time, Matt Cutts addresses a question posed by fellow Googler John Mueller, who asks:

A newspaper company wants to add an archive with 200,000 pages. Should they add it all at once or in steps?

Cutts says, “I think we can handle it either way, so we should be able to process it, but if we see a lot of pages or a lot of things ranking on a site all of a sudden, then we might take a look at it from the manual web spam team. So if it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to you in terms of the timing of the roll-out, I might stage it a little bit, and do it in steps. That way, it’s not as if you’ve suddenly dropped five million pages on the web, and it’s relatively rare to be able to drop hundreds of thousands of pages on the web, and have them be really high quality.”

“An archive of a newspaper is a great example of that,” he adds. “But, if it’s all the same to you, and it doesn’t make that much of a difference, I might tend to do it more in stages, and do more of a gradual roll-out. You could still roll them out in large blocks, but you know, just break that up a little bit.”

So it doesn’t sound like you’re going to have any major problems if you do it all at once (provided you’re not actually spamming Google with low quality content), but you might be raising a red flag with the web spam team, so it’s probably better to err on the side of caution, as Cutts suggests.

Etsy announced that the launch of Etsy Wholesale beta. The previously announced product is now live.

“For the past few months, we’ve been doing in-person usability tests, building the site features of what we hope will be the ultimate place for professional buyers and independent designers to connect online,” writes Etsy Wholesale program manager Vanessa Bertozzi. “And now we’re excited to embark on the next — and most crucial — step towards making this marketplace a reality: to populate the marketplace with retail-ready products from remarkable designers.”

Etsy Wholesale is free for buyers, but they still need to apply. It will be free to vendors during the beta period. Fees will apply once it’s out of beta. Criteria for what can be sold on Etsy Wholesale can be found here.

“We are carefully doing more research here because Etsy Wholesale needs to make enough money to cover the costs of building and maintaining a professional marketplace, but we also want it to have a fair and straightforward pricing model, one that works for vendors across so many categories,” says Bertozzi. “Another note: the beta is open to applicants from around the world but will, at first, only be in English and only support US dollars. We plan to add many more languages and currencies very soon.”

Etsy also announced a new delivery process for digital goods. For sellers offering downloadable items, the company has made “improvements” to the way they can manage and deliver these items.

“Previously, sellers emailed the attachment to the buyer after every sale,” explains Etsy’s Jaclyn Fu. “Now, sellers can upload the file to the listing just once, and that’s it! After the payment successfully processes, the buyer will receive an automatic email notification letting them know the file is ready on the Downloads page.”

Etsy community members sold $101.7 million worth of goods (after refunds and cancellations) in March, 9.7% higher than February’s $92.7 million. 4,534,479 items were sold during the month. See the latest weather report for more stats for the month.

Google is bringing its gigabit, fiber-to-the-home network to Provo, Utah, a little over a week after it announced that it was taking its ISP dreams to Austin, Texas. The announcement was made by Provo Mayor John Curtis on Wednesday, and a local Provo site has a nice run down on why Provo is the next stop on the GooFi express.

Those reasons include an updated web site, attributes the city shares with Austin, such as universities, and the fact that Provo previously attempted to build a fiber to the home network as part of a public-private partnership called iProvo. The network experienced financial troubles and parts of it were later sold to Broadweave, a private company before ending up in the hands of Veracity Networks. Apparently, those network assets changed hands about a year ago and were purchased by the city. That means the city is working with Google to provide the underlying dark fiber.

The deal still awaits approval from the Provo City Council as well as more details from Google on the roll out, pricing and the deployment. Since Provo does have its own fiber network Google says it will provide its Free Internet service (5 Mbps speeds) to every home along the existing Provo network, for a $30 activation fee and no monthly charge for at least seven years. In Kansas City the service is provided for free with a $300 connection charge.

Google’s Kevin Lo says the first residents will get connected later this year.

Google’s announcement significant for a variety of reasons — not the least of which is that Google is planning to keep pushing its gigabit network to more places. It already is building a fiber to the home network in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Mo. But it also signifies the changing cost-benefit equation that municipalities and private companies are facing when it comes to fiber to the home networks.

More municipalities from North Carolina to Seattle are trying to entice gigabit networks to their areas using a combination of leasing existing city assets or tax breaks for newcomers. Companies like Google and Gigabit Squared are trying to take advantage of the willingness of city officials to deal and the underlying assets in those cities, but even companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable are also starting to play ball.

The nature of network deployments are changing, and hopefully it will change the cost models to the point where more fiber to the home networks can become viable. However, it’s important to remember that private companies must act responsibly to their shareholders, while cities are accountable to their citizens. That’s a mix that might explode later on.

This story was updated at 2:28 PT to correct information about iProvo’s history.

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More potential bad news for Apple investors on Wednesday: shipments of the iPad mini could drop by as much as 30% in the second quarter. According to unnamed supply chain sources speaking with Digitimes, Apple’s manufacturing partners will ship 20% to 30% fewer iPad minis this quarter than they did between January and March due to “lacking demand in the market.” According to the report, customers are waiting for the second-generation iPad mini with a Retina display to launch, and are therefore not interested in the first model, which was released just this past November. Digitimes states that Q2 iPad mini shipments are expected to fall to between 10 and 12 million units from about 15 million in the March quarter.

Betaworks, the social media incubator and venture firm based in New York City, has slowly been morphing into a company that focuses on launching and operating projects — a whole lot of projects in recent months. The company has been working on five launches over the next five weeks, including one today, something in the music space next week, and Betaworks’ first game product coming shortly, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Om Malik during an interview at paidContent Live on Wednesday.

Betaworks has developed a model for these rapid launches and development cycles (100 to 150 days), and the company relies heavily on data to see if they stick in the marketplace. On Wednesday Betaworks launched Poncho, a super simple weather app; a couple weeks ago there was Giphy, a search engine for GIFs, which Borthwick said was so popular that 2 million users crashed the system when it first launched. Before that there was tapestry, a collection of mobile tappable stories.

But when Betaworks isn’t churning out its own content, it’s slicing, dicing, merging and mixing the content of others. One of the things that Betaworks is most famous for is its acquisition of the former social reading site Digg for a reported $500,000. Betaworks then merged it with some of the tools of its sluggish News.me creation.

Borthwick said that when the company bought Digg it had $250,000 a month worth of legacy costs, with $10,000 in monthly operating profits. Digg was jacked up and it had to pull out the needle, said Borthwick. After switching over to Amazon, building a new stack and relaunching with Betawork’s algorithms, Digg now costs closer to $20,000 a month to operate. “That’s the math of the cloud,” said Borthwick.

The overhaul seems to be working. The new Digg, and its users, are highly mobile-centric. Fifty percent of the traffic during the week and 55 percent on weekends comes from mobile traffic, said Borthwick. It was closer to 5 to 6 percent mobile before the relaunch. Digg now has a couple of million “active, rabid” users, said Borthwick. The Betaworks team pays particular attention to the amount of engaged users on Digg, which is high.

Attention is being fractured into a bipolar fashion, leading to condensed, fractional content on one hand and uber long-form content on the other. It’s Twitter vs House of Cards and Homeland, explained Borthwick. To build media companies and products in this era, you have to keep an eye on both, said Borthwick. To address that long form content market, Betaworks has created some tools over the past year around long-form story telling.

Not all of the innovation will come from newly launched media projects. Borthwick said he admires the work that Forbes and Bloomberg have done, as well as new media sites like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Upworthy.

CHeck out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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About seven years ago, a video was uploaded to YouTube featuring a group of school kids bullying an autistic child. This led to three Google executives – David Drummond, Peter Fleischer (pictured) and George Reyes – being convicted in 2010 by a judge in Milan on grounds of “failure to comply with the Italian privacy code,” though Google said it had removed the video after being notified, and had worked with Italian authorities to help identify the person responsible for uploading it.

“In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload,” wrote Matt Sucherman, Google VP and Deputy General Counsel – Europe, Middle East and Africa at the time. “We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question.”

Finally, this past December, the decision was overturned, and the execs were acquitted. Details of that ruling became pubic earlier this year.

It didn’t end there, however. The three executives are heading back to court, as the prosecutor has appealed the acquittal, reports ComputerWorld. The publication points to a personal blog post from Fleischer, who writes:

In December of last year, an Italian Court of Appeals overturned my conviction—as well as that of two other Googlers—for violating Italian privacy law in a case that stemmed from a user-uploaded video. I was pleased that well-reasoned legal principles had prevailed, and was hopeful that that would be the end of this long saga. Last week, however, the Italian prosecutor appealed the Court’s decision to the Court of Cassation (the Italian Supreme Court). This case, unfortunately, is not over. In its appeal to the Court of Cassation, the Italian prosecutor asserts—in addition to arguing that employees like me can be held criminally responsible for user-uploaded videos that we had no knowledge of and nothing to do with—that platforms like YouTube should be responsible for prescreening user-uploaded content and obtaining the consent of people shown in user-uploaded videos. I, and the many others who have voiced their support, view this as a threat to freedom of expression on the Internet. I’m disappointed that this case is not over, but continue to believe that ultimately justice will prevail.

If justice does not ultimately prevail, then this could create some pretty big problems for the user-generated content Internet that we’ve all come to know and love. We discussed this back when the execs were convicted.

CleanMyMac 2 is a powerful maintenance utility for keeping your Mac clean, organized, and free of clutter that slows it down. It’s been regarded as the best cleaning utility for years, and now version 2 is on the scene hoping to live up to the name of its predecessor.

The people at MacPaw have invested a lot of time and ef… (read more)

As you may know, letters poisoned with ricin were sent to President Obama and Senator Roger Wicker, though both were intercepted before they could do any harm. Investigators, reportedly see no link from the letters to the explosions at the Boston Marathon, at least so far.

Interestingly a statement has come out from none other than McAfee antivirus founder John McAfee, who, if you’ll recall, was the center of a big manhunt in (and out of) Belize late last year. In January, McAfee did an interview with Alex Jones in which he predicted ricin attacks on U.S. soil.

McAfee, today, took to his blog to say that he has been contacted my members of the press (linking to CNN), and asked about this prediction. “Meanwhile the same mainstream media channels reporting the current events refused to publish my findings of a potential threat,” he says.

What he considers to be his comment on the matter is as follows:

“The press is generally more interested in sensationalism than Truth. It is only when the Truth and the Truly Sensational coincide that the Truth plays much of a role in reported events.”

He goes on to say, “In January I told the truth about my discoveries in Belize about impending Ricin attacks, but the more sensational story at the time was the story of a deceptive madman on the run who was manufacturing stories. I am tired of the games played by the press and now choose not to play.”

He closes by saying that the truth is being told in an authorized movie of the events from Impact Future Media. Remember that?

In the Alex Jones interview, McAfee talked about the Belize government aiding terrorists, resulting in ricin making its way into the U.S. He said that Belize has been accepting Hezbollah terrorists, changing their identities, giving them European names, then shifting them off through various countries, and eventually into the U.S. with ricin. The John McAfee story sums up his story:

John goes on to say, that for the past three months he has employed two operatives that have infiltrated a Hezbollah Terrorist camp in Nicaragua who are manufacturing tons of Ricin that is destined for a major attack on USA soil. He has also placed three people who have gathered information from the Los Zetas Cartel about working with Hezbollah in trading weapons for access to drug routes. He says the Terrorists are using the drug routes for moving the Ricin … he claims the CIA must know about this. He says the pending Terrorist Attack will be much worse than 9-11.

Here’s the Alex Jones video. The interview starts at 48:40

Apple went from investors’ darling to Wall Street whipping boy in a matter of months, and the stock is now down more than 35% from the record high it hit last September. Shares plummeted to levels not seen since 2011 on Wednesday afternoon thanks in part to a recent note from Jefferies & Company analyst Peter Misek, who said Apple could be in for another couple of “disappointing” quarters as nearly all of its major mobile launches will happen later than expected this year.

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Designers Dave and Calvin Laituri have joined forces to kickstart Pucs, small, stainless-steel icecube replacements that promise to chill your drink without wetting it down. The Pucs are milled of solid steel and come in a handsome wooden tray that you can place right into the freezer.

The Pucs are rechargeable in that they will not degrade and hold their temperature for quite a while – the creators suggest adding and removing them as you see fit – and the will even reduce the temperature of hot beverages.

The team is looking for $2,500 to ship the first batch and they’re nearly at $2,000.

While the Pucs aren’t that amazingly new – similar rocks and metal cubes have been available for years – the process that the creators are going through is particularly interesting. Hardware startups don’t all have to be making smart watches or robotic arms. A cool, fun project like this is what makes crowdfunding so unique. First, the lads don’t have to make thousands of these, ship them, and hope they sell through a distributor. Whereas household goods are traditionally sold at big box stores and discounters, this process allows the creators to build just as many as they need and, when they’re ready to make more, they have a solid word-of-mouth list that they can approach for updates and further orders.

Is the American Civil Liberties Union an iPhone shop, or is the organization really looking out for your best interests? I ask because the complaint filed yesterday with the Federal Trade Commission (and revealed today) is the kind of marketing Apple probably couldn’t afford. This thing is a goldmine of FUD (you know, fear uncertainty and doubt) — Christmastime good, when Santa packs the room with presents and they’re all for you.

But, wait, Google gets gifted, too! Because the complaint is more about carriers dragging their bums updating Android than any fundamental security problem with the platform. The operating system has “known, exploitable security vulnerabilities for which fixes have been published by Google, but have not been distributed to consumers’ smartphones by the wireless carriers and their handset manufacturer partners”, according to the legal filing.

The 16-page complaint is a wonder. The FTC is charged with protecting consumers, for which the ACLU accuses U.S. carriers inflict much harm by way of Android phones: Devices “that do not receive regular, prompt security updates are defective and unreasonably dangerous”.

There’s a well-spring of FUD marketing for Apple here. “The wireless carriers have failed to warn consumers that the smartphones sold to them are defective, that they are running vulnerable software, and that other smartphones are available that receive regular, prompt updates to which consumers
could switch”, the ACLU complaint states. Apple makes the majority of handsets sold in the United States receiving timely updates. Google ranks second with devices like Nexus 4.

But there is plenty of goodwill for Google, which struggles to get carriers and manufacturers to update Android in timely fashion. Only one-quarter of Android devices accessing Google Play in the 14 days before April 2 run current version Jelly Bean, which released in July. ACLU does Google goodness by demanding that carriers are accountable for releasing updates that, at the least, patch vulnerabilities.

“The slow rate of adoption of the most recent versions of Android does not reflect a failure by consumers to seek out and install operating system updates”, according to the complaint. “Instead, it reflects the fact that for most Android smartphones in use, updates to the most recent version of the operating system simply have not been made available for consumers to install”.

Unsurprisingly, ACLU demands change, and as I read the document so beneficial to Google maybe I should wonder if the group is an Android shop — or if the search-and-information giant isn’t somehow involved here. I ask in part because the section about browsers could have been written by a Google marketer: “The majority of Android phones used by consumers are also running an out of date, insecure version of the default Android web browser”. Well, maybe Google wouldn’t so strongly word such a sentence but benefits if more people use Chrome mobile.

The complaint singles out major cellular carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.

“If the mobile carriers are not going to provide important security updates, the FTC should at a minimum force them to provide device refunds to consumers and allow consumers to terminate their contracts without penalty so that they can switch to a provider who will”, Chris Soghoian, ACLU senior policy analyst, says today.

The ACLU requests that the Commission investigate the major wireless carriers and enjoin their unfair and deceptive business practices. Specifically, the ACLU requests that the Commission:

A. Compel the major wireless carriers to warn all subscribers using carrier-supplied Android smartphones with known, unpatched security vulnerabilities about the existence and severity the vulnerabilities, as well as any reasonable steps those consumers can take to protect themselves, including purchasing a different smartphone.

B. Compel the major wireless carriers to permit consumers under contract who are using carrier-supplied Android smartphones which have not received prompt, regular security updates to end their contracts early, without any early termination fee.

C. Compel the wireless carriers to permit consumers who are using carrier-supplied Android smartphones less than two years old which have not received prompt, regular security updates to either:

1. Exchange, at no cost, their existing device for another phone that will receive prompt, regular updates directly from Apple, Google, Microsoft or another mobile operating system vendor.
2. Return the phone and receive a full refund of the original purchase price.

If you’re looking for an excuse to get out of your contract and switch to iPhone or another Android, ACLU may offer a way.

European power giant E.ON is building out a smarter grid across its various networks, including rolling out smart meters, and on Wednesday announced a new big data partnership with grid gear and software provider Ericsson. E.ON says it will increase its data delivery by 3000 percent, and Ericsson will provide software and services to manage that data.

The deal is focused around 600,000 smart meters in Sweden. But E.ON is one of the largest power and utility companies in the world and operates in 30 countries with 26 million customers, so clearly its a relationship with a lot of potential.

Ericsson competes with GE, Siemens, ABB and others to sell software, services and hardware to utilities and power companies. Increasingly utilities and power companies are interested in buying more data analytics tools as their networks are becoming IT networks that need to monitor, digest, and analyze data to run more efficiently. As global electricity grids add more clean energy (solar panels and wind turbines), and energy storage (battery farms), better data analytics and predictions tools will also be needed to keep the grid stable.

Some of the power gear vendors are turning to the big data startup leaders for partnerships around the latest analytics. For example, earlier this week Siemens announced that it’s working with data warehouse veteran Teradata.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Key technologies for the smart city
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