Google and Facebook upset more privacy people

Google and Facebook drew fire today from privacy advocates in the U.S. and Canada, respectively.

Jeff Chester of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Google had quietly changed its practice on behavioral targeting for display advertisements. Google had been more conservative than many other sites.

Google generally has used only the information generated in a single search session to decide what ads would appeal to a searcher. Last week, though, it opened up its ad network to a number of outside companies, including Mediaplex and others that specialize in profiling users based on where they go on the Web.

Google privacy official Jane Horvath confirmed in an e-mail to Chester that those companies could use cookies, which are tied to specific users, in choosing which ads to show to whom. She told him...

In the tech world, some fail the name game

No, the emailStripper is not available for virtual bachelor or bachelorette parties. It's freeware to get rid of annoying format coding on email messages.

It's also one of the worst tech product names listed by PC Magazine in its June issue. (It's not available on the web yet, but the list was e-mailed to us by the magazine's publicist.) The others include LappyMats, protectors for LCD laptop screens; Popuload, an RSS reader that gives you news feeds while you're downloading files; and Zlock, corporate security software from a company called Zecurion.

But are those really so bad in an era when the name of one of the world's most powerful and profitable companies (that would be Google) sounds like something a 1-year-old says just before spitting up?  Michelle Quinn wrote last year about some of the bizarre start-up names that Larry and Sergey have spawned, including Abazab, Wakoopa and Xoopit.

The biggest gaffes, though, seem to be unintentional word mash-ups caused by the lack of spaces in URLs. The site Bad Domain Names has compiled some of the best. Among the PG-13 rated ones: www.whorepresents.com, which is not a place to buy a gift for that special streetwalker, but a handy site to find the agent, manager, publicist and attorney for celebrities; and www.ipanywhere.com, not the blog of a serial urinator, but "your destination for Remote Access software and more."

There's an art to naming things that extends beyond the tech industry. Strategic Name Development has an interesting blog on product naming called NameWire (notice the URL doesn't spell anything nasty). And Josh Friedman wrote this month about a company called TitleDoctors that helps Hollywood studios come up with just the right titles to lure moviegoers. The story pointed out something any kid could tell you: The words "Cinderella" and "Man" don't really go together. At least not as well as LappyMats.

-- Jim Puzzanghera

Puzzanghera, a Times staff writer, covers tech and media policy from Washington.

Photo by Gaetan Lee via Flickr.

What a Tweet it is to read these short stories

They say that brevity is the soul of wit. That certainly was the case for the winners of Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest announced today.

Twitter allows users to stay constantly connected with friends and family by sending and receiving short messages called Tweets. People who are interested in someone's random musings can "follow" them.

The free social networking service has taken off in Silicon Valley. It recently raised $15 million in funding, handing Twitter a valuation just shy of $100 million. Twitter was created by a San Francisco start-up called Obvious.

So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a literary challenge: write a short story in 140 characters, the maximum length of a Tweet. More than 300 brave souls took part, showing off their ability to choose just the right words, sentence structure and punctuation to squeak under the character count.

The winning entry came from Ron Gould: "'Time travel works!' the note read. 'However you can only travel to the past and one-way.' I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill."

Second place went to ...

Not sure he's gone, Jim Gray's friends and family say goodbye

How do you memorialize someone if he might still be alive? The family of Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist and A.M. Turing Award winner, has been grappling with that issue since the clear, calm day in January 2007 when he sailed his boat, Tenacious, into the San Francisco Bay and never came home.

The scientific community is gathering at UC Berkeley tomorrow for a daylong tribute to Gray. As Michelle Quinn writes, it's part celebration, part science fair. Read the full story to learn more about Gray's disappearance and how the group of world-class problem-solvers dealt with their inability to answer this question: What happened to Jim Gray?

-- Chris Gaither

Photo: From left, Jim Gray on his boat Tenacious with wife Donna Carnes and friend Vince Vaughn. Courtesy of Donna Carnes.

Around the Web 05.30.08: Laptop spies and free music sites

-- Cuteness over irony. So says Susan Kare, the creator of some of the beloved icons on Apple's original Macintosh computer. She has done some recent work for Facebook. L.A. Times

-- Lights, action. More unusual activity outside the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York. First there were lines forming. Now it appears that a commercial is being shot. Could it be for a new version of the iPhone? Silicon Alley Insider

-- Laptop spies. U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly took info. from a  laptop when the U.S. Commerce secretary went to China, then used the information to try to crack into Commerce Department computers. AP via WashPost

-- Turning the corner: Dell reported solid earnings, thanks to sales of notebook computers. CNET

-- Music discovery and the Internet: a combination designed for wasting time at work. But where to begin? Here's a compilation of some sites to listen to music for free. Music Couch

-- Troubled waters ahead: Guy Hands, chief executive of TerraFirma, writes a note to investors that there will be cuts at the music company EMI Group, which TerraFirma bought last summer. Digital Music News

-- Privacy concerns: A new report looks at whether information gathered to detect copyrighted material through digital watermarks is eroding your privacy, BitPlayer reports.

-- The new talent hunt: Companies are signing Web talent but not sure how to make entertainment for the Internet profitable. USA Today

-- The Feds and the Silicon Valley socialite: The Mercury News reports that Silicon Valley socialite and investor William "Boots" Del Biaggio III is being investigated by the Feds. He resigned from Sand Hill Capital, a boutique bank to start-up firms, "for personal reasons."

-- Michelle Quinn

After Microsoft whiffs, Ballmer and Yang take to the green

Talk about meeting in the rough.

We couldn't help but note the irony that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer took to the fairway over the Memorial Day weekend with Yahoo's Jerry Yang (according to the WSJ, subscription required). Yang was the guy who drove round after round of opposition to the software giant's proposed takeover of the Internet pioneer. 

After months of acrimony and aborted talks, the two discussed the possibility of Microsoft buying Yahoo's advertising search business.

It seems there won't be a merger mulligan. We're not sure if Ballmer accused Yang of being a sandbagger or using the Kelly rule. But we are pretty sure there wasn't a lot of links love.

But that wasn't even the ironic part. After all, the setting made sense. Both men are avid golfers.

Which is why the timing of Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo on Feb. 1 was perhaps the most hostile part: A week before the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournament, forcing Yahoo’s golfer-in-chief to skip his annual ritual to save the company he co-founded.

Hey, Steve, watch out for that swing.

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo by Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

Murdoch says average families suffering, plans to raise newspaper prices

Media overlord Rupert Murdoch said late last night that the U.S. was in for 18 months of rough economic times, with rising unemployment and dwindling disposable income for average families.

Fortunately for Murdoch's News Corp., though, the recently acquired Wall Street Journal targets the most affluent and best educated Americans, who can be charged much more.

"The average [annual] subscription for the Wall Street Journal is $125. At the New York Times, it's $500. There's a long way to go in getting money from our readers," Murdoch said during a wide-ranging onstage interview at D: All Things Digital, a conference being held in Carlsbad, Calif., by the Journal.

Murdoch plans to challenge the New York Times in general news and world news as well as turn the Journal into more of a mainstream national paper. He said he had changed his mind and would continue charging for access to some financial news online while making more of it available free on ad-supported sites.

He also said he would continue to invest in journalism at News Corp.'s prize properties while newsroom jobs are cut at most other papers, including Tribune Co.'s L.A. Times, which Murdoch called...

Mr. Sun, please shine down on my iPod

Sunbathing may be going out of style in some circles, but soon we might put our iPods and other electronic devices on mini towels to catch the rays. A recently published patent application that cites Apple's best-selling products proposes using solar cells to power portable devices such as the iPhone and iPod, and even computers.

The technology detailed in the patent application, which was first reported by MacRumors, could enhance the battery life of gadgets. MacRumors and others say the patent application is from Apple but that is unclear from the document, which listed individuals (none of whom were Steve Jobs) as the inventors. Apple and the patent lawyer cited in the document did not returns calls seeking confirmation.

Using light to powering devices is not a new idea. Remember putting calculators under lamps to get them to work? One problem has been the constrained real estate of gadgets: in small spaces, where does one put the solar technology? The patent application indicates that the solar panels would be located behind the device's screen.

Others have worked on variations of this. Better Energy Systems makes a solar charger called the Solio that attaches to a window with a suction cup and transfers the energy to a device. An hour spent collecting sun rays in the Solio provides roughly 20 minutes of cellphone juice. Here's a package of stories Alex Pham wrote about how to get greener with consumer electronics, including the Solio.

If the solar-energy technology works, and Apple adopts it in its electronic devices, rest assured there will be a new crop of accessories to make the sunbathing iPod's experience as comfortable and fashionable as possible.

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo: A recent effort to break a sun-bathing record in Budapest, Hungary. Credit: Tamas Kovacs / EPA

Antipiracy fight knocks out Diggnation and other Revision3 Web shows

One of the most popular Internet-based television networks was shut down all weekend, a casualty in the entertainment industry’s fight against pirated material.

The outage at Revision3, which features shows include Diggnation and others targeted at techies, highlighted the risks of serious collateral damage in the usually invisible but bare-knuckled technological war between copyright holders and pirates.

The victimized company said today that the culprit was MediaDefender, a Santa Monica firm that distributes fake music and video files on the Internet in order to fight piracy. The shutdown resembled the denial-of-service attacks often used by cyber-criminals and other malicious hackers, but Revision3 and MediaDefender said the outage was accidental.

Computers at San Francisco-based Revision3, which attracts more than 4 million video views a month, began getting overwhelmed with Internet traffic mid-day Saturday and were mostly down until the middle of Tuesday, Chief Executive Jim Louderback said in an interview. He also blogged about it.

The onslaught kept users from getting to the ad-supported site and cut off employees from their own e-mail, Louderback said.

Such denial-of-service attacks aren’t unheard of, and Revision3 initially suspected that people pirating copyrighted material were responsible. That’s because the overwhelming flood of requests...

Around the Web 5.29.08: Beer pong, anyone?

-- Two weeks after Facebook canceled its beer pong bout with IAC's CollegeHumor, the crew demolished Nick Denton's Gawker Media at the D6 confab in Carlsbad. It even blogged the results first. Silicon Alley Insider

-- What's a billion dollars or so? Glam Media, the women-oriented advertising network and media company, is considering a $1.3-billion buyout offer, Venture Beat reports.

-- Hollywood studios and actors overcame their digital deadlock to reach a deal on a new union contract. LAT

-- Some like it cooked. Raw food chef and animal activist Patrick Hogan has given up on converting Googlers to his vegan ways and gone to work full-time for the Peninsula Humane Society as a wildlife technician. There he feeds orphaned ducks instead of young millionaires. SiliconValley.com

-- Scare me once, shame on you...comScore released new data about Google's U.S. paid click growth. Last time it left the impression of a collapse, prompting a stampede of Google bulls, but that trend reversed in April. Silicon Alley Insider

-- The rumors are back: Barry Diller might sell Expedia, Tom Petruno says.

-- This is war, er, Warhammer. Electronic Arts' Mark Jacobs discusses the history and future of the new online game. Venture Beat

--  TechCrunch's Mike Arrington notes that Google's uber geeky developer conference in San Francisco, Google I/O, flubbed the binary code sequence on event T-shirts. Or did it?

-- ComScore is buying M:Metrics, a research firm that measures how people use their iPhones and other mobile devices, for $43.3 million in cash and 50,000 shares of stock. MocoNews

-- Who is the man who would run Yahoo (if Yahoo would let him)? Meet Microsoft's Kevin Johnson. Fortune

-- Happy birthday, Causes. The Facebook application that gets people to donate time and money to their favorite charities has procured some impressive stats: 12 million registered users supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide; $2.5 million raised for nearly 20,000 organizations in all. Not bad for a year's work. TechCrunch

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo by Mohan S' via Flickr