Ken E. writes “Asus has backed down in the face of complaints from UK Eee PC 900 owners about the ultra-portable’s low-capacity battery. Confusing statements posted in online reviews led buyers to believe that they would get a larger capacity battery than they actually did — and they weren’t happy. Asus has, however, made a conciliatory gesture by extending a £10 high-capacity battery upgrade offer. Mobile Computer has the full announcement, plus quite a bit of background on how this fuss all got started. The batteries will be available June 10 and in the meantime Eee PC owners can download a BIOS update that Asus claims will add half an hour to battery life.”

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MojoKid writes “A little over a week ago Netflix unveiled the Netflix Player, developed by the team at Roku, a set-top box for watching on-demand movies and TV. This interview with Tim Twerdahl, the VP of Consumer Products for Roku, goes into some detail about the guts of the box and the future of the set-top box. Of course the system runs an embedded Linux OS but interestingly also runs on a Nexperia (Philips) media processor.”

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Lucas123 writes “IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced it has developed a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that is expected to enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with twice the storage capacity of today’s products. The 34-nanometer, multi-level chip is smaller than Intel’s latest CPUs. Samples will be available in June with production by the end of the year.”

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Enigma2175 writes “CNN is reporting that videos from the Coachella music festival showing Prince covering Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ have been removed by Prince’s label, NPG records. Thom Yorke of Radiohead, when told of Prince’s action, said ‘Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our… song.’ No comment from YouTube or Prince yet. Under the DMCA, YouTube is not required to verify the entity making a request is actually the copyright holder and this seems to be just another example of DMCA abuse.” As the article points out, Prince seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Interwebs.

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mikesd81 sends in a report from Newsday about radiocarbon dating of cremated bones excavated from Britain’s Stonehenge that, an archeologist said, has solved part of the ancient mystery surrounding the 5,000-year-old site: It was a burial ground for what may have been the country’s first royal dynasty. No word on how this work relates to the “Neolithic Lourdes” theory we discussed earlier. “The new dates indicate burials began at least 500 years before the first massive stones were erected at the site and continued after it was completed… The pattern and relatively small number of the graves suggest all were members of a single family. The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least a portion of southern England during this early period. They exerted enough power to mobilize manpower necessary to move the massive stones from as far as 150 miles away and [maintained] that power for at least five centuries, said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, leader of current excavations at the site… His findings will also appear in the June issue of National Geographic and in the television special “Stonehenge Decoded,” to be shown Sunday.”

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India, Brazil, and South Africa have challenged ISO’s approval of Microsoft’s OOXML document format. The national standards bodies of those countries have filed for an appeal, citing insufficient review time and procedural irregularities.

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica

D. J. Keenan notes that the cover story of the current issue of National Journal reports in depth on China’s cyber-aggression against US targets in the government, military, and business. We have discussed China’s actions on numerous occasions over the years. The news in this report is the suggestion that Chinese cyber-attakers may have been involved in major power outages in the US. “Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of US companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to US government officials and computer-security experts…”

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Isaac-Lew sends word of an article in the Washington Post reporting that on June 12 the FCC will hold a hearing regarding cellphone early termination fees. The Commission may look at early termination fees for TV and Internet service as well. The wireless carriers are taking a Bre’r Rabbit approach toward possible FCC regulation of early termination fees — the FCC’s intervention would pre-empt a number of class-action lawsuits going forward against Verizon, Sprint, and others. These suits, stemming from state regulations, could cost the carriers billions. “…the carriers have renewed a lobbying effort in recent weeks to persuade the FCC on a legal definition that would stave off the state lawsuits on cancellation fees. On May 6, 2008, Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam and the company’s chief lobbyist, Tom Tauke, met with [FCC Chairman] Martin, urging him to adopt a federal policy, according to FCC records.”

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When contemplating the world’s environmental problems, it’s sometimes hard not to feel like humanity is screwed. But then you attend an event like Future Cities, a panel of sustainability experts at the World Science Festival, and it seems like we might just figure out how to thrive on this planet after all.

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FnH writes “Researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium have created a new supercomputer with standard gaming hardware. The system uses four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, costs less than €4,000 to build, and delivers roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs. This new system is used by the ASTRA research group, part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, to develop new computational methods for tomography. The guys explain the eight NVIDIA GPUs deliver the same performance for their work as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors. On a normal desktop PC their tomography tasks would take several weeks but on this NVIDIA-based supercomputer it only takes a couple of hours. The NVIDIA graphics cards do the job very efficiently and consume a lot less power than a supercomputer cluster.”

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Why is there such a discrepancy in the number of male vs. female scientists in academia? Wired Science considers the funny math in the world of academic science.

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Xiroth writes “In what could cause an escalation of tensions between the two internet giants, an anonymous critique of eBay’s upcoming move to accepting only PayPal as the payment method in Australia has accidently been revealed to have been submitted by Google thanks to PDF meta-tags.”

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theodp writes “Citing expert testimony from a recent House Science Subcommittee hearing on Globalizing Jobs and Technology, The Economic Populist challenges the conventional wisdom that maximizing profits should be a corporation’s only responsibility, suggesting it’s time for the US to align its corporations to the interests of the nation instead of vice versa. Harvard’s Bruce Scott warns that today’s global economy is much like the US in the later 19th century, when states competed for funds generated by corporations and thus raced to the bottom as they granted generous terms to unregulated firms. Sound familiar, Pennsylvania? How about you, Michigan?”

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An anonymous reader writes “Well known iPhone hacker Jonathan Zdziarski gave a talk at O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 3 this week in which he called for the iPhone hacking community to embrace full disclosure and stop keeping secrets that were leading to the iPhone’s demise. He has followed up with an article about full disclosure and why vendors hate it. He argues that vendor-only disclosure protects the vendors and not the consumer, and that vendors easily abuse this to downplay privacy concerns while continuing to sell insecure products. In contrast, he paints full disclosure as a capitalist means to keep the vendor accountable, and describes how public outcry can be one of the best motivating factors to get a vulnerability addressed.”

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TheUnknownCoder writes “MIT scientists have created a Nanowire mesh that can selectively absorb hydrophobic (oil-like) liquids from water up to 20 times its weight. The membrane can be recycled many times for future use, and the oil itself can also be recovered. There’s even a video of it in action, removing gasoline from water.”

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benjymouse writes “The Register has picked up on a recent Microsoft security bulletin which urges Windows users to “restrict use of Safari as a web browser until an appropriate update is available from Microsoft and/or Apple”. This controversy comes after Apple has officially refused to promise to do anything about the carpet bombing vulnerability in the Safari browser. Essentially, Apple does not see unsolicited downloads of hundreds or even thousands of executable files to users’ desktops as being a security problem.” Now while downloading a hundred files to your desktop won’t automatically execute them, Microsoft’s position is that a secondary attack could execute them for you.

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Doofus brings us a CNet story about a discussion from Google’s Jeff Dean spotlighting some of the inner workings of the search giant’s massive data centers. Quoting: “‘Our view is it’s better to have twice as much hardware that’s not as reliable than half as much that’s more reliable,’ Dean said. ‘You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day.’ Bringing a new cluster online shows just how fallible hardware is, Dean said. In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.”

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Lucas123 brings news that Bank of New York Mellon Corp. has admitted they lost a box of unencrypted data storage tapes. The tapes contained personal information for over 4.5 million people. From Computerworld: “The bank informed the Connecticut State Attorney General’s Office that the tapes … were lost in transport by off-site storage firm Archive America on Feb. 27. The missing backup tapes include names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and other information from customers of BNY Mellon and the People’s United Bank in Bridgeport, Conn., according to a statement by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

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doppiodave writes “Hard on the heels of the Net Neutrality bill introduced in Canada’s Parliament, a class action suit was filed yesterday against Bell by Quebec’s Consumers Union, asking that extensive compensation be paid to all Bell’s DSL subscribers for fraudulent advertising and privacy violations. The press release is available in French. The timing of this suit coincides with several other developments that suggest Net Neutrality is finally coming to the attention of the general public and Canada’s regulator, the CRTC, which recently required Bell to file responses (by May 29) to an exhaustive list of interrogatories about its traffic-shaping practices.”

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In his bid for president, John McCain seeks to portray himself as a straightforward person of integrity. But recent TV footage from FlipperTV highlights McCain’s inconsistencies. In one video, he praises an electioneering group that’s been issuing disingenuous attack advertisements about Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions.

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Doctors make an exciting discovery that a drug used to prevent bone loss during breast cancer treatment also substantially cuts the risk that the cancer will return.

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Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks speaks at the World Science Festival about the deterioration of his sight following a bout with a rare and malignant form of cancer behind his right eye.

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bowman9991 writes “Could this be the new Blade Runner? SFFMedia reports that Celluloid Dreams has obtained the movie rights to Philip K. Dick’s science fiction masterpiece ‘Ubik’. First published in 1969, Ubik’s central character is Joe Chip, a technician for a telepathic organization that employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers so they can secure other people’s privacy. In the novel, the dead are kept in ‘half-life,’ a form of cryogenic suspension, with limited consciousness and communication ability. A mystical substance called Ubik, available in spray-can form, is the only thing stopping reality from disintegrating before Joe’s eyes. It’ll be hard to film, but fantastic if they get it right!”

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I’m going to remove the names of the two web 2.0 startups that apparently have just merged, according to a recent blog post from Jeff Nolan. I don’t really care about the merger at all or either of the two companies. I’m merely posting a short excerpt from the press release announcing the merger with the names redacted (they don’t deserve more publicity with a press release like this), because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a paragraph filled with so many web 2.0 buzzwords that says absolutely nothing.

Company A, a universal profile service for the social web that engages communities and enables content discovery, today announced its acquisition of Company B, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The integration of Company B’s proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine will bring richer, context-based profile and reputation management capabilities to the Company A service. To be useful across different types of social media, profiles and reputation have to be localized and linked to the context of the conversation. In this way, thought leaders emerge within and across communities based on their specific expertise and contributions.

Seriously? From that paragraph, does anyone have the slightest idea what either of these companies do — or what the merger is for? I’ve been known to point out stupid PR tricks, which focus mostly on the way they continue to bombard me with pointless and irrelevant press releases. But when the buzzword bingo gets this thick, it’s hard to do anything but sit back and laugh. That, and get to work on my latest proprietary universal social widget-enabler intelligence-context-based profiler management integrator. Because, clearly, that’s what the market demands.

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Earlier this week, we explained the root cause of many of the problems the entertainment industry runs into when it tries to deal with copyright online. It views the internet in the same way that it views a broadcast media content platform, when it’s been designed and used primarily as a communications platform. The entire concept of copyright doesn’t make sense in the realm of regular communications. You don’t worry who owns the copyright on the conversation you have on the phone or the email that you write to a friend. Yet, when viewed through the prism of a “content” platform, these are open questions. The same is true of things like blog comments. Yet, suddenly we find people arguing over who “owns” comments place on a blog page.

Mathew Ingram does a nice job highlighting the key issues that were raised this week on that question, but the whole conversation took a turn for the bizarre when Hank Williams weighed in. This is the same Hank Williams who posted a poorly researched defense of copyright. Now he’s back claiming that the issue of who owns the copyright on blog comments is a really important question. If anything, you would think that the points he raises in his post would actually be the perfect evidence for why his original post was wrong (though he seems to miss that). It’s quite clear from what he wrote that copyright law doesn’t handle this situation very well — which makes sense, because copyright is (again) designed for broadcast media, not communications. But rather than realize that’s a good reason why copyright shouldn’t apply at all here, Williams doubles down on why “ownership” over comments is something that needs to be worked out — he suggests that blog and comment system providers create a totally useless mechanism to “declare” ownership of comments.

Except that this system is not at all necessary, and would only lead to more problems. The entire purpose of copyright is to act as incentive for the creation of that content. Yet, I think most people would find it preposterous to claim that the reason they commented on a blog was because of the protections provided by copyright. In other words, there’s no question to worry about here because this content was all created without copyright being the incentive. However, in this bizarre and twisted world where infinitely available resources need to be shrunk down and “owned,” Williams insists that we need to figure out who has the copyright on comments.

In the comments to Hank’s own story, things get even more bizarre. First, Hank suggests that if the blog owner “owned” the comments then that might mean that the blog owner also “owned” the liability associated with those comments (which could mean in cases of libel or copyright infringement). Once again, though, Williams is showing his ignorance, as both cases are clearly covered by the safe harbors of the CDA and the DMCA, and the stacks upon stacks of case law concerning liability on things like blog comments. It’s quite clear that Williams thinks ownership of infinite resources is a good idea — but he doesn’t appear to have thought through what that means and why it’s neither necessary nor a good idea. Too bad.

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Wired is running a story about Christopher Tarnovsky, the man who was accused of working for NDS, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., to sabotage a competitor’s satellite TV system. Wired had a chance to speak with Tarnovsky and get his description of how the smart-card hacking war developed. Quoting: “Tarnovsky, who was known online as ‘Big Gun,’ says Ereiser offered him $20,000 to fix cards that were killed by ECMs, and he agreed. Each time NDS created a countermeasure, Tarnovsky would analyze the code and find a way to circumvent the countermeasure. He did it while working full-time as a software engineer for a semiconductor company in Massachusetts. ‘I’d be at work and I’d check the IRC (channel) to see if they’d launched their Thursday countermeasure yet,’ he says. ‘It was like a chess game for me. I couldn’t wait for them to do a countermeasure because I would counter it in minutes.’ It wasn’t long before NDS came courting. Tarnovsky had a contact at the company to whom he’d begun passing information about holes in its software, even supplying patches to fix them.”

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For years, Prince was the poster child for “getting” the internet and new media distribution opportunities. He experimented with a variety of different creative business models that suggested he got how the economics of music worked these days. It was working too — with his efforts to give away his music helping him sell out concert after concert around the world. But then something changed, and Prince went ballistic, suing YouTube, The Pirate Bay and eBay and even threatening fan sites while demanding that even videos with tiny snippets of Prince music in the background get taken offline. The whole thing is quite surprising, and if he keeps this up, he’s risking taking all that goodwill he built up for years, and turning himself into another Metallica. Becoming anti-fan is never a good idea.

The latest story, though, has a twist. Prince apparently did a cover of a Radiohead song at a recent concert. Someone filmed it and put the video on YouTube. Given his newfound hatred for YouTube, Prince demanded that the song be taken down. And here’s where it gets interesting: Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is demanding that it be put back online, noting that he owns the copyright on the song: “Really? He’s blocked it?… Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our … song.” Of course, as that LA Times report notes, in true Streisand Effect fashion, the effort to take down the song has only driven much more interest in people trying to find the song. If Prince weren’t suing so many people, you might even think he was canny enough to have done this on purpose as a marketing campaign.

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The Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully deployed its robotic arm and tested other instruments including a laser designed to detect dust, clouds, and fog. The arm will be used to dig up samples of the Martian surface which will be analyzed as a possible habitat for life. A camera on the arm will allow pictures to be taken of the ground directly beneath the lander. The camera has already seen what may be ice, which was exposed when the soil was disturbed by the landing. The data collected by the arm will be compared to recent findings which suggest that water on Mars may have been too salty for most known forms of life.

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There’s been an ongoing

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In this question-and-answer session, we talk with the Twitter persona of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, then reveal the true identity of @MarsPhoenix.

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Wiimotes and other accidentally airborne objects can wreak havoc with delicate HDTV screens. Enter TV-Armor: A heavy-duty acrylic shield designed to protect your TV’s sensitive parts.

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Fresh from a high-profile civil trial that cleared his former employer of piracy charges, satellite TV hacker Christopher Tarnovsky opens the door of his private lab to show Wired.com how he circumvents security on smart cards. Please don’t try this at home.

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Lucas123 writes “Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate’s inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won’t be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. ‘It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,’ on price and reliability.”

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A few weeks back, we wrote about how Immersion was involved in a bizarre lawsuit involving a firm focused on the “teledildonics” market (look it up — or, actually, you’re probably better off not). Immersion, of course, is well known in the tech world for holding a bunch of patents on “haptic” technology, which many people are more familiar with as “force feedback” in devices like video game controllers. Immersion is not afraid to use its patents and has been involved in numerous lawsuits — with the big one yielding $130 million from Sony for the force feedback controllers used in the PlayStation. The case mentioned a few weeks ago involved a shell firm that Immersion had done a deal with. Since Immersion didn’t want to smear its own name by suing companies involved in force feedback sex devices, it basically licensed the legal rights out to this shell company. However, that shell company felt that Immersion owed it some of the $130 million Sony booty.

While the case with the shell company has now been dismissed, Jim Mullin notes an even more interesting case: Microsoft is also demanding a large cut of the Sony settlement money. Here’s where things get tricky. Basically, Immersion had sued Microsoft as well for violating the patents. But, as we’ve seen other companies do, part of the settlement terms between Immersion and Microsoft are that Microsoft would join the patent battle against Sony and get a cut of any settlement money that came out of that lawsuit. In effect, rather than just paying up to license the patent, Microsoft switched sides in the lawsuit.

However, Immersion used some sneaky tricks to skirt around its agreement with Microsoft — most specifically never referring to its deal with Sony as a “settlement.” Thus, it claimed that it doesn’t owe a dime to Microsoft (some thanks Microsoft got for paying up, huh?). So now Microsoft has sued, though muddling the whole case is the fact that in filing the lawsuit, Microsoft released some confidential info, which caused Immersion to sue Microsoft as well. And just think, folks, all this money being spent on lawyers could actually have gone into making better game controllers. But who wants to do that when there are more lawyers to pay?

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Upstart videogame developer Platinum Games goes against the grain, creating a gory Wii game, a complicated space adventure for Nintendo DS and other glorious wonders.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “India is now the third country to appeal the ISO’s approval of OOXML, with their appeal arriving just before the deadline last night. According to PC World, this makes OOXML the first BRM process under ISO/JTC 1 to be appealed, which leaves us in uncharted territory. Although there was substantial confusion in the comments on yesterday’s story, Brazil is really appealing, not merely disapproving, of OOXML, having sent a letter that begins with ‘The Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result.’ Groklaw speculates that this may have something to do with Microsoft hedging their bets by supporting ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, though we probably won’t see any more countries appeal now that the deadline has passed.”

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Linux.com (who shares corporate overlords with Slashdot) is reporting that gNewSense has gone 2.0. For the uninitiated gNewSense is a stripped down version of Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron for the free software purist. Removing over 100 pieces of proprietary code and firmware, gNewSense offers a user the ability to run an OS where everything is able to be studied, changed, and redistributed. “gNewSense is a great alternative to Gobuntu, the Canonical-sponsored free derivative of Ubuntu. According to its wiki page, the 8.04 version of Gobuntu hasn’t been released due to a less-than-optimal reaction from the community. Gobuntu used the same repositories as Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu live CD can achieve the same installation as Gobuntu by merely selecting the free-software-only option in the installer (press F6 twice at the boot menu). Also, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has indicated that he would rather focus on gNewSense because the work on that distribution can help the Ubuntu community as a whole. “

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Hussain Bahia has been studying asphalt for 20 years and says he knows how to make it more ecologically friendly.

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Four Palo Alto teens found themselves chased down a street and detained by Apple store security for 2.5 hours after they downloaded a third-party game onto a store phone.

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Apple Core, makers of a third-party Apple TV upgrade, abruptly withdrew its product from the market yesterday, citing unspecified copyright concerns. Company representatives say they were not pressured to do so by Apple or any other party.

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Erik J writes “Remember about six weeks ago when Motley Crue and Rock Band partnered to release a new single premiering first in the game before anywhere else? Come to find out their song ‘Saints of Los Angeles’ was downloaded over 47,000 times on the Xbox version alone, beating out digital services iTunes and Amazon who only were only tapped 10,000 times for the single.”

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Is the Apocalypse upon us, or is this just our generation’s equivalent of the Nixon-Elvis summit? Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and KISS just happen to be Sweden at the same time — so naturally she paid a call on the guys. In their hotel room. Said she was thrilled to meet them. It happened: there are pictures.

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Wanna tap e-mail, voice and Web traffic for the government? Here’s your chance. Comcast, the country’s second-largest Internet provider, is looking for an engineer to handle “reconnaissance” and “analysis” of “subscriber intelligence” for the company’s “National Security Operations.”

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Dr. Jim writes “The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years. The usual suspects including multi-core chips, virtualization, and cloud computing are on the list. Multicore servers and virtualization will mean that firms will need fewer boxes, and apps can be easily moved from box to box (and right out the door to an outsourced data center). Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm’s apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes.”

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A prominent neuroscientist told a crowd at the World Science Festival that the curious phenomenon of synesthesia — in which some people “taste” colors or “hear” smells — is simply a consequence of the aptitude humans evolved for abstraction.

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Naveen Jain is nothing if not confident in himself. Back in 2000, as founder and CEO of InfoSpace, he famously declared both that InfoSpace was bigger than the internet, and that it would be the world’s first trillion dollar company. More specifically, he said: “There are two kinds of people in this world… those who don’t believe in God, and those who believe in God and InfoSpace. That’s OK — the nonbelievers will be converted when we become a trillion-dollar company.” Now, it’s one thing to be confident, but it’s another thing to be cooking the books to try to get there. After InfoSpace imploded and Jain was sent packing, an investigative report uncovered all sorts of evidence about how much of InfoSpace’s revenue was a huge scam, involving outright lies and “lazy susan” deals, where InfoSpace would “invest” in a company, who would turn around and pretend to buy InfoSpace services as a way to boost revenue.

Jain moved on and started a new company called Intelius, which claims to help you get background information on people — though it’s not hard to find many, many, many people who claim that the information is next to useless. Still, it’s managed to bring in a ton of revenue, and with that has been planning to go public. However, Mike Arrington did a fantastic bit of sleuthing to discover that much of that revenue seems to come from a very questionable method.

Basically, Intelius gets you to cough up some money for the “information” it has on someone. Afterwards, it asks you to take a short survey, promising to give you $10 for your time. The survey is quick, but down below, in tiny gray-colored hard-to-read print, it notes that in submitting the “survey,” you’re actually agreeing to sign up for a $20/month “service” that, according to Arrington, doesn’t appear to do anything other than charge you $20/month. As for that $10? Well, it’s never mentioned again (nor is the $20/month you’ll be paying… other than on your credit card bill). The “service” is a separate company (though Intelius gives them your credit card info), but clearly pays Intelius a fee for each signup. Arrington does a few back of the envelope calculations and figures that nearly all of Intelius’ “growth” comes from these scammed deals, which, some claim are also difficult to cancel.

The whole thing stinks, and you would think that, given the situation with InfoSpace, the backers of Intelius’ IPO would have done a bit more due diligence before agreeing to take the company public.

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Primitive tribes who prefer isolation to assimilation are increasingly endangered by the encroachment of modern civilization, the Brazilian government says.

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Author Jim Rossignol makes a case for videogames’ amazing potential in a world filled with doubters.

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