p2pnet headline roundups – Dec 12, 2007
p2pnet headline roundups | Last of the day …
Women are top tech shoppers – Times Online
Women will overtake men as the primary buyers of electronic gadgets for the first time this Christmas, according to department-store chain John Lewis. Helen Keppel Compton at the company told The Sunday Times that a “tipping point” had been reached this winter and women would be responsible for between 50% and 60% of all purchases in its electrical departments during the festive season.
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Report Advises Caution Shoppping Online – Associated Press
Some popular online retailers don’t do enough either to inform customers how their personal information could be used or to give them control over it, according to a public interest research group. CyberStreetSmart.org, a project of the New York Public Interest Research Group, has issued “screen door” and “steel door” awards to retail Web sites after evaluating their protections for customers’ personal information. The group reviewed the privacy policies of 484 online retailers in October and November. Disneyshopping.com and homedepot.com received screen door awards, meaning they’re not doing such a good job. Sites that won steel door awards include netflix.com, ralphlauren.com and rocawear.com.
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Facebook’s viral marketing catches a bug – Valleywag
Developers write apps for Facebook not because it’s a wonder of modern software, but because it lets them tap into Facebook’s 60 million users. The result: a surfeit of zombie bites and Scrabble challenges, spread, in Valley parlance, “virally” from friend to friend on the social network. Last night, Facebook proved antiviral. A bug deleted all pending requests from friends to add an application. “Anyone else seeing that invitation acceptance numbers are down significantly over the past 7-8 hours?” one developer wrote in a Facebook forum. “Since about midnight PT, our signup numbers through requests/invites are about 40% lower than we’d normally expect.” Facebook’s response? An emoticon! “Hey, there appears to have been some data loss last night. It seems (ironically) that a script that was supposed to be backing things up and cleaning out old platform requests that were already acted on actually went haywire and instead deleted new requests that were not supposed to have been deleted. 
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Websites Made Chumps by Phony Trump Story – UMDb
A recent story that Donald Trump left a waiter at Santa Monica restaurant The Buffalo Club a $10,000 tip was a hoax fabricated by a new website, Derober.com, the Los Angeles Times disclosed today (Tuesday). Among outlets carrying the phony report were FoxNews.com, Defamer, E! Online, and the Huffington Post.
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World’s first ‘newspaper’ phone launched in Sweden – The Local
Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter said on Wednesday it had launched the world’s first “newspaper” telephone: a mobile phone offering the daily’s subscribers direct and free access to its website.
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United Online Cancels Classmates IPO – paidContent
So much for the first pureplay social networking IPO in U.S.: United Online (NSDQ: UNTD) has canceled the proposed IPO of its Classmates.com social networking unit. The company originally announced its plan to hive off the company in August, and in late November it said it expected to raise $177.7 million via the sale. But, citing the standard “market conditions,” the company now says that such a move wouldn’t be in the interest of stockholders. In other words, the interest wasn’t there.
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Microsoft swoop hands Multimap founder $25m – Times Online
The deal, understood to be worth a little more than $50 million (£24.4m), will further expand Microsoft’s fast-growing footprint in online and mobile advertising. It will also deliver a windfall worth about $25 million to Sean Phelan, the Multimap founder, who owns a majority stake in the business.
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Behind The Scenes of the Swiss DMCA Fight – TorrentFreak
Whilst America is often considered by many to be the home of overreaching and overprotective copyright laws, the Swiss government has decided that it can do better, and so quietly passed a bill in an attempt to catch the US. However, the Swiss won’t accept such a law without a fight. Swiss DMCA referendum logoThe law, dubbed by many to be a ‘Swiss DMCA’ was slipped through on October 5th with little fanfare, and overwhelming legislative support. Annoyed, Florian Bösch started the ‘No Swiss DMCA’ campaign to do something about it. Unusually, Mr Bösch is actually a coder that works on DRM systems. He agreed to talk with TorrentFreak to discuss the law and his aims.
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IIA ready for new censor battle – Australian IT
Australia’s peak internet industry group will this week launch its bid to force Labor to rethink its internet filtering policy.
Internet Industry Association’s Peter Coroneos said the organisation would meet Labor’s new Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy this week to brief the federal Government on mandatory ISP-level internet filtering. “It’s premature to say anything more at the moment, except that there are concerns in the industry on implementing anything that could be unworkable,” Mr Coroneos said.
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