+ 3 - 7 | § ¶MySpace, Fox, and Politics
A potentially freaky story:MySpace launched a U.S. presidential campaign site Monday, and it has the potential of reaching millions of people who don't otherwise go to political Web sites, one analyst said.
MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive Media Inc., launched MySpace Impact, featuring MySpace pages for 2008 presidential candidates.
Candidates with pages on MySpace Monday were Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton of New York; Barack Obama of Illinois; Joe Biden of Delaware; and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio; John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate, along with Republicans Senator John McCain of Arizona; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Libertarian Ron Paul also has a page.
MySpace hopes to play a "powerful role" in the 2008 elections, CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a statement. The site plans to give users easy-to-use information in a format they can relate to, he said.
MySpace, with 64.4 million unique visitors from the U.S. in February, has the potential to play a major role, said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at ComScore Networks, a Web traffic measurement firm. MySpace users represented about 37 percent of all U.S. Internet users, he said.
As the article notes in passing, MySpace is a division of Fox, and so I wouldn't be surprised if the "millions of people reached" by this campaign get a "fair and balanced" slant. Hopefully most of them will be intelligent enough to realize that they need to look beyond a profile page to get actual information.
+ 6 - 4 | § ¶Don't share your files: think of the children!
Absurd:In today's Let's Be A Little Overdramatic file, a newly released report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggests that networked file and music sharing could harm children and threaten national security.
The November, 2006, report, entitled "Filesharing Programs and Technological Features to Induce Users to Share," makes two main points across the span of its 80 pages:
* that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic, and
* file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job
Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file actions, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge.
I bet downloading stuff gives you cancer too. Seriously though, while downloading everything willy-nilly is not a solution, neither is having draconian DRM policies as the big IP corporations tend to push. There'll never be a real dialogue to solve this issue as long as you have official sources (e.g. the government) spouting this kind of nonsense. Pretty reminiscent of the "war on drugs"...