There’s been so much interesting news lately that it’s hard to keep up with it all.
These are the stories I’ve personally found most interesting:
7/28/2010 – from WIRED:
Google, CIA Invest in “Future” of Web Monitoring
“The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
7/29/2010 – from ReveNews:
Affiliate’s Indicted for Cookie Stuffing
“The defendants in the following cases are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Criminal Charges Filed
On June 24, 2010, two separate indictments were handed down by a grand jury in California against Shawn Hogan (pdf) and Brian Dunning (pdf) following an FBI investigation by the Cyber Crimes Department. The indictments charge Hogan and Dunning with wire fraud and criminal forfeiture. Hogan was charged with ten counts of wire fraud and Dunning with five counts of wire fraud.”
7/29/2010 – from Citizen’s Media Law Project
“FTC Seeks to Clarify — and Justify — Its Blogger Endorsement Guidelines
The Federal Trade Commission recently issued a factsheet in response to questions it received about its revised guidelines requiring disclosure of compensated endorsements.”
8/4/2010 – from Bizop.ca
“Montana Securities Claims ACN is a Pyramid
Montana Securities Commissioner Lindeen takes action against ACN, Inc for alleged pyramid scheme
Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Monica J. Lindeen announced the issuance of a Cease and Desist Order and Notice of Proposed Agency Action against ACN, Inc. for allegedly operating a “pyramid scheme.”
Thanks for the reference to the FTC story.
Just for humor, I sent Ben Edelman – the Harvard Professor in charge of compliance for eBay – the Shoemoney thread on Hogan.
I would love to know more about how Edelman picked up the cookie stuffing scheme. He is a pretty bright guy, worth looking at his papers. http://www.benedelman.org/
I’ve followed Ben on and off. Just officially subscribed to his feed.
http://www.spywarewarrior.com/ was an excellent site as well back when it was more active. Now, it’s all be defunct.