Recovery.gov, a heavily advertised government-run transparency site that relaunched on Monday after criticisms about it's actual content, still fails to meet the federal government's accessibility standards or and practices. The non-compliance issues relate mostly to display of data tables -- an essential point given the site's motto of "Data, Data & More Data." This is…
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Google’s Chrome Frame Gains Enemies
Just released last week, Google's browser plug-in Chrome Frame is already causing a stir. The plug- in allows IE6, IE7 and IE8 users to utilize Chrome browser's WebKit rendering engine, as well as its high-performance V8 JavaScript engine. Google originally pitched it as a way to instantly improve the performance of the always unsatisfactory Internet…
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Can Micropayments Save Internet News?
No matter how many times people collect information and research micropayments, trying to pop the bubble of faith around them as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry, they consistently maintain some level of support. Newspapers have spent the past century with a monopoly on tools of mass publishing as well as the means…
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Performance Rights Groups May Cause Price Hike
Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are all preparing to eventually collect "performance fees" from e-tailers like Apple for traditional music downloads and the music included in downloads of television episodes and movies. This group even wants compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples. iTunes customers aren't even over the recent and first ever download price hikes,…
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Google Acquires reCAPTCHA
On Wednesday, Google took a major step in accelerating its efforts to scan tens of millions of books and periodicals. ReCAPTCHA, a well-known provider of CAPTCHA technology, is used to prevent spammers from using computers to automatically register for online services. By requiring users to type randomly chosen words that appear as images, the "Completely…
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Whatever Happened to Widespread Wi-Fi?
A few years back, a whole host of commercial and community schemes were underway which promised to blanket towns in free - or very cheap - wireless connectivity. But now, it's extremely rare to find wi-fi that is both easily accessible as well as affordable. It's far more likely to use the internet while on…
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Google Books Sees Another Obstacle
Tuesday, the continuing opposition to Google Books settlement took a turn, as civil rights groups told a federal court that they believe the plan to digitize millions of books will threaten readers’ privacy. These groups include The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic of the University…
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Intel Halts Shipments Due To Bug
Yesterday, Intel confirmed that its new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M solid state-disk drives (SSDs) have serious data corruption issues and told the press that it has halted all shipments to resellers. The brand new line of X25-M (2.5-inch) and X18-M (1.8-inch) SSDs were inspired by a joint venture with Micron and utilized that company's 34-nanometer lithography technology. Micron uses a process which allows for a denser,…
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Spotify- Coming to America
Spotify is coming to America -finally- and has high hopes for being the next big music thing. With an application that seems to work by magic, replacing iTunes and giving access to over 6 million tracks on demand, Spotify has already spent its' first months out of beta as the most successful music sharing platform in…
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Microsoft’s ActiveX Bug Remains Unpatched
The latest Microsoft vulnerability is being attacked at an alarmingly increasing rate. Several security companies warned consumers today as the developing threat prompted Symantec to raise their Threatcon ranking to the second of four steps. Sunbelt Software, and SANS' Internet Storm Center also bumped their warnings yesterday after Microsoft announced that the well known ActiveX…
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