The Federal Bureau of Investigation Office of General Counsel (GLU) sent a letter to Wikimedia Foundation (the parent company of Wikipedia) ordering them to remove the FBI shield from it’s pages (“Unathorized posting of the FBI Seal”) and threatening litigation.
The image in question is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-FBI-
ShadedSeal.svg.
The letter states that “the site itself notes, ‘Unauthorized use of the FBI seal . . . is
subject to criminal prosecution under Federal criminallaw, including 18 U.S.C. 701.’” Unauthorized reproduction or use of the FB I Seal is prohibited by 18 United States Code, Section 701.
The underlying concern for reproduction of the seal is to prevent people from reproducing the seal and flashing it without authority. However, many websites, including the web version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display a reproduction of the seal.
Wikipedia responded with a fairly “feisty” (as described by the NY Times): “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version.”
Consumer Reports did a study on Apple’s new iPhone 4 and found that the antenna problem along the side bars of the device significantly effects the ability to maintain a signal and make phone calls. By holding the iPhone a certain way (as demonstrated in the video below), the iPhone will experience a reduced signal to the extend that it can drop phone calls. Following this study, Consumer Reports stated that they are unable to recommend the iPhone 4–as this problem is significant.
Starbucks has finally begun to offer free wifi. The no-charge, limitation-free and no-registration wifi initiative will take place in both the US and in Canada.
Starbucks has been working on it’s own network, called Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo!. The idea of the network will be to offer a seamless entertainment service for mobile devices. The Wall Street Journal is already part of the project as a premium content partner.
Apple released the iPhone 4 with a potentially critical flaw. If you hold the iPhone a certain way, the device will lose it’s signal, as the antennas are placed on the left and right side of the device. The flaw is especially bothersome for left-handed users. Apple’s response will not go in the textbooks for the best ways to handle a bad PR situation:
“avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band.”
Video demonstration of the iPhone 4 losing it’s signal — determined by how you hold it.
A great new feature was added to Google Apps–Google’s business fleet of web-based office software. Google Apps now supports multiple domains.
Prior to this update, if you owned multiple web domains, you would need to have several Google Apps accounts–one for each. As part of the upgrade, there is a new admin control which gives a single panel hotbox for managing the different domains.
Sharing is also expanded with this upgrade. You will now be able to share documents across domains.
Facebook’s 2009 revenue was almost 800 million, according to a report by Reuters. Facebook also turned part of that revenue into solid net profit. This revenue is higher than previous estimates of 500 million. “They are downplaying their performance…” stated one Reuters source.
If Facebook is heading towards an IPO, than they would be better to show giant growth rather than high numbers–only to have to contend with those numbers later. Also, the company needs to address privacy concerns with the public–and outline that it can build consumer trust moving forward rather than living in consumer trust murky black water.
Google has made strides to move many of the Android users over to the Android 2.0 environment. Google recently released statistics that show that 50.4 percent of all Android devices that connected to the Android marketplace in the past two weeks of early June 2010 were running Android mobile OS 2.0 or higher.
There has been concern for a growing divide in capabilities between more modern forms of the OS and earlier incarnations. These recent statistics provide a sense of comfort for such concerns–that users are moving towards the more advanced 2.0 environment and upgrading their software (and in some cases, devices).
Overnight Print’s blog featured an interesting article on “Top 5 Small Business Marketing Products” that provide ideas like instead of “getting t-shirts printed with your business name on, go a step further and find out if a local sports club would like to have their uniforms sponsored by your business!”. The idea of printing on M&Ms was quite interesting, but I wished they provided a link directly to that feature. I agree that the USB drive as a marketing product is another good idea, and the pricepoint of “64 MB drive with your logo on it for around $5″ is doable for a lot of businesses.
Overall, I like the direction that Overnight Prints is taking with this blog post. I much prefer it to others like “Become our No.1 Fan on Flickr…Win 500 Free…”. Looking forward to more Overnight Prints!
Web Designer NY put out a brief outline of HTML 5, and what it will be for web designers. It is a very high-level look at the new core language for the web. We found this useful for those that are not familiar with the features of HTML 5, but might be interested in learning more.
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