I looked at this picture in udder disbelief.

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Google has been asked by a US law enforcement agency to remove several videos exposing police brutality from the video sharing service YouTube, the company has revealed in its latest update to an online transparency report.

Another request filed by a different agency required Google to remove videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. The two requests were among 92 submissions for content removal by various authorities in the US filed between January and June 2011. Both were rejected by Google along with 27 per cent of the submissions.

The IT giant says the overall number of requests for content removal it receives from governmental agencies has risen, and so has the number of requests to disclose the private data of Google users.

Brazil heads the first list with 224 separate demands to remove a total of 689 items from its search results, as well as from YouTube and various other services. Google says its social networking service Orkut is very popular in the Latin American country, which partially explains the number of requests.

Any sufficiently unequal distribution of property will be indistinguishable from monarchy.

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Siri doesn’t replace search, but in many cases it circumvents it by directing users straight to integrated partner services. When you ask for the nearest Indian restaurant there’s still a search taking place, but it’s through Yelp, not a generic search engine that would include Yelp plus various other results.

By skipping the search engine and going straight to a designated source there is no place to insert advertising. If the results are embedded in Siri’s response, as Yelp recommendations are now, the only way for advertising to appear as part of the process is if the user manually goes to the partner site.

The model changes. For the subset of services it supports, Siri could deliver more value to the user by more quickly getting them to the information they need, or by completing a task for them. It creates more value for Apple by selling more devices. The value to the partner sites is an increase in traffic without having to pay the per-click fees of a search engine, and potentially in licensing fees, although the sites may lose out on their own advertising opportunities, depending on how they were integrated.

Search engines are hurt by reduced traffic, reduced user tracking, and reduced opportunities to deliver advertising.

When Steve said he was going to kill Google, he was Siri-ous.

Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

A fourth moon is visible on the above image if you look hard enough.First — and furthest in the background — is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and one of the larger moons in the Solar System. The dark feature across the top of this perpetually cloudy world is the north polar hood. The next most obvious moon is bright Dione, visible in the foreground, complete with craters and long ice cliffs. Jutting in from the left are several of Saturn’s expansive rings, including Saturn’s A ring featuring the dark Encke Gap. On the far right, just outside the rings, is Pandora, a moon only 80-kilometers across that helps shepherd Saturn’s F ring. The fourth moon? If you look closely in the Encke Gap you’ll find a speck that is actually Pan. Although one of Saturn’s smallest moons at 35-kilometers across, Pan is massive enough to help keep the Encke gap relatively free of ring particles.

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Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.

After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it won’t allow its records to be opened for public review at the National Archives until 2031, because some of the documents contain “sensitive information,” according to one official.

So they know who stole the money, and whoever did it is important enough to get protection..

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”Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn’t like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He’s right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realise it’s rubbish, even though based on the CAD [computer-aided design] renderings it looked great.

”He loves coming in here because it’s calm and gentle. It’s a paradise if you’re a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. ”Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don’t run into major disagreements.”

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A US Patent granted today (October 25) will send Google and Android phone makers around the world reaching for their lawyers.

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A top US government official believes that the internet is under fierce attack by authoritarian governments worldwide, and that the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

"Today we face a series of challenges at the intersection of human rights, connected technologies, business, and government. It’s a busy intersection – and a lot of people want to put up traffic lights," said US Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, speaking at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

While the so-called "Arab Spring" may have proved the power of the internet to inform and unite repressed populations – an idea that Google’s public policy honcho dismissed as "hype" – Posner believes that it also awakened repressive governments to the need to more tightly control communication among their citizens.

"The result has been more censorship, more surveillance, and more restrictions," Posner said.

It’s unclear if Posner has a mirror he can look in.

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Even with unemployment hovering around 9%, companies are grousing that they can’t find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.

Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren’t giving kids the right kind of training. The government isn’t letting in enough high-skill immigrants. The list goes on and on.

But I believe that the real culprits are the employers themselves.

And then she goes on to say

Bring back aspects of apprenticeship: In this arrangement, apprentices are paid less while they are mastering their craft—so employers aren’t paying for training and a big salary at the same time. Accounting firms, law firms and professional-services firms have long operated this way, and have made lots of money off their young associates.

So blaming the employers results in shifting the financial burden of on-the-job training to the employee and longer probationary periods with lower pay?

I know this is the WSJ, but come on!

Let me make this simple for you: Henry Ford had difficulty finding the employees he needed. After he doubled the wages of his workers, he didn’t have that problem any more.

Companies used to have “personnel”, now they have “human resources”. Personnel are like farmland, they need to be tended. Human resources are like mineral resources — and what do you do with mineral resources?

You exploit them, of course.

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Clearly GM has heard from a lot of cycling folks, including BikePortland who first alerted GM through twitter that all hell was breaking lose about these ads. According to the LA Times and from the GM Twitter feed, hey have been very busy responding to all the messages they got via facebook and twitter – and have basically apologized and said they are going to change the campaign and drop the ads, which is good.

(10.11.11.)

If you are a student looking to add tens of thousands of dollars of long term debt, care little about the environment, and want to lump two tons of steel around campus while paying through the nose for insurance, gas, and parking…General Motors has got a perfect deal for you. Bonus: it’ll make you fat and unhealthy! All you have to do is give up that dorky bicycle that’s easy to use, practically free, gets you some exercise and is actually fun to ride.

In one of the more remarkably ill-conceived car ad campaigns of all time, good corporate citizen GM is heading to campus to actively stop you from riding a bike by trying to make it look like it sucks. Obviously it’s been a while since GM execs and their creative teams set foot on campus. Anyway, I’m sure the campus facilities people will love having to add thousands of extra car parking spaces on campus at $30,000 a pop (who needs more buildings to learn in anyway, lets fill campus with parking structures); and University Presidents will have a little bit of explaining to do when it comes to those end of year climate and greenhouse gas targets… Maybe it’ll generate more business in the gym where students can drive in to go and ride on stationary bikes. Hope there’s enough parking.

In case you were wondering, GM has a fine-sounding corporate responsibility statement – carefully crafted by the best in the business, I’m sure. One sample quote: “As a responsible corporate citizen, General Motors is dedicated to protecting human health, natural resources and the global environment.

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Facebook Ireland is under fire for allegedly creating “shadow profiles” on both users and nonusers alike.

The startling charges against the social-networking giant come from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (IDC), which, Fox News reports today, is launching a“comprehensive” investigation against Facebook Ireland for extracting data from current users–without their consent or knowledge–and building “extensive profiles” on people who haven’t even signed on for the service.

Names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, work information, and perhaps even more sensitive information such as sexual orientation, political affiliations, and religious beliefs are being collected and could possibly be misused, Irish authorities claim.

Interestingly, Facebook users living outside of the United States or Canada are contracted with Facebook Ireland. Facebook users living inside the United States and Canada are contracted with Facebook Inc., headquartered in California. Running afoul of privacy laws is much more likely for companies operating outside of the United States, especially in Europe, where privacy laws are much more stringent.

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A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist – even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal – part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice – would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

Open-government groups object.

Change, as brought to you by Mr. Obama.