filmlikenyc.com

Browner, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was interviewed on Friday along with other business and political leaders at the Atlantic’s First Draft of History conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The interview was streamed live online.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

She said that a “piecemeal” approach to regulations will not create the certainty that businesses need to make investments in clean-energy technologies because the regulations create demand.

Some lawmakers are drawn to clean-energy technology policies out of concern that China will “best” the U.S. economically, she added.

She argued that U.S. businesses will invest more in clean-energy technologies once Congress passes a law with incentives for renewable energy and efficiency as well as a cap-and-trade system that limits heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

A number of large companies and green technology start-ups continue to urge lawmakers to set up regulations that put a price on carbon emissions, with many business people preferring a cap-and-trade system. With a cap-and-trade, large polluters such as utilities can buy and sell permits to emit carbon to stay under a government-set cap, a system already used to reduce other air pollutants.

The Obama administration is pushing for a “comprehensive” energy and climate bill because it will provide the economic foundation to spur investment in clean-energy technologies, said Carol Browner, the president’s assistant on energy and climate.

The House narrowly passed an energy and climate bill in May. The Senate earlier this week introduced its own version although passage of any combined bill is not expected before the end of this year. The timing is significant in international negotiations because the Copenhagen round of international climate negotiations will start in December this year.

The process around the passage of Waxman-Markey worked because lawmakers addressed regional and competitive issues posed by a cap on carbon emissions. For example, special programs to address high-polluting industries and incentives for regions that rely heavily on coal were set up.

Passage of the bill in the Senate is far from certain with 60 votes needed. Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency went ahead with a program to see how carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from stationary sources, such as power plants and factories, would be regulated under the Clean Air Act. But that is not the route that the Obama administration prefers, Browner said.

“We want to tools so we can work with the business community to reduce these pollutants,” Browner said. “Every time we’ve implemented environmental clean-air regulations, we’ve gotten solutions more quickly and at dramatically less cost than anticipated.”

“The point is we have to get started, we have to send a signal to the marketplace that we are going to be dealing with these (greenhouse gas) emissions in a different way,” she said.

Carol Browner, assistant to the president on energy and climate change, speaking at MIT earlier this year.

In response to a question, she said that nuclear power has to be part of the U.S. energy future. “You can’t rule out clean sources of fuel,” she said. Energy storage, particularly for solar and wind, and smart appliances that lower household electricity usage are some of the most active areas of technology development, she said.

In the real world, one’s choice of friends may, indeed, send out signals about all kinds of characteristics and predilections one might have.

But here’s one that might make some readers feel that the world is now irreversibly eerie.

I know those chaps at MIT get involved in some strange pursuits.

One of the students’ professors, Hal Abelson, used some interesting imagery to describe their apparent discovery, now excitingly dubbed Project “Gaydar.” Said Abelson: “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don’t have control over your information.”

(Credit: CC Todd Huffman/Flickr)

Especially, it seems, his friends.

I’m not sure I am quite as excited by this rug-pulling as Professor Abelson.

And in the Facebook world, who cares if someone is gay or straight? They’re not real friends anyway, are they?

I might, though, just be wrong, mightn’t I?

So they delved into some Facebook profile data and believe they have created software that can tell whether someone on Facebook is gay, merely by looking at his or her friends.

However, I am not frightfully fond of the concept of even well-meaning uberbrains trawling through my personal things in order to make assertions about who, what, how or even where I am.

According to the Boston Globe, two MIT students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, seemingly fascinated with ethics and law and, possibly, other people’s sex lives, became enraptured by how much information people are revealing through their Facebook profiles.

Although the students couldn’t actually prove that what they surmised was true, they used what they seem to describe as personal knowledge and concluded that their program was especially accurate when it came to identifying gay men.

I am sure, for example, that if I were to come to your house and examine your underwear drawer I might be tempted to reach certain conclusions about your lifestyle.

Google knows.

From a business perspective, Toeman isn’t sure if trying to foil the googlers is the right way to go. He says, “Maybe the right way is to make the questions easier, so more people play.” There’s less fun in that model, I think. Although probably more money.

These methods have their flaws. The first type of question might turn off pure trivia buffs, and the second penalizes players who are using the service via mobile devices (since the pictures are viewed on linked Web sites).

The tendency for people to cheat online is one of the reasons I initially told Jeremy Toeman I wasn’t going to cover his Twitter quiz game, Trivia On Twitter, which rewards fast answers to Twittered trivia questions with real prizes. What’s the challenge here? Anything you can ask can be googled. The best players would be those who are able to read search results pages the fastest. No fun.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But, Toeman told me today, he’s trying to come up with trivia challenges that rewards more than google skills. Some of the questions involve calculations, or multiple steps, such as “How many U.S. states are there with only four different letters in their names?” He’s also looking at creating picture questions, in which players have to identify an image. He’ll be running the pictures through an image editor first, modifying them so image-matching engines like TinEye are not likely to find them.

Trivia On Twitter’s business model includes running sponsored giveaways so there’s some motivation from users to employ all means possible to win games. To date, the prizes have been in the Bluetooth headset range, keeping organized “cheating” to a minimum, but if this business succeeds and gets bigger, it will end up with bigger prizes, raising the motivation to win at all costs by gathering teams of people, poised at their computers–some on Wikipedia, others on IMDB, others at search engines–ready to look up questions in particular areas. The game currently has fewer than 3,000 followers, so there’s a lot of room left for growth.

So straight-up trivia will remain the focus of the game. And for those standard trivia questions, Toeman says, the nature of the Internet means that the trivia team has to reverse-engineer questions (culled, often, from their own google queries) to reward people with actual knowledge, compared to those who are speedy googlers.

The team has to make clear trivia questions into bad google queries. But the game rewards speedy answers. The idea is to craft questions for which only people with their own knowledge are likely to be first. “The goal,” Toeman tells me, “is not to make questions more time-consuming, but to reward the people who actually have the knowledge.” If you really know something, you can still be faster than someone who has to look it up. Toeman says that the typical response time for the first right answer on the game is fifteen seconds. The slowest time-to-correct-answer is still under one minute.

The Web has made cheaters of us all. It’s why I don’t play online Scrabble anymore. I like to play honestly. It’s more of a challenge. Until I find myself getting smoked by my 11-year-old nephew with “Zymurgy” on a triple word. Right. Then the gloves come off and the anagram generator comes up, you little squirt. But where’s the fun in that?

(Credit:
Mozilla)

This Firefox 4.0 mockup shows a very Chrome-like interface.

The Firefox 4.0 mockups also show a combination button to the right of the address bar that changes behavior depending on what the browser is up to. The button can be used to start loading a page whose address has been typed, to stop loading if it’s in the process of doing so, and to reload it if it’s finished loading.

Specifically, the second Firefox 4.0 mockup shows the browser tabs on top where once there was a window title bar. That’s the same approach that Google picked with Chrome, a view of which you can see below.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Mozilla is looking for comment on the designs, which, the browser developer takes pains to note, are “for brainstorming/exploration” and aren’t final.

For Firefox, putting tabs on top meshes conceptually with Electrolysis, aka Content Processes, an under-the-covers change that will make each tab a separate computing process. That carries potential performance, stability, and security advantages, but requires more memory.

Of the “more contentious Tabs-on-Top concept,” Mozilla says advantages include that it saves vertical space and removes visual complexity. On the flip side, it’s different, and moving user interface elements confuses people. Also on the negative side, the missing title bar means people see only a truncated Web page title in the tab.

Mozilla has released mockups that show how Firefox 4.0 conceivably might look, and two words spring to my mind: Google Chrome.

Last week, Mozilla showed some mockups for the nearer-term Firefox 3.7 that eliminated the browser’s title bar, replacing it with two drop-down menu buttons on the right, just like Chrome has had since its September 2008 debut. The Firefox 4.0 mockups show two options, one similar to the 3.7 ideas, and the other taking another step in the Chrome direction.

An example of Chrome's latest interface.

Pepsi Max is the company’s new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, “Save the calories for bacon.”

Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320×240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord–there’s a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It’s a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.

The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network’s Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas–an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.

“The evolution of marketing television in the fall–it used to be as simple as this,” Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. “It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore.”

The ad with embedded video.

“It’s leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company,” Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group’s OMD media agency.

PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.

NEW YORK–Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company’s headquarters here.

This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip’s technology.

The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.

In an interview earlier this year, Bartz estimated that Yahoo could save around $500 million a year by outsourcing search–and lo and behold, in this morning’s announcement, the company said it expects the done deal will boost its annual operating income by about $500 million. That’s a far cry from what some people had thought could be saved in 2008, but that impact on Yahoo’s operating income should satisfy those looking for the company to generate higher profits.

Jerry Yang’s determination to fend off Microsoft last year led shareholder Carl Icahn to gain three seats worth of influence over Yahoo management after he and two associates joined Yahoo’s board. Later in 2008, Yang stepped down as CEO and Carol Bartz was brought over from Autodesk with a clear mandate to shake up the company.

And throughout all the drama–involving everyone from Carl Icahn to the Department of Justice–the flirting toward some kind of deal continued, fueled by the pressure both companies felt in competing with the 800-pound tech gorilla of the 21st century: Google.

Has it really been 18 months since the tech world first started talking about the possibility of a Microsoft-Yahoo deal?

Why now?
So, after all the machinations of the past few years, why is this happening now, other than the fact that Yahoo has a new leader shepherding the deal?

But if Bing is seen as providing a similar or better experience compared with Yahoo’s own search technology, Yahoo has less to lose by making the deal. Yahoo isn’t really a search destination in its own right: the vast majority of Yahoo searches come from people who are already on a particular Yahoo site. As long as the search experience isn’t terrible, those people will likely use whatever search provider is plugged into the box above their stocks on Yahoo Finance or the home page of their fantasy sports team, and stay within the Yahoo network.

Internally, however, the deal represents a big cultural change for Yahoo. Outsourcing the search technology team would be a dramatic reversal for a company that has also spent the past 18 months improving the quality of its search results and quietly leading the charge toward semantic search, which both Google and Microsoft have embraced of late.

The news finally puts an end to one of the biggest will-they-or-won’t-they tech stories since Apple was believed to be developing a mobile phone. It also marks the end of an era for Yahoo as an independent search company, allowing it to further cut costs and rebrand itself as a digital media company. And it transforms Microsoft, which recently unleashed its new Bing search tool, into a clear No. 2 behind Google in search technology, with what should be a steady stream of Internet-derived revenue.

There’s a simple reason why talks continued: Microsoft has cash and needs scale. Yahoo has scale–an enormous network of Web sites–but needs simplicity, cost savings, and focus. It also needs to maintain its hold on its current advertisers in hopes of shifting them over to display ads.

And then this morning, Microsoft and Yahoo at long last announced a search deal. In a nutshell, Microsoft’s technology will power Yahoo’s search results, while Yahoo will handle ad-selling duties for both companies’ search sites. For more details, see the breaking-news story from my colleague Ina Fried, “Yahoo, Microsoft reach search, ad deal.”

After all this time, how did we get here? For one thing, it’s taken a different cast of characters in Sunnyvale to perform this version of “Waiting for Godot.”

Where does that leave us? For one thing, hopefully the term “Microhoo” will be successfully banished to the dustbin. But with this deal, we’re entering a new era for Yahoo, Microsoft, and the search market in general.

For one thing, both Yahoo and Microsoft might be more comfortable with the quality of Bing, which has been well-received since it made its debut a few months ago. At one point a year ago, Yahoo could have looked at Bing’s predecessor, Live Search, and wondered why it made sense to force that experience down the throats of its users.

Bartz has shown far more pragmatism about the future of Yahoo search and Microsoft’s money, compared with how co-founder Yang felt compelled to defend his baby against Microsoft’s entreaties. In appearances throughout the year, she has talked of a Yahoo that newcomers to Planet Earth would not realize includes a search team; during last week’s earnings call, Bartz followed her usual playbook by focusing instead on the sheer reach of Yahoo’s network of Web sites and its relationships with top-tier advertisers.

Those are both decisions that, understandably, might have taken some time.

Yahoo appears to be betting its future on its ability to maintain the 300 million unique users that visit its newly redesigned home page every month and the hope that display ads will finally do for the Web what they did for television 50 years ago. Microsoft is giving up the right to sell its own search ads–still easily the most effective form of online advertising–in hopes of putting a real dent in Google’s operation.

Bartz has downplayed the importance of search competition to Yahoo’s future but has hedged her bets by casting doubts on the magnitude of the cost savings–at one point, one of the primary reasons for Yahoo and Microsoft to cut a search deal–that would accompany the move to Bing-ify Yahoo search.

Well, you could look it up. Since February 1, 2008, when Microsoft made a $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for the Internet pioneer, Yahoo has gone through dozens of high-profile executives, added three new directors, suffered through two reorgs, and replaced its CEO. According to reports, their flirtation began even earlier in private quarters.

• Use a disposable camera and a pre-paid cell phone.

I asked some security experts for suggestions on what they do to protect themselves at the events and here is what they said.

• Make a backup of your computer before you leave for the conference and then wipe everything and reinstall when you get home.

• Use a virtual private network and–if you can–use RSA ID authentication and stop all direct connections to the computer.

Do’s:
• Have minimal software on your laptop, such as only the operating system and necessary applications.

With virus-infected USB drives, Wifi network sniffing, badges with built-in microphones and even security experts getting hacked, it seems like it’s only a matter of time until your number comes up if you’re not careful.

• Don’t use the ATMs in the vicinity of the conferences.

• Run Linux off a USB key, back up documents online, and start with a fresh operating system every day.

• Ask to be listed as a non-registered guest at the hotel so people can’t get your room number or acknowledgement that you are staying at the hotel.

Don’ts:
• Don’t plug into any Ethernet jacks.

The iPhone, love it, but leave it at home when going to Defcon, experts say.

(Credit:
CNET )

What to leave at home:
• Your laptop and smart phone. You can’t be attacked if you don’t bring your equipment. If you must bring it, consider leaving it in the hotel room.

• Take the drives with you when you leave the laptop in the hotel room.

• Disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on all devices.

Attending Defcon and Black Hat can make you feel a bit like a deer in a forest full of hunters.

• Only connect to the Internet when you must.

• Use an EVDO wireless card.

• Stay off the Wi-Fi networks at the airport and the events.

(Credit:
Verizon)

• In addition to using updated security, application, and system software (antivirus in particular) and installing patches, use an operating system-level firewall.

An EVDO modem, such as the one pictured, should be the only gateway to the Internet used at a hacker conference.

• Lock up your equipment in your hotel room when you are going to be gone.

She told Oprah last month that when she learned of their appearance on the Web: “I kept screaming: ‘I’m done. My career is over. I’m done. Get it off. Get it off the Internet.’”

Barrett has been arrested and charged with interstate stalking. The criminal complaint states that Barrett allegedly acted “with the intent to harass, to place under surveillance with intent to harass and intimidate, and to cause substantial emotional distress to a person in another state.”

(Credit: CC Conspiracy of Happiness/Flickr)

However, she has returned to what is, for so many, her rightful role on ESPN’s college football coverage.

According to the New York Post, the videos, which in July caused many males of uncertain character to risk computer virus invasion in order to view them, were allegedly shot by Michael Barrett, 48, of Westmont, Ill.

A man has been accused of hacking at hotel peepholes and replacing them with tiny cameras in order to shoot voyeur videos of ESPN presenter Erin Andrews in the nude.

Someone then tried to sell the videos to the nice folks over at TMZ.com. However, being wise to the nuances of invasion of privacy, TMZ contacted the ESPN presenter’s lawyers. The feds say that the e-mail address used to make the offer of sale led them to Barrett.

For her part, Andrews, who was understandably outraged by the videos, is now considering legal action against both the person who shot them and any site that published them, according to the Associated Press.

The FBI believes that having hacked the peepholes, Barrett allegedly used a cell phone camera or other miniature device to shoot his infamous videos, which were originally thought to have been posted on the French DailyMotion.fr site.

The criminal complaint contains this quote from an FBI agent: “The inner eyepiece of the peephole screws into the sleeve for the peephole. The eyepiece had been tampered with and was shortened, and it appeared to have been hack-sawed.”

In announcing the arrest, FBI agents went into some detail as to the technical means by which the videos were shot. Each of the eight videos is alleged to have been shot through the peepholes of two hotel rooms in which Andrews was staying. Barrett is accused of making efforts to secure the room next to hers.

Erin Andrews in happier times.

The long road toward Microsoft and Yahoo’s search deal could be set to get a little longer, or fall off a cliff.

“This deal is going to eliminate a competitor in search in a market that has high barriers to entry and only has three players,” Cantor said. He compared it to the reaction that would have arisen in the 1960s if two of the three major television networks had decided to merge amid a far-smaller media landscape.

Both companies have long expected the U.S. Department of Justice to scrutinize the deal to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo’s Web pages, which would also see Yahoo end its time as a search company. Microsoft and Yahoo confirmed Friday that the Justice Department has asked the two companies for more information about their deal, which is a step beyond taking a mere interest in the proceedings.

In some ways, it’s almost a reflexive action. When there are three major companies in a market, and two of them decide to join forces, that almost automatically provokes a review, said Matthew Cantor, an antitrust lawyer with Constantine Cannon in New York.

Cantor thinks the Justice Department will force Microsoft and Yahoo to put Yahoo’s search technology assets up for auction to let the deal go through. That would allow a third major player to enter the business, although that new entrant would still have the burden of attracting searchers: Yahoo has said that an overwhelming majority of the people using Yahoo search are already doing so from a Yahoo Web page, the combination of which are among the most visited pages on the Internet.

But the deal–years in the making–could have arrived at a time when the DOJ is more interested mergers and acquisitions than under past administrations.

In this case, the Justice Department is likely looking at two different aspects of the deal. On one hand, regulators are expected to probe whether advertisers will be harmed by the loss of an outlet for their ad dollars, as well as whether Google has less incentive to compete for searchers now that there’s only two fish in the pond.

However, that might not be as appealing to Microsoft and would at least throw the deal into question. The company has spent millions on the development and launch of Bing, but it likely is interested in retaining certain aspects of Yahoo’s search technology, not to mention some of its engineers.

After years of a largely hands-off approach toward intervening in mergers, the Justice Department is likely to increase its scrutiny of merger activity, said Donald Russell, a partner with Robbins Russell in Washington. The poor state of the economy has decreased merger activity, but things are starting to pick up and the Justice Department under President Obama could begin to assert itself more strongly than it did under the Bush administration.

Given that Microsoft and Google have been fighting behind the scenes in Washington all year as scrutiny of Google ramps up, you might think Google had decided turnabout was fair play. Google declined to comment on the circumstances that have led to the Justice Department’s review, other than to say in a statement “there has traditionally been a lot of competition online, and our experience is that competition brings about great things for users. We’re interested to learn more about the deal.”

“Apple would not say why we needed to remove the ‘Free Memory’ feature,” Tori Gale, support manager at Bjango, wrote in an e-mail. “(Apple) simply demanded that it was removed, or (it) would delete (version 1.0 of) the app from the store…Nothing iStat did violated the terms of the developer contract, as far as we know, and Apple didn’t say that it did.”

That sentiment of frustration and bewilderment is growing in the iPhone developer community. A recent demand from the Federal Communications Commission has forced Apple to shed a bit of light on its app approval policies, but much more light could stand to be shed on it. In its current state, the apparent inconsistencies and outstanding questions appear to be hurting all parties involved–including Apple.

Gale’s comments echo gripes other developers and application backers have had over Apple’s App Store policies. Among many others, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor expressed disgust when his band’s app was originally rejected for objectionable content. “Apple rejects the NIN iPhone update because it contains objectionable content,” he tweeted to his followers. “Not even sure where to start with that one.”

To maintain the application’s availability on the App Store, Bjango had been told by Apple that it had to remove what was arguably the most compelling feature of version 1.0: Free Memory, which enabled people to clear wired and inactive memory to increase the iPhone’s battery life. It also improved the device’s performance.

When pressed for more insight over Apple’s ultimatum, Gale had, much to her chagrin, little to say. “Apple really hasn’t given us any information,” she said. “We simply don’t have much we can say.”

This is far from the first time Apple has kept developers and the media at arm’s length over an App Store rejection that has caused some head-scratching. More recently, Monday’s publicized approval of an iPhone game from a controversial franchise–Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, which follows the rejection of an official “South Park” app over “objectionable” content from the show–has people wondering whether the company even has a standard playbook for app approvals.

(Credit:
Bjango)

Apple did not respond to requests for clarification as to why it demanded that Free Memory be removed from the app. At this point, I’m just as much in the dark about how iStat’s Free Memory feature might have violated App Store policy as Bjango says it is.

The version 1.1 release of developer Bjango’s iStat application for the iPhone last week was marked with disappointment.

The iStat app’s killer feature has been killed.

Check out Don’s Facebook profile, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.

For its part, Bjango said it has “enjoyed creating iPhone applications, but we are disturbed at some of the recent decisions by Apple, both in this case and in cases with other developers,” Gale wrote. “The dictatorship of the App Store is limiting the creativity of developers and is resulting in users missing out on software that has been allowed on other, more open platforms.”

Bjango, which focuses on developing apps for the iPhone, felt that it had no other choice but to create a new version sans the Free Memory feature. iStat 1.1, $1.99, offers only iPhone monitoring. Among other things, users can see battery life calculations and how much memory and disk space remains.