David Lidsky's Blog, page 4575

Facebook to Add Child Safety "Panic Button" Application

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, a government law enforcement agency, has been after social networking sites to provide protections for its underage users. Social networking sites, says CEOP, provide comparatively easy venues for child predators. The agency has seen some success--Bebo and MySpace already adopted the panic button--but Facebook resisted for a long time, saying its own protection was sufficient.

But, reports the BBC, after the rape and murder of a 17-year-old...

China Renews Google's Operating License: Did Google Cave on Censorship?

Chna's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology confirmed, in the wake of another announcement, that it has renewed Google's operating license to stay alive in China, reports Reuters.

Among the list of more than 200 companies approved for a renewed license was Guxiang, the company that operates all of Google's Chinese activities. Interestingly, the document states that approval to Guxiang was granted after "making improvements," which might indicate that Google had caved in some way...

Google Silently Invests Over $100 Million in Zynga, Possibly for Google Games Launch

[image error]A rumor floated by TechCrunch this weekend speculates, with the aid of "multiple sources," that Google has invested somewhere between $100 and $200 million in Zynga, makers of online games like Farmville and Mafia Wars.

The investment was apparently made from Google itself and not its venture capital arm, Google Ventures, which suggests Google's interest is perhaps more predatory than merely financial. TechCrunch says Zynga will become the "cornerstone" of Google Games when it launches later...

Guy Kawasaki on Twitter Brawls, Authenticity, and How He Plans to Win The Influence Project

Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of the news aggregator Alltop.com, the former chief evangelist for Apple, and author of, among other titles, The Art of the Start. At the end of The Influence Project's first week, Kawasaki sits comfortably in the top 10, so we sought him to discuss the power of social media, how Twitter followers and Facebook fan numbers can be misleading, and the benefits of artfully telling someone off on the Internet.

Mark Borden: Why did you join The Influence Project?

Intel Supercomputer Predicts Gulf Spill Atlantic Bound

BP may not know where oil from the Gulf gusher will go next, but Intel does. The Xeon-powered Encanto supercomputer, located at Intel's Rio Rancho campus, is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. And all of its 3,500 quad-core processors are devoted to tracking the potential paths of the BP disaster.

Encanto started working on the oil disaster just a few days after it began, but progress has been slow-going. The first six simulations alone sucked up over 250,000 hours
of computer...

Infographic: Science Says Spain Will Win the World Cup

Pop Sci has pointed us to a fascinating chart by two math professors at the University of London, which purports to show who will win the World Cup on Sunday. The short answer: Spain, because they pass 40% more than The Netherlands, and as a result are a better "network" for exploiting their opponent's weaknesses.

The professors simply graphed all of the passes made by each team during the World Cup. (This sort of network study is usually called graph theory, and helps in planning internet...

Open Thread: Should the FDA Control Junk Food Marketing?

Now that tobacco advertisements have been cut down to size by the U.S. government's Family Smoking Prevention and Control Act (no more color ads for tobacco, audio ads that use music or sound effects, mail-in cigarette coupons etc.), regulators are shifting their attention toward another major American health problem: junk food.

BNET points us toward this document (PDF), which outlines potential nutritional standards for food marketed to children. The document, created by an interagency...

IDEA Spotlight: TazzyTotes, Produce Bags That Don't Kill The Planet

We know, we know. How many variations on a reusable bag can you possibly have?
[image error]
TazzyTotes Produce Bags actually fill a legit gap in the annals of environmentally enlightened shopping. Most eco-geeks will bring their own sack to the grocery store, then seal fruit, vegetables, and other bulk food in separate plastic bags -- not terribly green.

TazzyTotes Produce Bags are basically plastic bags without the plastic. Designed by the Vancouver studio JDi Design, Inc., they come in a...

Facebook's Zuckerberg, in T-Shirt, Webchats With British Prime Minister

The U.S. government may be footling with fantasmagorical Web 2.0 toys for citizen empowerment, but over in the U.K., ladies and jellyspoons, the new Prime Minister has his finger on the pulse. He's been webchatting with Mr. Facebook.

The Prime Minister David Cameron, looking spiffy and smart (with a slightly badly knotted tie, to show he dresses in the morning like the rest of us) recently conducted a videochat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the benefits of Web 2.0 social network...

U.K. Scientists Demo Bulletproof Liquid Armor

Liquid, bullet-stopping body armor. Read that again: Liquid, bullet-stopping body armor. It's not sci-fi, it's real, and a team of U.K. scientists have proven it has a future in protecting soldiers from incoming rounds or shrapnel.

Liquid armor isn't a new idea, oddly enough: As well as being a sci-fi staple (Neal Stephenson's "sintered armor gel" from Snow Crash is a classic example) it's been researched for decades, mainly due to the benefits that a lightweight, flexible but super-strong...