Reuters reports that a Tennessee couple who "defriended" Jenelle Potter on Facebook were murdered by her father and another man.
"This is just senseless," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. "We've had murders, but nothing like this."
Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don't mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.
"Once you've crossed her, you've crossed her father too," Reece said.
With all the attention focused on Facebook and Google, it's sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they've prioritized highly is content.
Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.
The Iranian government isn't exactly known as a champion of free speech and access to information. Thus, it's never shocking to hear about Internet censorship in the country, the state of which appears to be getting worse all the time.
Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. Anything based outside the country that uses a secure connection via HTTPS is blocked, according to news reports and a thread on Hacker News. Secure sites based within Iran are reportedly still accessible.
Kodak, once a symbol of technological innovation, is lately looking more like a textbook example of a disrupted company. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, after years of struggling to keep up in a landscape dominated by digital cameras, smartphones and photo-sharing apps.
One of the ways that Kodak tried to stay competitive is by manufacturing and selling digital cameras. Today, those efforts come to an end with the news that the company will be getting out of the digital camera business altogether.
The disruption of cable television at the hands of the Internet and its premium video streaming services has been predicted for some time now. Perhaps there's something about the size and demeanor of the cable industry that makes some people long for it to be conquered by the free and open Web. Maybe that skews the imminence of the predictions. Either way, to many, cable's disruption just feels inevitable.
Cable is indeed losing subscribers, but it's happening very slowly. According to the latest data from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes with cable subscriptions has declined 4.1% in the last year. Meanwhile, TV service provided by telephone companies like Verizon increased 21.1%.
While Apple's preferred method for introducing customers to new products is with a gala stage event, Microsoft's method has become the doling out of information in carefully timed lumps through corporate blog posts. Today, a rather hefty lump (almost the size of one of my analysis articles) was doled out by Microsoft's Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky, shedding considerable new light on how Windows 8 will work on systems with ARM-based processors.
Yes, it's true. The FBI had a file on Steve Jobs. It's not what you might think, though. The FBI performed a "level III" background investigation on Jobs as a potential presidential appointee in 1991. He was described by most witnesses as an "individual of good character and integrity" that would be suitable for a "position of trust and confidence with the Government." Jobs also had a brush with the FBI when Apple received a bomb threat in 1985.
For music fans, all-you-can-stream music services like Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio are kind of dream come true. Signing up gives you instant access to a library of millions of songs from major label and indie acts from around the world. Most services are now free, with some limitations on usage. For paying users, as long as you keep your subscription, there's really no need to pay for most individual tracks or albums (unless you're an audiophile). In the case of Spotify, you can even merge your local music collection with the service's cloud-based selection of music. Awesome.
For artists, it's another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn't necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.
After an enterprising hacker discovered a privacy problem in beloved new social app Path yesterday, its creators have issued an update and an apology. "We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you our users, first," CEO Dave Morin writes.
Path was uploading iPhone users' address books to its servers without asking. Today's update, version 2.0.6, now prompts users to opt-in to the "Add Friends" feature, which is not mandatory. Path has deleted all the existing contact info from its servers.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon that the Consumer Preview phase of Windows 8 testing is slated to begin on Wednesday, February 29, with a gala rollout event in Barcelona. That's to coincide - for the first time - with Mobile World Congress, which has not generally been known as the kind of affair where a PC operating system is the headliner.
The venue may definitely steal some of the thunder from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's keynote, which remains set for the day before.
