TPM Idea Lab

NASA Video Shows Huge Antarctic Glacier Breaking Apart

2012-02-23T21:30:58Z

A 3D simulation video from NASA gives viewers an amazingly close view of a gigantic glacier breaking apart off the western edge of Antartica.

The video takes users on a breathtaking flight through the over 18-mile-long crack in the Pine Island Glacier, which will cause the glacier to break apart in a matter of months, producing an iceberg almost as large as the state of Rhode Island.

The video was generated from elevation models captured during a flyby of the glacier in October 2011, when the crack was first discovered, surprising NASA scientists. The team who made the discovery used a heavily modified Boeing DC-8 aircraft turned aerial laboratory to gather the necessary measurements, part of what was dubbed "Operation IceBridge."

Check it out here via LiveScience:

After the crack's discovery in October, NASA got an even more expansive photo of the damage using its Terra AM earth-observing satellite. Scientists determined the crack is 260 feet wide and 195 feet deep, almost down to sea level, and it's only growing.

Scientists aren't sure of the precise cause of the crack, but believe it is related to the rapidly thinning ice of the Pine Island Glacier, itself thought to be caused by warm water melting the undersides of the glacier's edges. As more ice melts and breaks apart, scientists are concerned about the effect the process will have on sea levels worldwide, especially in coastal regions, where they could cause "slow motion flooding."

Here's an approximation of the size of the glacier crack:

What Google's Patents Reveal About Upcoming High-Tech Glasses

2012-02-23T19:39:42Z

Search giant Google is reportedly gearing up to sell a set of high-tech, computerized glasses -- yes, as in spectacles -- later this year, according to reports published by The New York Times this week, confirming earlier reporting by the blog 9to5 Google.

Not much is yet known about the high-tech specs for certain. They will reportedly contain a small camera, allowing users to snap photos and videos of their surroundings, but also a screen of some kind, allowing Google to layer relevant information and virtual objects over whatever the wearer is looking at, a concept known as "augmented reality," which is already on display on many existing smartphone and tablet apps from other companies.

The glasses will be manipulated by a user's facial gestures, rely on Google's mobile Android operating system, have wireless Internet connectivity and cost about as much as a smartphone, anywhere from $250 to $600, according to Nick Bilton, tech writer for The New York Times.

Other than that, tech bloggers have taken to speculating at length, in vivid detail, about what sort of experience the Google glasses will offer wearers.

But after reviewing Google's U.S. patents over the past few years, TPM discovered several revealing inventions awarded to Google that would fit in with the glasses as so far described. The patents also indicate that the increasingly esoteric company was focused on developing the technology necessary for such glasses for at least several years, going back to 2009.

That was also the same year that Google launched Google Googles -- a separate but related mobile app for Android smartphones that allows users to perform Google searches using photos snapped with a phone camera.

A patent filed by Google the same month Google Googles was released regarding visual searching also anticipates that technology will be used in an "augmented reality application."

As that patent notes at the bottom: "...the results may be used to provide corrected location information to the mobile user device. They may also be used to provide enhanced content to the device. For instance, information may be provided about the point of interesting in the image. Or supplemental content regarding nearby buildings and attractions may be given, such as via a local listing or Yellow Pages application. The results may also be used in an augmented reality application."

Another patent filed by Google just over a year ago, in February 2011, describes a much more arresting merging of physical reality and digital data. The patent is titled "Geo-coded comments in a messaging service," basically layering social network comments over a map, comments relative to a particular location on that map.

As the patent explains: "The map can be two dimensional (2D) or three dimensional (3D) (e.g., augmented reality)," later adding, "The augmented reality context may refer to the area located around the user, where the user can capture and depict in their camera."

A drawing included in the patent helps illustrate the concept:

Basically, Google would want a user of an augmented reality device -- such as its forthcoming glasses -- to look at a business and see reviews about it pop up outside the physical building.

Another patent filed by Google in November 2009 related to location and mapping, two of Google's biggest passions, further reveals the company's longterm vision for augmented reality technology. The patent also provides the only clear mention of computerized "goggles."

The patent is for displaying data on a map or alongside a map based around specific tasks (the example Google gives is "house hunting"). While this is basically how Google Maps as we now know it works, Google's patent specifically states that the technology could apple to an "LCD panel, a projector, a heads-up display for a vehicle, and/or a pair of virtual reality goggles."

Yet another patent filed in March 2011 and just granted to Google in January this year is for a system to display content "at a fixed size" no matter what mobile device it appears on, so that a visual image, such as a corporate logo, isn't distorted when it changes size. Google said the technology could apply to "wearable computers," among a multitude of other devices.

Finally, regarding the reported controls of the Google glasses -- which are said to be operated by gestures of the head, such tiling to scroll through a webpage -- Google was granted a patent on February 9 of this year to allow a mobile device equipped with an accelerometer (a motion detection device) to automatically active certain applications based on what it thinks the user is doing. Google gives the examples of turning on music when a user is jogging or switching to a speakphone mode when riding in a car.

Other google patents, for scanning and annotating documents with a camera-enabled device and for allowing users to annotate things on Google Street View, could also conceivably make it into the glasses.

Google, though has yet to comment officially on their existence, let alone when they might be available and for how much. Until then, the best inferences that can be made come from the company's existing patents and the reports of those close to it.

Obama Calls Upon Congress To Pass 'Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights'

2012-02-23T16:33:56Z

The White House on Thursday released a report outlining the Obama Administration's goals for protecting consumer privacy as more and more of our personal lives end up online.

"Never has privacy been more important than today, in the age of the Internet, the World Wide Web and smart phones," President Obama wrote in a statement at the beginning of the report.

The report calls upon Congress to pass a "Consumer Privacy of Bill of Rights," going on to outline just what the White House wants to see in such legislation -- 7 tenets, to be specific: Individual control, transparency, respect for context, security, access and accuracy, focused collection and accountability.

As for who should enforce the bill, the report is abundantly clear that the Administration wants to "strengthen" the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and give it the primary responsibility, and power, to watch the companies watching us.

The report also calls upon industry leaders to implement their own practices in line with the "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," saying that the FTC will be watching, and that the agency will not hesitate to take action against companies found to be violating consumer privacy.

The FTC has notably already been doing this, going after high-profile targets Google and Facebook in recent years, finding both companies to have failed to give consumers adequate tools to protect privacy, and making each one agree to a similar settlement to undergo 20 years of privacy audits.

Indeed, although Google and Facebook aren't named specifically in the report, it's likely they are high on the White House's list for companies that should be leading the way on this new policy.

A pivotal part of the Obama administration's strategy is getting the private sector and industry self-regulating and lobbying groups to voluntarily adhere to some privacy standards, what the report calls a "multistakeholder" process.

Facebook was quick to respond to the report, with Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer of policy releasing the following statement to the press:

"We applaud the Commerce Department's privacy framework for seeking to both honor the expectations consumers have when they use online services and promote the innovation that has fueled the growth of the Internet into an engine of job creation and a provider of invaluable services to consumers. We appreciate the Department's attention to guiding principles like control, accountability, and transparency, which are core to Facebook's commitment to its users. Additionally, we look forward to participating in the process convened by NTIA to develop enforceable codes of conduct while balancing the public's demand for new ways to interact and share."

Already, the White House's involvement seems to have spurred some change from within the industry.

On Thursday, timed to coincide the the report's release, the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry group representing 400 companies, including Google, announced it would reverse course and support a universal "Do Not Track" button to be included in all major Web browsers, which would stop online advertisers from collecting information about users and creating profiles about them without their expressed knowledge and consent.

The FTC has been calling for such a button since December 2010, and advocacy groups even longer than that. Various browsers have all offered such solutions, but in piecemeal, and not with the support of the rest of the industry. Now that appears to be changing.

As the Wall Street Journal reported:

Speaking for the industry, Stuart Ingis, general counsel for the Digital Advertising Alliance, said the decision to adopt do-not-track is an "evolution" of the industry's approach. Previously, the industry had been pushing for consumers to "opt out" of Web tracking by clicking on icons in individual advertisements that offered consumers a choice of blocking the customized ads. Mr. Ingis said that the industry will continue that approach while it's in the process of adopting the do-not-track system.

"We're pleased to join a broad industry agreement to respect the 'Do Not Track' header in a consistent and meaningful way that offers users choice and clearly explained browser controls," said Susan Wojcicki, Google's senior VP of advertising, in a statement to TPM.

As another example of how the process should work, the report points to several existing Web industry groups, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit corporation based out of California that governs the Internet's domain name system (Web addresses).

Of course, its also worth pointing out that ICANN has been criticized recently for being a "revolving door" to other industry groups and has taken heat for introducing a new generic top-level domain, ".xxx," designed for adult websites, and then further expanding the domain name system to "dot anything."

The report's wish list for what practices companies should abide by isn't exactly novel, following what advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have called for for years, but it is quite lengthy.

A few stand-out requests: "If consumers grant consent through a single action on their computers, they should be able to withdraw consent in a similar fashion," the report states.

It also points out common consumer frustrations with small mobile device screens that make reading full privacy notices difficult, noting that companies should take into account screen size when presenting consumers with that information.

That particular request comes on the heels of an agreement reached on Wednesday evening between the California Attorney General's office and mobile operating system makers Google, Apple, Research-In-Motion, Amazon and HP to allow consumers to review the full privacy policy of any mobile application prior to download. The agreement also forces all apps to present their privacy policies on app stores. Previously, apps often provided privacy policies to users after download or didn't make them easily available to read at all, as the Next Web illustrated.

Overall, its still unclear if Congress has the appetite to come together and pass some version of the President's "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights." But if the way lawmakers have recently gone after Google over its attempt to update its privacy policy is any indication, then maybe this is one area both sides will actually agree on.

CERN: Errors Could Mean Even Faster Faster-Than-Light Particles

2012-02-23T14:15:00Z

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has confirmed that scientists have found errors in a physics experiment that recorded particles traveling 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light in late 2011. But now, the agency says that one of the errors means the particles could have been traveling faster than that!

However, the other error -- a loose cable, seriously -- reported by scientists working at the CERN experiment, called OPERA, means that the particles could have been traveling much slower than the initial results, calling into question the original findings that rocked the scientific world when they were first reported in September 2011.

At the time, the OPERA team reported firing a beam of uncharged particles called neutrinos from CERN's facilities underground near Geneva, Switzerland, toward a detector 454 miles away, located near Assergi, Italy. The OPERA team said that the beam took only 2.39994 milliseconds (0.00239994 seconds) to travel the distance. That's 60 billionths of a second, 0.00000006 seconds, faster than the speed of light (approximately 186,000 miles per second).

But the results were quickly called into question by science writers, as nothing in the known universe should be capable of traveling faster than light in a vacuum, according to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Still, the OPERA team insisted that they had carefully double-checked their work, even repeating the experiment using shorter particle bursts in November 2011, only to uncover the same result.

Then, on Wednesday, Science Insider broke the news that OPERA scientists has discovered that the results might have been the result of a "bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer," caused by a fiber optic cable connecting a GPS device used to track the particle beam and a computer card.

A CERN spokesperson confirmed to the The Associated Press shortly thereafter that the OPERA team had found "two separate issues," with the experiment, including issues that "may have affected measurements," either overestimating or underestimating the time it took the neutrinos to travel the 454 miles between the two instruments.

CERN on early Thursday finally put out its own release doubling down on this assessment of the errors, and explaining that OPERA scientists had fixed the errors and would re-run the experiment in May.

As CERN explained:

The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May.

Cutting through the technical jargon, what CERN states is that either of the two errors could have disrupted the measurements of the actual time it took the neutrinos to travel, so the particles could have been traveling faster than initially reported, slower, or perhaps even the same speed.

That ambiguous result is unlikely to satisfy those in the particle physics community, but for now it seems, Einstein's theory stands strong, at least until May, when the experiment is repeated using shorter beams of neutrinos. Let's hope that OPERA scientists make sure that all the cables are tightly connected in that one.

Faster-Than-Light Particle Result Reportedly Caused By Loose Cable

2012-02-22T22:18:42Z

The faster-than-light particles detected by scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September 2011 might not have actually been moving that fast after all, according to multiple reports on Tuesday.

The eye-popping results were apparently caused by a loose cable, as Science Insider first reported on Wednesday afternoon.

The initial results were obtained from CERN's OPERA experiment, which involves shooting beams of uncharged particles called neutrinos from near Geneva, Switzerland through an underground particle accelerator to a detector 450 miles away in Gran Sasso, Italy, and recording the resulting effects. Results obtained over a three-year period of operation and announced in September 2011 caused a furor around the world as they showed the neutrinos traveling 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light (which is approximately 186,000 miles per second), in apparent defiance of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which states that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light in a vacuum.

Science writers provided lots of skepticism and alternate theories in the wake of the OPERA team's results, as undoing Einstein would also call into question much of our modern assumptions about particle physics and the Universe. As it turns out, those skeptics might have been on the right track, and Einstein may still be the law of the land.

As Science Insider's Edwin Cartlidge explained:

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

CERN is staying coy about this theory, not releasing any official announcements yet on its website or Twitter feeds, two methods it customarily uses to break news.

But a CERN spokesperson did tell the Associated Press that "scientists found a problem in the GPS system used to time the arrival of neutrino particles at an underground lab in Italy," and that "the problem may have affected the measurements."

However, CERN won't know for certain whether or not the loose cables were the culprit until later this year, when further tests are conducted. CERN in November 2011 re-ran the OPERA experiment using shorter beams of neutrinos in an effort to prove its findings, finding much the same result. It is unclear whether the loose cable affected that retest as well, but based on what we know so far, that is likely.

Poisoned Apple Supplier Workers Publish Letter Requesting Reform

2012-02-22T22:08:55Z

For all the recent reports surrounding the harsh working conditions at the Chinese factories where Apple's iPad and iPhone are assembled, it's worth recalling an older problem: Back in February 2011, Apple admitted -- and the New York Times further detailed -- that 137 workers at an Apple supplier factory in Suzhou, China, suffered serious injuries from handling n-hexane, a toxic cleaning agent used to wipe off iPhone screens.

"Some workers said they were hospitalized for months with what doctors told them was nerve damage," the Times reported, with one, a 27-year-old named Jia Jing-Chuan telling the newspaper that the nerve damage made him "hypersensitive to cold," requiring him to wear winter clothes indoors.

Now Jia Jing-Chuan and another worker, Guo Rui-Qiang, have published a letter asking users to sign an online petition demanding Apple reform the conditions at supplier factories. The letter was posted on the website of SumofUs, an advocacy organization behind the new petition and behind one previously submitted in print to six Apple stores around the globe, also calling for supplier labor reform.

In the new letter, the workers explain that while employed at Wintek, a Taiwanese electronics screens manufacturer and Apple supplier, they "were hospitalized and treated" for n-hexane poisoning, "but our debilitating symptoms continue," two years after they were admitted.

"Rui-Qiang still can't find work because he can no longer stand for the long hours most jobs require," the workers explain. "Jing-Chuan has to spend nearly $100 a month on health supplements."

"If more people know about what we went through, Apple will feel pressured to change so other workers don't have to suffer like we did," the workers state.

The letter also targets Apple's upcoming shareholder meeting on Thursday as a deadline for amassing 100,000 signatures, saying that CEO Tim Cook, who the workers accuse of ignoring their outreach to the company, "will listen to you as current or potential consumers."

Rui-Qiang and Jing-Chuan were also among five former Wintek employees who wrote a letter to then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs almost a year ago to the date, in February 2011, asking that the Cupertino-based company compensate them for their injuries. After Steve Jobs resigned due to his declining health in August 2011, the workers updated and re-sent their letter to his successor, Cook.

Still, Cook has apparently yet to respond. As the new letter notes: "We have been pressuring Apple, and its new CEO Tim Cook, for years to compensate those of us who were injured working for them, and demanding reform of working conditions at their Chinese factories so that their workers don't suffer like we do."

Apple has also reportedly told Chinese and American environmental advocates that it will soon open at least two supplier facilities to investigations carried out by the China's Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, an independent advocacy group, as USA Today reported on Tuesday. The investigations, which will assess Apple's environmental footprint and look into allegations of toxic waste dumps, will be separate from one currently being conducted by the Fair Labor Association, a trade group Apple joined in January and which it is paying to audit the working conditions at supplier facilities where Apple says 90 percent of its products are made.

Nightline's Tour of Foxconn Factory Reveals Little New Information

2012-02-22T17:50:55Z

The crew of ABC News "Nightline" was given exclusive access by Apple to investigate two Chinese factories of the giant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, where the bulk of Apple's iPad and iPhone devices are assembled, along with devices from leading competitors Sony, Amazon and HP.

Apple invited Nightline to the plants amidst a flood of negative PR, following multiple suicides by workers at the factories in 2010 and more recent reports of inhumane and dangerous working conditions.

Facing increasing online and physical protests from workers' rights advocates, Apple on February 13 announced it had commissioned a third-party audit of by a trade group, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), to review the factories. Within a day of beginning the audit, the association's president called the facilities "way above the average of the norm" for China.

The Nightline episode appears to be another part of Apple's strategy to rehabilitate its image, as ABC News reporter Bill Weir admits it was "around this time when Apple called me."

"They wondered if "Nightline" was interested in seeing their iPhone, iPad and MacBook final assembly lines at Foxconn during a first-ever audit by the Fair Labor Association," Weir explained.

On Tuesday night, Nightline aired the 30-minute special episode of its tour of the factories, hosted by Weir. The episode was posted online in full on Wednesday.

"After this trip, I'll never see an Apple product the same way again," said Weir in a teaser video of his tour of Foxconn's factories in the Chinese cities Shenzhen and Chengdu.

video platform video management video solutions video player

However, from the early reviews of gadget bloggers, it seems as though Nightline's tour of Foxconn has revealed little in the way of new information about how the company treats its workforce and how much Apple has to do with it.

"You would think that this 'unprecedented' look inside Apple factories would reveal much we didn't know, but the show was relatively light on information," commented The Verge's Joshua Topolsky.

"What the exposé touched on, but ended before it could satisfy, was truly getting inside the workers' heads," said Gizmodo's Sam Biddle and Michael Hession.

That said, when a Foxconn executive was asked if the company would like it if Apple insisted it double its pay for workers, the executive said "Why not?"

Foxconn on Friday announced it was raising worker pay 16 to 25 percent, the first time since June 2010. Junior workers will now receive 1,800 yuan ($290) per month.

Nightline's report also came ahead of the latest allegation of Foxconn's unethical labor practices: The fact that underage workers, around 16 or 17-years-old, reportedly had their hours slashed or were transferred to other departments specifically to avoid being included the Fair Labor Association's audit, according to the Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, as AppleInsider reported.

Correction: This story originally referred to the suicides that took place at Foxconn's Chinese factories as "mass suicides," when, in fact, the more accurate term is "multiple suicides," as many of the workers took their own lives individually.

How Hubble's Steam Planet Discovery Helps Us Understand The Universe

2012-02-22T16:26:35Z

In the wake of NASA's announcement on Tuesday that scientists had identified a remarkable planet made up primarily of steam using the Hubble Space Telescope, the leader of the project, Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, took the time to describe the planet in greater detail to TPM.

Firstly, to dispense with the burning question on everyone's minds: There's almost no chance of life on GJ 1214b, located 40 light years away from Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star in the constellation Ophiuchus. GJ 1214b is simply too close to its star -- just over a million miles away -- and thus too hot, as Berta explained.

"The coolest temperature you can find on the planet is about the temperature of a hot oven," Berta told TPM via email. "That's too hot for the complex molecules of life to survive. It would be like putting a beautiful green, leafy plant into an oven and baking it at 450F for a billion years, it just wouldn't work! If the planet were about 4 times as far away from its star as it is, it could be cool enough that maybe we could start talking about life surviving and thriving on it."

Berta's team theorizes that the planet formed further out from its star and moved steadily closer over eons, baking.

Still, establishing the planet's atmospheric makeup is an important discovery in our quest to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

"We're learning more about the diversity of worlds out there in the Galaxy, the many possible ways that planets can form," said Berta. "I think that's a very important step in placing our solar system, and Earth, in context."

As to whether the planet is representative of an entirely new class of planets or not, Berta said "we need to find more of them to know for sure."

Furthermore, scientists aren't really sure if the planet is made up primarily of pure water vapor, water mixed with other compounds, or something else entirely.

"Knowing what we know about the abundance of elements in the Universe, water is the most likely culprit," said Berta.

However, because the planet's surface temperature is far above the boiling point, that water is mostly in steam form.

"There's probably very little liquid water as we know it," Berta acknowledged, "Much of it would be in solid or more gaseous form, and mixed in with lots of other constituents, including some hydrogen and helium."

As far as the other "solid" forms of water that could be occurring on the planet, Berta previously said that it could exist in such states unknown on Earth or anywhere else in the universe, such as "hot ice" or "superfluid water."

"We don't know how deeply the envelope of water on the planet extends down into the planet, so you could get down to really high pressures and temperatures, where water behaves very strangely," Berta elaborated to TPM.

The Hubble space telescope provided a closer view of the planet's atmosphere than any other instrument to date, including the ground-based telescopes that were the first to spot GJ 1214b in 2009. Hubble's infrared close-up ruled out that the planet had a hazy atmosphere primarily of hydrogen, instead indicating it was made primarily of water, but scientists will need to get even closer to be sure exactly how much.

"With more observations, we'll be able to figure out the exact quantities of many different kinds of molecules on GJ1214b, exactly how much water, carbon dioxide, methane, etc... are in the atmosphere," Berta explained. "The picture we have of GJ1214b's atmosphere is right now only a sketch, we need more observations to fill in the details!"

The ultimate observation tool -- the James Webb Space Telescope, a successor to Hubble that's slated to be 100 times more powerful -- is still under construction and slated for a 2018 launch, although it has been delayed, seen its costs balloon and been targeted by Congressional budget slashers.

Still, Berta is confident that there are enough telescopes and planetary scientists working right now to get an even better picture of GJ1214b ahead of the launch of the James Webb Telescope.

"By making a serious investment of telescope time using the big telescopes we have right now, we should be able to start to fill in the picture of GJ1214b and its internal structure and atmosphere," Berta said.

Presented By:

2012-02-22T16:26:35Z

Hubble Discovers Steam World 'Like No Planet We Know Of'

2012-02-21T23:30:44Z

Updated 10:30 am ET, Wednesday, Feb. 22

Using NASA's famed Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have determined that an alien world located just 40 light years from Earth is unlike anything previously found before: A world composed primarily of steam.

The planet, known officially under the unflattering moniker GJ 1214b, "is like no planet we know of," said Zachory Berta a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a release announcing the discovery of the planet's strange composition, adding: "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."

GJ 1214b was first sighted in 2009 by the Harvard MEarth Project's ground-based telescopes located near Amado, AZ. However, it took Hubble's relatively new Infrared Wide Field Camera 3 to establish a closer view of the planet, revealing that it likely contains a dense atmosphere of water vapor.

While that's not a novel announcement on its own, combined with two other pieces of information known about the planet, it paints an exciting picture of a world that is unlike any ever before spotted by Earth's observers.

GJ 1214b is 2.7 times the diameter of Earth (so about 21,400 miles straight through) and 7 times as heavy (9.1 × 10^25 lbs.) containing far more water than Earth with much stronger gravity.

But because the planet is also in a much closer orbit to its star than Earth is to the Sun (Just over a million miles away compared to Earth's 93 million miles, with a year of just 38 hours), its surface temperature is way hotter: an average 446 degrees fahrenheit, according to estimates from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center.

That means that the water on the surface of GJ 1214b is doing weird things besides turning into steam.

"The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water', substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," Berta explained.

Berta and his fellow researchers hope to get a closer view of the planet, which they believe is the first of an entirely new class of steam worlds, when the James Webb Space Telescope is finally completed and launched, hopefully sometime within the decade. That telescope, the successor to Hubble, has narrowly evaded the Congressional chopping block, despite being beset by numerous delays, errors and cost overruns.

Still, for now, the Harvard-Smithsonian team and their collaborators in Europe are savoring their hot new find. They've published their results in a recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

Their finding is just the latest in a series of amazing new extrasolar planetary finds being made by scientists using NASA equipment, all of which scientists hope will lead us one day to finding a planet that supports extraterrestrial life. Steam world GJ 1214b is an unlikely candidate, despite having so much water, because it is so close to its star, and thus outside of the "habitable zone," the point at which liquid water can stably exist on a planet's surface.

Correction: This post originally said that the planet GJ 1214b was 21,400 miles around. In fact, that measurement was for diameter, so the more accurate word would be "straight through." The error has been corrected in copy. We regret it.

Cookiegate: Google Taking Heat For Tracking Users Online

2012-02-21T21:00:47Z

There's been a firestorm of controversy brewing over the past few days after a Web researcher at Stanford University discovered Google and several other major online advertising companies were surreptitiously circumventing the default security settings on Apple's Safari web browser to allow them to track users' interactions online.

As Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student of computer science and law at Stanford, explained, Apple's Safari browser -- found on all Mac computers, the iPhone and the iPad -- is unique among competitors in that it ships with default privacy settings that block all third-party "cookies," from being installed on a user's device.

Browser "cookies" are small files that websites and services install on users computers in order to store information related to a particular user's browsing experience -- such as the items they've put in an e-shopping cart, for example. Although Safari allows some cookies, such as those related to filling out online forms, it blocks those that are "third party" -- cookies that don't come from the same web address that the user is currently viewing. Many ad companies install cookies on users' machines to see if they've clicked on ads or not and keep track of other web browsing habits to enable personalized advertising options.

But as Mayer found in his research, Google, which runs the Web's largest online advertising service, DoubleClick, and three other separate advertising companies -- VirbantMedia, Media Innovation Group and PointRoll -- dodged Safari's third party cookie blocking by submitting an invisible form to the browser, tricking it into thinking the user had voluntarily filled out a form to allow such cookies to be installed on his or her machine.

Mayer included 200,000 Safari browsers in his sample size, telling KQED News that "the overwhelming majority" were found to have Google DoubleClick cookies installed on its servers, but said he was unsure just how widespread the problem was. Safari is the largest mobile web browser in terms of market share, according to tracking firm Net Applications, so the problem could be much more widespread.

Mayer on February 17 published the incriminating evidence of the massive privacy settings evasion on his personal blog. The Wall Street Journal picked up the findings and brought them into the spotlight, running a lengthy article with several graphics explaining just how the evasion process worked.

Google was immediately thrust on the defense, announcing it had disabled the cookies and stealthily removing language on a Google privacy policy page affirming that Safari's default settings prevented the search giant from tracking users. Google also told The Journal that the newspaper "mischaracterizes what happened and why."

"We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled," said Google's statement. "It's important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information."

In a fuller statement circulated by other media outlets, Google further elaborated on what it was trying to do and why, shifting the blame to Apple's Safari browser for having tighter default privacy settings than other competitors, and saying that the circumvention was necessary to enable features related to Google Plus, Google's up-and-coming social network. Google also admitted that by circumventing the default Safari settings, it had inadvertently allowed other advertisers to install cookies on user's devices.

As Google explained:

Unlike other major browsers, Apple's Safari browser blocks third-party cookies by default. However, Safari enables many web features for its users that rely on third parties and third-party cookies, such as "Like" buttons. Last year, we began using this functionality to enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalized ads and other content-such as the ability to "+1" things that interest them.
To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google's servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalization. But we designed this so that the information passing between the user's Safari browser and Google's servers was anonymous-effectively creating a barrier between their personal information and the web content they browse.

However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser. We didn't anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It's important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

Users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome were not affected. Nor were users of any browser (including Safari) who have opted out of our interest-based advertising program using Google's Ads Preferences Manager.

However, that last paragraph proved to be a sticking point for Microsoft (Google's largest search competitor) which on Monday published a blog post outlining how Google also evaded the default settings on Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.

As Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, corporate VP of Internet Explorer (IE), explained in the post:

"By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site will use the cookie and that the site's use does not include tracking the user. Google's P3P policy causes Internet Explorer to accept Google's cookies even though the policy does not state Google's intent."

Google hit back several hours later with a lengthy statement, available in full over on WebProNews. In it, Google points out that Microsoft's P3P standard has fallen into widespread disuse since it was introduced in 2002, with over 11,000 websites not using it as of 2010, including Facebook.

Indeed, Facebook itself confirmed to ZDNet on Tuesday that its ubiquitous "Like" buttons all evade IE's P3P standard, and must, in order to enable users to see and access them. As Facebook explained in a statement: "P3P was developed 5 years ago and is not effective in describing the practices of a modern social networking service and platform." However, Facebook threw Microsoft a proverbial bone, saying it had "reached out directly" to the company to work on a solution. Facebook also subtly attacked Google for bringing Facebook into the fray as a proxy, noting that "our P3P policy is not intended to enable us to set additional cookies or to track users," unlike, of course, Google's evasion of Safari and IE to enable tracking cookies.

It should be noted that Microsoft is a major investor in Facebook, owning just over 1 percent of the company after buying $240 million worth of shares on the secondary market in 2007, valuing the company at $15 billion (it's now thought to be worth up to $100 billion).

Microsoft has also been shamelessly attempting to exploit Google's privacy controversies lately, posting a video in early February on Google-owned YouTube making fun of Gmail, so their latest attack on Google should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

That was also the conclusion of Jonathan Mayer, the Stanford researcher who first discovered Google's Safari circumvention.

"Microsoft: hallmarks of privacy research are 1) finding something new, 2) not pushing the story with a PR agency (but thanks for the note!)," Mayer tweeted Tuesday.

Still, that's not to say that Google should be getting a pass for its practices. Mayer posted a thorough update to his findings on his blog Tuesday, essentially calling Google out for attempting to whitewash the controversy by deferring to its new social network, Google Plus, which Mayer pointed out is only tangentially related to the cookie problem at best.

"The circumvention behaviors affected all users, independent of whether they had a Google account, were logged into a Google account, or had made a choice about social advertising," Mayer wrote, puncturing a hole in Google's defense that it had pursued the Safari circumvention strategy to "to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled."

Further, as Mayer noted, "Circumvention is not a commonly accepted business practice," and "Apple's purpose was not messing with Google. The default cookie blocking feature that Google circumvented was implemented in Safari 1.0, which shipped in 2003--long before Google was in the third-party display advertising business, and long before relations between the companies soured over smartphones."

That line of analysis, from a technical expert, no less, acts as a deft answer to those Google apologists, like Web search blogger John Battelle, who have argued that this is mostly a corporate fight between Google's vision of the Internet -- open and easy to crawl -- and Apple's -- a tightly-controlled and prescribed experience.

No matter how one slices it, Google doesn't come out of this scrape looking any better. In fact, with the company already facing scrutiny from bloggers and lawmakers over its newly condensed privacy policy (which goes into effect March 1), it's just about the worst possible news for the company and its users.

Regulators, for one, are less happy with Google than ever before: On Friday, hours after The Journal's piece was published, the Federal Trade Commission was hit with three letters from lawmakers and advocacy groups calling upon the agency to investigate Google over the Safari evading practice.

The FTC has already placed Google on thin ice, settling a privacy investigation into Google's failed Buzz social network in March 2011 by making Google agree to a series of terms and bi-annual privacy audits. It's unclear if Google's latest privacy breach violates any of the FTC's settlement terms, but the agency is looking into the complaints. The FTC in June 2011 also announced it had begun another investigation into Google, this one into antitrust allegations over its search and advertising businesses.

In Fight Against Global Warming, U.S. Declares War On Cook Stoves

2012-02-21T17:06:52Z

Updated 1:00 pm ET, Tuesday, Feb. 21

TINA CASEY

The U.S. has joined with five other countries in a first-of-its-kind international effort to slow the pace of global warming by targeting three greenhouse emissions, one of which is black carbon from the open cook stoves widely used in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Though there may not appear to be much promise in that angle of attack, cook stoves could in fact hold the key to achieving a quick, significant impact on global warming along with benefits for public health and agricultural production.

The new initiative, called the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, was launched February 16 by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The founding members are Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, the U.S. and the UN Environment Programme.

The project contains a long term goal within a short term goal: It skips over the most notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere for about 100 years, and settles for picking off some some low hanging fruit.

It targets global warming emissions that last only a few days or at most a few years in the atmosphere, namely black carbon, hydrofluorocarbons and methane gas.

All together, these three contribute about 33 percent to global warming emissions.

By achieving a clear, measurable success in a relatively short period of time, the coalition hopes to build overwhelming public consensus on the human causes and effects of global warming. That, in turn, should help to build overwhelming support for the kind of long term, coordinated global actions needed to address the problem of carbon dioxide emissions.

In the context of a longstanding fossil fuel industry campaign to undermine public support for global warming action, the new coalition appears to be positioning itself as a street-level public relations counterbalance.

Secretary of State Clinton was not shy about expressing this agenda in her speech announcing the initiative, stating:

"And we know that in the principal effort necessary to reduce the effects of carbon dioxide, the world has not yet done enough. So when we discover effective and affordable ways to reduce global warming - not just a little, but by a lot - it is a call to action."

As for projects that would help to meet the three short-term goal, cook stoves are an important target because they are estimated to contribute about 25 percent to global black carbon emissions.

Black carbon, a component of soot, only lasts up to a few weeks in the atmosphere but it does a lot of damage on the way up and down. As an emission from open wood burning stoves in developing countries, it contributes to premature deaths especially among women and children routinely exposed to smoke. Once in the atmosphere it absorbs sunlight, and when it falls on snow and ice it causes them to darken and absorb more sunlight, contributing to glacier melt.

On top of all that, soot falling on croplands inhibits agricultural productivity, and the use of wood for fueling highly inefficient stoves contributes to deforestation.

The new coalition will coordinate with other programs that are already under way to help populations swap out of open cook stoves and adopt more efficient low cost alternatives, and even renewable alternatives including solar power.

Among those programs underway are those being spearheaded by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public/private partnership designed to spur the development of a clean cook stove market in the private sector and get 100 million homes worldwide to adopt clean cook stoves by 2020.

The group was launched by the UN Foundation and Secretary Clinton in September 2010 with $50.8 million in initial funding from leading U.S. agencies. Shell Oil's philanthropic arm, the Shell Foundation, is actually one of the alliance's founding members.

Meanwhile, the new action plan from the State Department also addresses other black carbon sources including vehicles, primitive kilns, and the practice of burning agricultural waste.

The other two items of concern, man-made methane emissions and hydrofluorocarbons, can be curbed through methane capture at coal mines, agricultural operations and other sources as well as tighter regulation of products like aerosols and refrigerants.

Updated to include mention of the Global Alliance For Clean Cookstoves in copy.

Anonymous Denies It Is Pursuing Power Outage Attacks

2012-02-21T16:00:00Z

The National Security Agency is concerned that hackers operating under the banner Anonymous could, over the next two years, achieve the capability to stage a cyberattack that would produce a power outage, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The director of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, has warned the White House and other government officials about his agency's concerns that Anonymous could attain this power by 2014, according to the Journal, which cites unnamed sources "familiar with the gatherings."

However, the report is scarce on some important technical details -- such as just how such an attack could theoretically be carried out and how Anonymous would go about procuring the necessary information and access to make it happen.

While no specific targets are mentioned, John Brennan, chief counterterrorism advisor to President Barack Obama, reportedly agreed that the loosely affiliated hacktivist collective would indeed have the capability to cause a power outage in "three to five years."

Furthermore, as The Journal's Siobhan Gorman noted in his report: "The group has never listed a power blackout as a goal..."

An unidentified power grid source told the newspaper that "we are concerned, as are other sectors," about being targeted by Anonymous and other emergent hacker groups, however, other officials said that power stations face consistent cyber attacks and there are backup systems in place in the event of a successful strike.

The Journal also points out that someone claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous posted a call for like-minded users to temporarily take down the Internet itself on March 31 by attacking root Domain Name Service servers in what's been dubbed "Operation Global Blackout," although that planned attack doesn't really have anything to do with an actual power blackout, at least not yet.

Web users operating under the banner of Anonymous have mostly reacted to the Journal's report with scorn and bemusement, vehemently denying the group is pursuing actual power outage capabilities.

"Why would Anons shut off a power grid? There are ppl on life support / other vital services that rely on it. Try again NSA. #FearMongering," tweeted YourAnonNews, a popular Twitter account that announced the temporary downing of the CIA website on February 10.

"Ridiculous! Why should Anonymous shut off power grid? Makes no sense! They just want to make you feel afraid," read a post on the AnonOps Communications blog, later tweeted out by Twitter user AnonOps, who in claimed responsibility for knocking offline the Justice Department website and the websites of Universal Music, the MPAA and the RIAA on January 19.

"Lol this is hilarious," wrote user kimdotcom_ on an Anonymous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, posting a link to the Journal's article on Tuesday morning.

"Wow Kimdot that is too funny," replied another user, Ark_Anon.

Later in the chat, another user posted an image of NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander along with the joking message "you know who is hot?"

Alta Devices, Maker of Highest Efficiency Solar Panel, Working With Military

2012-02-17T14:15:36Z

Alta Devices, the company that recently set the record for the highest efficiency solar panel ever certified by the U.S. government, is working to supply the U.S. military and defense contractors with its high-tech flexible solar panels, the company revealed exclusively to TPM.

Alta Devices President and CEO Christopher Norris told TPM in a telephone interview that the company has just begun working on demonstrating its equipment in a "small pilot line" of solar panels at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, but that it already had spurred great interest from industry and government.

The small pilot line will produce about 2 megawatts of power, Norris told TPM, enough to power about 600 homes. But comparing Alta's panels to standard fossil fuel power plant alternatives is a bit misleading, because the company isn't looking to replace fossil plants or fuel sources, but rather go where they cannot.

"For some reason, solar has gotten into a trend of competing with fossil fuel plants head on," said Norris, "We don't think that's necessarily the best use of solar, and certainly not our solar. We're focusing on places where where solar is not and where electricity itself is not."

Norris believes that Alta's panels will "fundamentally enable new product class."

Alta's high-efficiency, ultra-thin, flexible panels -- which are 1/40th the thickness of a human hair -- are "being integrated into lifting materials for residential and commercial buildings," Norris said.

"We're doing some work with electric vehicle companies that need solar to run cooling for their batteries, and some military work," said Norris, adding that some of his customers, including those in the military and military contractors, will begin receiving the panels late this year or early 2013.

"The stuff you're going to see first is going to be non-personnel," Norris explained, "Applications on vehicles of different sort. We have quite a bit going on purely portable side. There will be some airborne infrastructure, as well as hybrid systems, mobile systems. The point is that our technology is flexible, mobile and turns on quick."

Pressed to explain Alta's connections to the military, Norris said that he couldn't elaborate much due to non-disclosure agreements.

However, Norris did reveal that his work was being funded by the Pentagon's future-flung Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same agency that birthed the predecessor of the Internet (ARPANET), as well as the Department of Energy and venture capital funding.

Alta Devices set the record for highest solar panel efficiency yet on February 6, clocking in at 23.5 percent efficiency, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). That means that Alta's panel was able to convert 23.5 percent of the sunlight it receives into usable energy, including losses due to heat, a humungous leap over the industry average of between 7 and 17 percent.

The way that Alta Devices was able to achieve such efficiency was due to an innovative, counter-intuitive approach it took to the problem of energy conversion and conservation: When Alta's panels overheat, they actually emit some light themselves, albeit invisible fluorescent light, as opposed to conventional panels that waste energy as pure heat.

The company also uses a markedly different material to produce its panels than the industry standard panels, which use polysilicon. Alta uses gallium arsenide, a combination of gallium -- a byproduct of aluminum smelting -- and arsenic, which is better known as a poison.

However, according to Norris, the arsenic becomes inert when combined with gallium, so there's no danger. And the solar cells themselves can be grown to the designers exact specifications, using as little gallium arsenide as possible to produce a photovoltaic -- or light to energy -- conversion.

"That's the goal," said Norris, according to TPM. "To use no more gallium arsenide than is absolutely needed to create solar panels."

That's because gallium arsenide is relatively expensive compared to polysilicon. However, Norris believes that Alta has found the perfect recipe: Using a gas-controlled gallium arsenide crystal growing process developed by researchers at Caltech and the University of California Berkeley.

It seems the U.S. military and its contractors agree.

Rivals Sprint And AT&T Both Like Payroll Tax Cut Deal

2012-02-16T21:25:04Z

The last-minute compromise reached by House and Senate leaders on Thursday to extend the payroll tax cut for another year was achieved partially by having both sides agree to pay for the cut by auctioning off $22 billion worth of licenses to the wireless spectrum -- the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum over which radio waves and data can be transmitted.

The licenses, which are issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are currently held by national TV broadcasters.

But many of them have gone unused in recent years as broadcasters have switched over from analog to digital broadcasting, as they were mandated by Congress to do no later than June 2009.

"As Wi-Fi plays an increasingly important role in the spectrum ecosystem, the economic benefit created by unlicensed spectrum is estimated at up to $37 billion a year," said FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, in a statement before the House on Thursday. The FCC has pressured TV broadcasters to give up unused spectrum for years.

Those unused chunks of spectrum -- also called "white spaces" -- are coveted by the nation's mobile wireless carrier companies -- AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile -- all of whom want the spectrum to augment their networks, which have been under increased load due to the increasing popularity of data-heavy smartphones and tablets.

The more spectrum a wireless company has, the more data it can transmit, and with less disruptions.

Not surprisingly, numerous wireless companies and other advocates of releasing the spectrum have come out in favor of the bill.

"Sprint supports the bipartisan compromise announced this morning by the House and Senate leadership and we hope that Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate will support it with a vote for final passage," said Vonya B. McCann, Sprint's senior vice president for Government Affairs, in a statement provided to TPM.

The Wireless Association (CTIA), an industry lobbying group, also cheered the move. "This additional spectrum will help CTIA's members meet Americans' voracious appetite for mobile Internet anywhere and anytime," said CTIA CEO Steve Largent in a prepared statement. "While current usage is significant with more than 340 billion MB of wireless data used in the first half of 2011, mobile data usage is expected to grow by a factor of 16 over the next five years."

But in an unexpected note, even AT&T, which had eyed the compromise with suspicion, also applauded. AT&T had been concerned that Congress would give the FCC too much power to dictate the rules of the spectrum auctions.

"In our industry, there has been much focus in recent weeks on whether the FCC should or should not be able to exclude qualified wireless carriers from bidding in these spectrum auction," said AT&T executive Jim Cicconi. "The final legislation speaks clearly on this point: the FCC may not do so as part of any auction proceeding."

AT&T and the FCC haven't gotten along well historically. But their relations took up an abrupt turn lately, as the FCC basically sounded the death-knell in AT&T's plans to buy T-Mobile and use that company's spectrum, releasing a report in November 2011 that said the deal would likely harm consumers and the marketplace. Sprint, too, had joined the pile-up, suing AT&T to block the merger.

Still, on this compromise, at least, everyone seems to be in agreement.

"Spectrum auctions have raised more than $50 billion for the U.S. Treasury, and economists regard the economic value created by FCC auctions as being about 10 times that number, or $500 billion in value," said the FCC's Genachowski, later adding "And freeing up unlicensed spectrum for 'white spaces' and other higher-power unlicensed use holds tremendous promise to become another value-creating breakthrough on the order of magnitude of Wi-fi."

Furthermore, the compromise is also a matter of public safety: Homeland security officials have clamored for their own frequency reserved for disaster communications, following the September 11 attacks, when many experienced network outages. Congressional staffers hammered out a deal to take $7 billion of the proceeds from the spectrum auctions to create such a frequency, The Washington Post reported.

The Utilities Telecom Council (UTC), a trade group representing the nation's major utilities companies and other so-called critical infrastructure, applauded this part most of all.

"UTC looks forward to passage of the legislation and working with the public safety community to promote sharing with utilities and other critical infrastructure industries," said UTC CEO Connie Durcsak.

Of course, any auctions and network are still years away, so it remains to be seen just how nicely all the stakeholders will play once the spectrum actually gets dolled out.

Facebook Asking Some Users To Upload Government Issued IDs

2012-02-16T19:40:13Z

Updated 4:32 pm, ET, Thursday, Feb. 16

Facebook on Thursday began asking certain popular users to upload photos of their government issued identification cards to help the social network test a new accounts verification service, the social network confirmed to TPM.

"The new process enables people to verify their identities by submitting a government issued ID," a Facebook spokesperson said.

Facebook also revealed to TechCrunch, which first broke the news of the new verification process on Wednesday night, that it will "permanently delete" the ID information after the account holder has been verified.

Facebook did not elaborate on how exactly it will go about verifying the IDs or the accounts supposedly attached to them.

Twitter and Google Plus, which also offer account verification services for selected users and have done so for months (years in the case of Twitter), are similarly opaque about how those verification processes work.

For instance, Robert Scoble, a prominent technology blogger and Google Plus user, said that he was verified randomly by Google, but that the company didn't contact him about it or check his ID.

Twitter suffered a similarly embarrassing faux-pas with its three-year-old accounts' verification service in early January, when it mistakenly verified a parody account as that of the real Wendi Deng, wife of News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch. The parody account holder repeatedly said that he was never contacted by Twitter and that a "Verified" badge simply appeared on his account.

Facebook is at least more upfront about what it is looking for in order to verify users.

According to screenshots obtained by TechCrunch, Facebook will accept a "passport, driver's license, work/military ID" or two "alternate IDs" including a "school or work ID, library card, birth certificate, credit card, or social security card."

Facebook has said that, for now at least, the verification process and request to show ID is only being tested on a few popular users who have turned on the social network's new "Subscribe" feature.

Facebook hasn't said precisely which users it's tapping to participate in the new verification process, but TechCrunch cited Lady Gaga as an example.

The "Subscribe" feature, launched on September 14, 2011, works like this: Users can visit Facebook's "Subscribe" page and click "Allow subscribes." That activates a new "Subscribe" button in top corner of the user's Facebook page. Any other user can click this button to be "subscribed" to the see all of the first user's public updates, even if the subscriber isn't friends with the user who activated the feature.

Previously, Facebook only displayed the updates of users who had agreed to be "Friends" with each other. Tech bloggers pointed out that the "Subscribe" feature, in enabling "one-way" following, was adding a Twitter-like quality to Facebook. Since Twitter launched, the only means of seeing any other user's updates was to "follow" them, but there was no obligation to follow back, as was in the case of the mutual Facebook "Friending."

However, Facebook attempted to spin its new verification process as an expansion of its "Subscribe" feature, calling it a "minor update to our Subscribe feature."

"This update makes it even easier for subscribers to find and keep up with journalists, celebrities and other public figures they want to connect to," Facebook said in its statement to TPM, although it is unclear exactly how verifying accounts will do this, unless Facebook posts a "Verified" badge or other mark on their accounts, a la Twitter and Google Plus.

But Facebook has not given any indication it intends to do this, raising the question of what good "verifying" an account will do for subscribers

In an added layer of complexity, Facebook also told TPM that verified users will be allowed to change the names displayed on their Facebook pages to pseudonyms, confirming TechCrunch's earlier reporting.

As Facebook told TPM in a statement: "Once verified, [users will] also have the option to more prominently display an alternate name (nickname, maiden name, byline, etc.) on their timelines in addition to their real name."

Again, this move follows a similar move by Google on January 23 to allow people to sign up with psuedonyms on its Google Plus social network. For seven months after it launched in July 2011, Google Plus enforced a rigid "common names" or "real names" only policy, enraging some users. Twitter has since its launch in 2006 offered users the ability to create accounts under psuedonyms, which is why Twitter has turned into one of the preferred communications platforms of the Anonymous hackers.

However, there are many more outstanding questions remaining over how Facebook will store, secure, process and delete the information of users who submit their IDs in order to be verified. As one commentator noted on TechCrunch's post on the new system:

"I don't know how I feel about Facebook asking me to upload a copy of my government issued ID, especially the part about "we'll permanently delete your documents. When have they ever permanently deleted anything?"

To that point: Facebook was in late 2011 audited by the Irish government over an Austrian student's complaints that Facebook did not delete enormous amounts of his data even after he clicked "delete" on his account. The student obtained 1,200 pages worth of his personal data from Facebook by request, including wall posts, photos, messages comments and other data he thought had been deleted. The Irish government did not find Facebook in violation of its laws and Facebook escaped a fine, but it agreed to make changes to its policies in the European Union to allow users more granular control over deleting content.

Late updates: A reader pointed out to TPM that it is illegal to copy a military or Department of Defense-issued identification card in most cases (except for health insurance purposes), punishable by fines or imprisonment.

Meanwhile, it's also worth pointing out that Facebook has requested copies of government-issued IDs in the past for users who have had their accounts automatically deactivated under suspicion that they were fraudulent or spammers. Facebook in late 2010 admitted that a bug caused some accounts to be deemed likely fakes when in fact they were real.

Google also requests a copy of a government-issued ID for users attempting to reactivate Google Accounts that the company has suspended.

Notorious Electronics Manufacturer Foxconn Also Exploits Interns, Report Finds

2012-02-16T16:35:23Z

Lost amidst the grim coverage of the inhumane working conditions at the Chinese factories of the electronics supplier company Foxconn is another story: Foxconn has a massive pool of young, allegedly underpaid interns, one of whom committed suicide, as Vice's Motherboard blog reported Wednesday.

According to the lengthy, harrowing report from Motherboard editor Alex Pasternack, Foxconn -- a Taiwanese company that assembles the bulk of Apple's iPhone and iPad, along with products from other leading American tech companies including HP and Amazon -- is running what could be the world's largest internship program, and that it is exploiting its interns with the implicit collusion of the Chinese government and local schools.

One of those interns, whom Pasternack calls "Liu Jiang" (not his real name), committed suicide at 18 years old by jumping off the roof of his dorm at the Foxconn factory in Foshan, China, in July 2010, less than a month after his internship began.

Foxconn had terminated his internship just days prior and was attempting to send him home "because he failed to show up for work for several days." The intern suicide wasn't well covered because it was Foxconn's seventeenth suicide attempt and thirteenth death that year alone.

"It's not clear why he stopped working, what kept Foxconn from buying him a ticket home, or what led him to suicide," writes Pasternack.

But whatever the reasons, the young intern was one of 180,000 that Foxconn admits work at its factories during the summer months, although the number may be even higher -- up to 430,000, or a third of the company's declared workforce, according to a report from the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) cited by Motherboard. Internships reportedly last from two to six months per stint.

Interns at Foxconn have in some cases reportedly received half the salary of regular workers despite doing "essential factory labor," and "in some instances, [being] forced to work 14-hour days in a standing position," according to the findings of reports from China Labor Watch, a New York-based advocacy organization. Many of the interns weren't even studying factory-related fields, according to Motherboard.

Foxconn has pushed back on those reports and the intern's suicide, saying in an October 2010 statement: "While we have found a small number of incidents where interns have voluntarily and legally worked overtime hours, we are working hard to institute a ban on any overtime work by interns and we are in the process of ensuring that this important policy is enforced across all of our operations."

But those interns are part of a much larger system of exploitation by electronics manufacturers throughout the country, who rely on similar tactics to boost their workforce on the cheap, according to Motherboard.

The interns come from vocational schools and public schools throughout the country, including an estimated 200 in Southern China that Foxconn is accused of "systematically" exploiting.

The vocational and public schools, along with private internship recruitment companies, are sometimes paid "commission" from the interns' salaries and/or directly by factories, according to Motherboard.

The intern network is reportedly aided and abetted by local governments. Government officials and agencies have received fees for recruiting students to internships, and the government of the Henan province in June 2010 "declared that 100,000 vocational and university students would be sent on three-month internships at Foxconn's Shenzhen plants," Motherboard reports, reference English-language China Daily.

The entire Motherboard report is striking and worth reading in full here.

With interns as young as 16 reportedly being pulled into the system, the report coincides with previous reporting, including from Apple itself, documenting child labor at Foxconn's Chinese factories. TPM has reached out to Foxconn for a response to the reports and will update when we hear back.

Apple on Monday announced that the Fair Labor Association, a trade group that represents manufacturers and other businesses which Apple joined in January, had begun conducting a full audit of the working conditions of Apple's electronics suppliers, including Foxconn. It's unclear whether or not the FLA investigation will look into child labor or internships.

The move came after increasing online protests and a few real life demonstrations against Apple, which themselves followed harrowing reports by This American Life and The New York Times into the inhumane, sometimes fatal working conditions observed at Foxconn's Chinese factories.

Presented By:

2012-02-16T16:35:23Z

Apple, Questioned By Lawmakers, Changes App Contacts Rules

2012-02-15T23:20:20Z

Updated 9:26 pm ET, Wednesday, Feb. 15

Apple on Wednesday announced a sweeping change to its guidelines for mobile applications developers in the wake of a growing scandal that started with one, relatively obscure social networking app called "Path."

"Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told All Things D on Wednesday. "We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."

The updated guidelines came nearly a week after a Singapore iPhone developer named Arun Thampi on February 8 discovered that his entire address book from his iPhone was being automatically scanned and sent to Path, despite it not having asked his clear expressed permission to do so. Path was apparently using the information to connect users to others who used Path in their address books.

After initially dismissing the finding as "industry best practice," Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin apologized for the practice on his blog, said his company deleted all of the data it collected from users and released a new version that explicitly asked users for permission to scan their contacts.

But as Morin had stated, many other popular social networking iPhone apps including Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and Instagram all used variations of Path's address book scan for much the same purpose, and all without explicit permission from users. Many of those networks have quietly changed their policies echoing Path's, and Twitter told the L.A. Times it plans to do so, but now it seems that all will have to comply, as Apple has decreed it so.

The change in Apple's policy came just hours after two members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and cc'ed Path's Morin, demanding Apple answer nine questions about its guidelines for iOS developers.

As Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) wrote: "This incident raises questions about whether Apple's iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts."

The lawmakers also asked Apple: "You have built into your devices the ability to turn off in one place the transmission of location information entirely or on an app-by-app basis. Please explain why you have not done the same for address book information."

Late update: Rep. Henry Waxman has responded to Apple's policy change with the following statement provided exclusively to TPM: "I am pleased that Apple has responded to concerns raised about their privacy policy. Their decision to implement a software fix is a step in the right direction. I look forward to Apple's complete response to the questions about its policies and practices."

Apple Investigation Makes Workers Fill Out iPad Questionnaires

2012-02-15T22:24:09Z

The investigation into the working conditions at Apple's foreign assembly factories, especially those in China, has scarcely begun, and already the group conducting them has found that conditions aren't that bad, Reuters reported. The auditors are making 35,000 employees at two Foxconn factories in China fill out questionnaires on the iPad, a product the workers themselves assembled.

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) is a trade group that Apple joined in January. Apple recently commissioned the FLA to conduct what Apple says will be the most comprehensive audits in the company's history, following increasing protests over reportedly inhumane working conditions at the Chinese Foxconn factories, where Apple's most popular products are assembled.

The audits began Monday, according to Apple and the FLA, and the results aren't due to be published until March.

And yet, just three days later, the FLA is already saying that the physical conditions at Foxconn's Chinese factories are better than "the norm," for the country.

"The facilities are first-class; the physical conditions are way, way above average of the norm," said FLA president Auret van Heerden, Reuters reported, adding "I was very surprised when I walked onto the floor at Foxconn, how tranquil it is compared with a garment factory...So the problems are not the intensity and burnout and pressure-cooker environment you have in a garment factory...It's more a function of monotony, of boredom, of alienation perhaps."

The FLA is conducting the audit by making workers fill out anonymous questionnaires on the iPad in batches of 30 at a time, Reuters reported. About 100,000 workers are employed at each of Foxconn's two factories being audited, but only 35,000 are being interviewed as part of the investigation.

Some workers rights advocates have have cheered Apple's new audit as meaningful progress towards more ethical products, but others have criticized the FLA as nothing more than a "corporate mouthpiece," and the audits as a "whitewash," of the exploitation of workers.

Swiss 'Satellite Janitor' Aims To Clean Up Space Junk

2012-02-15T19:45:03Z

The Swiss have had about enough with how messy with space junk low-earth orbit is becoming. And so the Swiss Space Center is doing something about it.

The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a "janitor satellite" that will begin to clean up Earth's orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth's atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.

The janitor satellite, simply dubbed the "CleanSpace One," is being designed by the Swiss Space Center at the state-run university École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne near Lausanne, Switzerland. It will be a small rectangular shape: Just over 11 inches long, 4 inches wide and 4 inches deep, and cost just over $10 million (10 million Swiss francs) to build and launch. It is set to be operational within three to five years, by 2016 hopefully, according to Swiss Space Center.

It's first target will be one of two dead Swiss satellites: either the Swiss Cube, the country's first orbital object, launched in 2009, or TIsat, which was launched the following year.

The CleanSpace One will complete its mission by using a large pincher grabbing arm (think of those claw crane machines that vex players at arcades and other entertainment venues) "inspired from a plant or animal example." The arm will grip the dead satellite and drag it back to Earth's atmosphere, using a precision motor to re-orient its trajectory accordingly. Swiss scientists explain the system in the following video.

But taking down one of those defunct objects is just the beginning of what the agency has in mind.

"We want to offer and sell a whole family of ready-made systems, designed as sustainably as possible, that are able to de-orbit several different kinds of satellites," said Swiss Space Center Director Volker Gass, in a statement on the Center's website.

As the Center points out, that kind of technology is becoming increasingly necessary as the near-space around Earth fills up with junk, mostly discarded objects from spacecraft launches, old, dead, satellites, and the shrapnel left in the wake when such objects collide. There's at least one old spacesuit floating up there too, according to NASA.

NASA estimates that earth's orbit contains over 500,000 human created objects, 19,000 of which are larger than 4 inches (10 cm). The U.S. Space Surveillance Network has been tracking the larger objects by radar to allow new spacecraft to be steered out of the way, MSNBC reported.

And yet, collisions with active satellites still happen, as was the case in February 2009, when U.S. satellite company Iridium's telecom satellite was destroyed after colliding with a defunct Russian satellite.

Not to mention the fact that in the past six months alone, the space-watching public was treated to not one, not two, but three different uncontrolled re-entries of large defunct satellites, none of which fortunately caused any damage to anyone or anything on the ground.

Although it sounds a bit far-fetched, the Swiss mission does appear on the face of it to be more practical than a plan posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's future-oriented research arm. DARPA in October 2011 announced it was launching a new program, "Pheonix," designed to repurpose dead satellites into antennas by attaching mini "satlets" onto the dead ones that would take over the antenna portions of the dead satellites and reactive them. DARPA is counting on being able to attach the satlets remotely, using robotic surgery inspired tools. We'll see how both that, and Switzerland's idea, pan out.

Is The Chinese Government Ready For Jeremy Lin?

2012-02-15T17:19:54Z

Basketball fans have been mesmerized over the past week by the surprise dominance of New York Knicks star Jeremy Lin, the first American-born player of Taiwanese descent.

And with good reason: Lin, 23, who was originally undrafted and was until recently a backup player for the Knicks, has been on an incredible run since he began starting on February 4, propelling the once terrible New York City team to six straight victories with an NBA record-setting more than 20 points per game and seven assists for his first five starts, including Tuesday night's nail-biting win over the Toronto Raptors, in which Lin scored two three-pointers to tie and win the game with 0.5 seconds remaining.

Not surprisingly, the buzz around Jeremy Lin has taken over social media, with his official Twitter account gaining over 200,000 followers in the past week and various social media homages to him popping up, including "Linterest," a parody of the new social network "Pinterest."

On popular Chinese social network Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog, Lin has close to a million followers now.

As Kashmir Hill points out at Forbes, Jeremy Lin could also be one of the NBA's first players to have attained stardom already having attained fluency in social media: Lin apparently blogged on Xanga when he was in high school, and has posted videos poking fun at himself and his Harvard education on his YouTube account.

The "Linsanity" has reportedly extended to Lin's ancestral homeland of Taiwan, where dozens of fans gathered at a bar in Taipei on Wednesday morning at 8 a.m. to watch the Knicks take on the Raptors in Toronto, claiming Lin as one of their own, The Christian Science Monitor reported on Wednesday.

Yet fans throughout the rest of mainland China are finding it hard-pressed to catch Lin on the state-run China Central Television (CCTV) sports channel. As UK-based newspaper the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, CCTV didn't switch to the Knicks game live on Wednesday morning, despite the clamoring of many users on Sina Weibo. Instead, the network played a taped European soccer game.

The Financial Times speculates that CCTV was intentionally censoring the game due to Lin's outspoken Christianity and/or the tendency of fans to wave Taiwanese flags in the crowd.

China of course has had an ongoing tenuous relationship with the island of Taiwan since 1949, when the government deposed by the Communist Revolution fled to Taiwan. Taiwan still considers itself an independent nation, while the mainland government considers it a province.

Lin's faith is also a dicey subject: Although the Chinese Communist government is officially atheist, it has increasingly tolerated open displays of Christianity throughout the mainland since relaxing restrictions on religion in the 1970s. However, Chinese state media still attempts to downplay the role of religion in Lin's life. As the FT reported, CCTV did air a segment about Lin on Monday featuring the brief comments of a New Yorker applauding Lin for his faith, only to have that line scrubbed by censors.

But the restrictions on CCTV may have less to do with Lin himself than a new edict from the government to limit foreign programming to 25 percent of total broadcasted content per day, as the Los Angeles Times reported. Outgoing President Hu Jinato last month penned an essay decrying the influence of foreign programming on Chinese culture, the paper reported.

At the same time, Chinese state censors evidently had no problem allowing Knicks games to be streamed by Sina, the Chinese company behind the micrblog. In fact, Sina, which has an agreement to stream NBA games on its website, reported record numbers for Friday's game against the Los Angeles Lakers, in which Lin bested NBA star Kobe Bryant, Wall Street Journal China reported on Wednesday.

The Journal also noted Lin's faith seems to be catching on with Chinese fans and could prove a marketing opportunity. Sina Weibo followers posted messages containing vaguely Christian lingo like "Amen," and "God playing basketball."

Plus, English-language news outlet China Daily has covered Lin extensively over the past week, publishing 16 articles on his rise, including a piece published Wednesday celebrating him as an icon for all of Asia.

Still, it will be worth watching the Chinese government's reaction to Lin's sharp rise to fame. All indications are that he's here to stay. The next Knicks game, against the Sacramento Kings, is Wednesday night at 7:30 ET at Madison Square Garden.

Correction: This article originally incorrectly referred to the "Chinese monarchy" fleeing to Taiwan in the wake of the 1949 Communist Revolution. In fact, it was the Chinese republican government at the time. The story has since been corrected in copy. We regret the error.

Nicolas Sarkozy Launches Twitter Account As French Elections Kick Off

2012-02-15T15:20:31Z

As the French presidential elections kick off, President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a personal Twitter account -- a sign of social media's increasingly influential role in politics.

His first tweet was straightforward, announcing his new account and thanking those who are "following" him. His second announced a primetime television news appearance. Sarkozy is expected to officially announce his reelection campaign during the TV appearance.

Sarkozy's new Twitter feed might also be an attempt to gain some momentum in the polls, the AP reports. The embattled politician, who many blame for France's economic woes, trails the Socialist nominee Francois Hollande, both in the polls and in Twitter followers.

In the U.S. Republican presidential campaign, Twitter has changed the way candidates communicate with voters and even reporters. A campaign can send out quick blasts to correct misquotes or announce endorsements and events. And President Obama's success among young voters was spurred by his campaign's aggressive social media efforts.

As of Wednesday morning, Sarkozy had nearly 40,000 followers.

Former FTC Privacy Chief Takes On Online Advertisers...By Joining Them

2012-02-15T13:52:24Z

The former privacy chief of the Federal Trade Commission, Marc Groman, in December 2011 jumped headfirst into an industry he had previously regulated, becoming the executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), a voluntary online advertising standards association that includes Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL among its 80 member companies.

Groman told TPM in an exclusive interview that he joined the group to try and reform online advertising practices from within the industry.

"I came to the NAI because I think it's just an extraordinary organization with a great mission," Groman told TPM "It goes above and beyond legal requirements for online advertisers."

Two months after he started, he's got his first shot: The NAI on Tuesday released its annual compliance report, detailing the operations of and complaints against its members over the course of 2011.

NAI members voluntarily join the organization and pay membership dues to support the organization's staff and the preparation of such reports, but they are also investigated yearly by the NAI and must comply with a lengthy and detailed code of conduct that contains numerous provisions, among them those that require them to post notifications on their websites that they are collecting personally identifiable information, those that prohibit the collection of data from children under age 13 without parental consent, and those that require "opt-in" consent before personally identifying information -- your name, email, etc -- is combined with non-personally identifying information -- search queries and use of online products.

That last part is of critical importance lately, as it appears to be what Google is attempting to do by combining its multiple privacy policies to allow the company to better track users across products and serve up information such as when you'll be late for a scheduled meeting, based on your Google Calendar entries and local traffic data.

"It's a burdensome process," said Groman, "Companies are committing publicly to comply with the code."

By and large, the 2011 report paints a reassuring picture when it comes to how online advertisers are handling consumer information. Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, along with the majority of the other companies surveyed (only 60 in 2011, as that's how many were part of the group then. The attendance has swelled to 80 since) all came out clean.

The 2011 NAI report found "that no member companies intentionally collect" personally identifiable information from Web users for "online behavioral advertising purposes," conducive with years past (the NAI has been active since 2000).

In addition, the report found no violations of data related to healthcare and children, and had "comprehensive policies in place," to govern how such information, was collected, stored and used.

However, the report did find seven complaints in 2011 and two instances of "non-compliance" -- that is, two occasions where a company violated the NAI code.

The company in question, Epic Marketplace, was caught red-handed violating the code in July 2011 by another unrelated organization, the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. Standford found that Epic was engaging in "history stealing" -- a practice that allows someone to see which websites you've visited by running a script that checks which links appear darkened or have changed colors on each webpage you visit. Epic was running such a script on the websites of Flixter, a popular online movie listings directory, and cable internet service Charter.

However, as the NAI noted in its 2011 annual report, the organization began a review of Epic "within 24 hours" after Stanford published its findings online, published a preliminary report in October on its findings (they concluded that Epic had been violating the code) and has since slapped Epic with annual audits by an independent third party.

Groman pointed to that incident as an example that the NAI works better than "heavy-handed" government imposed guidelines on online advertising.

"We've established a strong regulatory program," Groman told TPM.

But the new director of the NAI says that's just the beginning of what he has in store for the group under his tenure. Groman pointed to the portion of the 2011 report that notes the NAI plans to "increase its technical monitoring of member companies," and that member companies "be required to report the domains they use" for advertising -- that is, all the other websites that they are advertising on. Other changes coming in 2012 include an updated website and more staffers at the organization.

But Groman thinks he has a strong base to build on, especially as the number of visits to the NAI's relatively bare bones website soared in 2011 to 8.5 million unique visits, up 200 percent from 2010, especially to a consumer-facing "opt out" tool designed to allow Web users to disable information collecting by any or all of NAI's members.

"I welcome with open arms all those questions and criticisms from other outside groups," Groman said.

Report: Netflix Ramping Up Original Content With Comedy From 'Weeds' Creator

2012-02-14T23:01:39Z

Netflix, the nation's largest video subscription service, is reportedly bolstering its original content offerings by securing the rights to produce a new, 13-episode dark comedy series from Jenji Kohan, creator of Showtime's hit show "Weeds," Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.

Netflix declined to comment on the veracity of the report to TPM.

The new series is reportedly called "Orange is the New Black," apparently based off the 2010 memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman, a communications executive who spent 13 months in federal prison on 10-year-old drug smuggling charges.

Netflix will also produce a horror series called "Hemlock Grove," from Eli Roth, the director of the movie "Hostel," according to the new Bloomberg report.

Bloomberg cites "a person with knowledge of the situation" for the report and credits Deadline.com with breaking the original news that Netflix was nearing deals on both new shows months ago.

By the middle of 2013, Netflix wil have five original content offerings, the company's chief content officer Ted Sarantos said at a conference in January.

Netflix has already debuted the first of its original content acquisitions, the gangster comedy "Lilyhammer," and has announced that it will premiere a 26-episode political thriller series, "House of Cards ," later in 2012. Prematurely canceled cult comedy "Arrested Development," will also be revived on Netflix in 2013, the company announced in November 2011.

If Bloomberg's and Deadline's reports are correct, the two new series could round out those five original content offerings that Sarantos alluded to.

Netflix said in its fourth quarter earnings that it feared competition from other streaming movie services, namely HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Amazon Instant Video and Hulu Plus.

Now Netflix can add Verizon and Redbox's forthcoming video streaming service, announced February 6 with a late 2012 targeted release date, to that list.

But it's not just competitors that Netflix has to worry about. Or rather, there are some related concerns: The company suffered a precipitous drop in its stock throughout 2011 as it made a series of business blunders, from raising its price 60 percent abruptly on customers, to announcing, then canceling plans to spin-off its DVD rental plan. Add to that the fact that Netflix continues to have to pay royalties to stream content from the top providers -- namely the big Hollywood studios and their distributors -- and the company's future is a tough one at best.

Google's Valentine's Day Doodle Supports Gay Marriage

2012-02-14T19:11:23Z

Google has altered its logo in time for Valentine's Day (as it has to commemorate numerous other occasions beginning with the Burning Man Festival in 1998).

But this year, the search giant waded into political territory, posting a short animated love story that features a snapshot of two men in tuxedos at the end, what appears to be an homage to gay marriage.

The HTML5 animation, which revolves around a young man's failed attempts to use Google searches to woo his jump-roping sweetheart, was co-created by Michael Lipman, an animator from the hit Web animated series Happy Tree Friends.

Lipman told TechCrunch that Google only gave him three weeks to finish the project, when it normally would have taken him 10 to achieve the same results.

But he conspicuously didn't address the most interesting part of the video: A collage of various couples that appear at the end, including an astronaut and a squid-like alien, a princess and a frog, a cat and a dog, a white man and a black woman, a cookie and a milk carton and the two gents in tuxedos in the front and center.

However, as PC World pointed out, the timing of the video was especially poignant:

Yesterday, Washington state legalized gay marriage -- possibly with the help of a letter to the governor from Microsoft and five other tech companies -- and the New Jersey Senate also voted in favor of allowing same-sex marriages, though the bill has some challenges ahead.

Google has also expressed support for gay rights in the past. In May 2011, the company released a video ad for its Chrome Web browser that also promoted the "It Gets Better" campaign (to the ire of some users). In June 2011, the company installed a rainbow at the end of the search bar, in support of Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. However, that campaign was also criticized by gay rights supporters for being too subtle, with the rainbow only appearing when "gay friendly" terms were searched.

Correction: This article originally misidentified the milk carton's partner as an egg. It is, in fact, a chocolate chip cookie, as a reader pointed out. We have since corrected the error in copy and regret it.

Presented By:

2012-02-14T19:11:23Z

Apple Reportedly Testing Smaller iPad, As Chinese Company Seeks Ban

2012-02-14T18:20:13Z

With Apple's new iPad 3 reportedly only days away from being unveiled, the news swirling around the company has gone into overdrive: Apple is reportedly testing an even newer, smaller, 8 inch iPad, according to a report in the The Wall Street Journal Tuesday.

The Journal's report cites unnamed officials at Apple's suppliers in Asia, where its current iPad and iPhone models are assembled. The officials said that Apple "has shown them screen designs for a new device with a screen size of around 8-inches, and said it is qualifying suppliers for it."

That coincides with an earlier rumor from the sporadically accurate Taiwanese tech news website DigiTimes, which in December 2011 said that Apple would launch a 7.85 inch screen iPad in the fourth quarter of 2012. The Journal's report on Tuesday doesn't specify when, if ever, the 8 inch screen model would hit the market.

To be clear, the model being tested is not the same device that Apple is expected to show off on Wednesday, March 7, which reportedly has the same screen size as its predecessors (the 9.7 inch iPad and iPad 2), but with an improved processor and 4G network connectivity.

The futuristic smaller iPad (iPad Nano?) would emulate Apple's strategy with the iPod -- releasing a number of different sized devices -- and also allow Apple to compete more directly with some hot new Android competitors, namely Amazon's Kindle Fire (7 inch screen) and Barnes and Nobles' Nook Tablet (8.1 inches), both of which have seen brisk sales since being launched late in 2011, to coincide with the holiday shopping season.

However, at $199 and $249, respectively, both of those Android tablets are also priced considerably less than the cheapest new iPad 2, which costs $499. It's unclear how much a new smaller, 8 inch screen iPad would cost.

Separately, the Associated Press reported late Monday that a Hong Kong-headquartered electronics company, Proview, is seeking a ban and seizure of all current iPads being imported and exported in 30 cities throughout the country.

Apple in November lost a trademark infringement case it filed against Proview in the Chinese city Shenzhen. Proview counter-sued for $1.5 billion, but says that the final damages amount had yet to be determined.

That ban hasn't gone into effect yet, but authorities in at least two Chinese cities, Shijiazhuang and Xuzhou, have begun confiscating iPads from authorized Apple retailers, according to the Wall Street Journal Asia and the New York Times.

Other retail shops throughout the country have reportedly removed their iPads from the front of the store to back storerooms, fearing that they will too be confiscated, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.

Proview has also filed a separate case in Shanghai that is set to begin on February 22, Businessweek reported.

Apple argued it had purchased the rights to the name "iPad" from a Proview Taiwanese subsidiary for $55,000 in 2010, but the Shenzhen patent court disagreed that those rights included China.

Apple's spokespeople have continued to assert the Cupertino, California-based company's rights to the "iPad" name:

"We bought Proview's worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago. Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple in China," Apple Beijing spokeswoman Carolyn Wu told the Associated Press.

Apple has appealed the Shenzhen court's ruling, but needs to settle soon, as a ban on Chinese exports of the iPad, where the device is assembled, would be "catastrophic" for the company, IP lawyer Stan Abrams told Bloomberg Businessweek.

New Italian Satellite Puts Einstein To The Test

2012-02-14T15:30:57Z

TINA CASEY

Hold onto your hats sci-fi fans, you're about to find out how much, exactly, the Earth drags space and time along with it as it rotates. The answer to that and other burning questions is forthcoming from LARES, an Italian satellite that just took off on the European Space Agency's (ESA) brand new Vega launching system. The primary mission of the satellite is to measure the "bizarre" phenomenon called the Lense-Thirring effect.

Also known as frame dragging, the Lense-Thirring effect puts a real-life spin on any number of science fiction tales dealing with space and time travel.

To visualize the effect, Krishna Ramanujan of NASA suggests that you start with something more familiar:

"Frame dragging is like what happens if a bowling ball spins in a thick fluid such as molasses. As the ball spins, it pulls the molasses around itself. Anything stuck in the molasses will also move around the ball. Similarly, as the Earth rotates, it pulls space-time in its vicinity around itself."

Scientists first predicted the Lense-Thirring effect in 1918 based on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, but according to Ramanujan, it was not measured accurately until 1998, when researchers recorded shifts in the orbits of two satellites. However, the data still had an error of margin of about 20 percent.

In 2004, NASA and an international team came up with a more accurate measurement based on data from the same satellites combined with an improved model of the Earth's gravity field.

The latest attempt is an all-Italian mission from that country's space agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italia, or ASI), which aims to get the accuracy up to within one percent. To that end, ASI put together the Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES) for a ride on the Vega launcher.

LARES is a relatively simple, low-cost spherical satellite, weighing 859 pounds, designed to follow the Earth's orbit by laser, using panels called retroreflectors (retroreflectors deflect light back to its source with little or no scattering). The payoff could be significant in terms of the satellite's ability to collect data leading to a deeper understanding of gravitational physics.

In addition to measuring the Lense-Thirring effect, LARES will also collect data to test other gravitational principles and alternatives to general relativity.

Fans of global conspiracy theories (Agenda 21, anyone?) may also be interested to know that the LARES mission will help define the International Terrestrial Reference System, which since the late 1980's has provided the global scientific community with a standard framework of spatial coordinates. The system requires constant updates due to changes in the Earth's shape from tectonic plate shifting and other phenomena.

That's a lot of punch for a relatively modest satellite, and it illustrates the concept behind the Vega launch system as a whole. Several European countries began collaborating on the project in the 1990's with the aim of developing a smaller-scale, lower cost alternative to ESA's two existing launch systems, Ariane 5 and Soyuz.

Vega is capable of launching several satellites at once, and LARES was just the main payload for this trip. Also hitching a ride were seven smaller "picosatellites" bearing university-based experiements. Vega will be fully qualified to carry commercial payloads once the results of this launch are fully analyzed.

Next up for Vega is another launch in 2013. Future missions will include additional gravity research as well as wind monitoring and the demonstration of advanced reentry technologies.

Apple Announces Investigation Into Factories; Advocates Cheer

2012-02-13T23:32:34Z

Apple on Monday announced it had requested third-party audits of the working conditions at the foreign factories where its most popular products, from the iPhone to the iPad, are assembled.

The audits, which are being conducted by "socially responsible" business trade group the Fair Labor Association (FLA), began on Monday and will run through "later this Spring," according to Apple. Audits will involve inspectors visiting production facilities, reviewing documents, speaking with workers one-on-one and through anonymous forms, and giving them business cards to allow them to follow up later, in case working conditions deterioriate or punitive action is taken against workers who speak up.

The results of the first inspections -- of two Chinese factories owned by Taiwanese manufacturing company Foxconn, where the bulk of Apple's mobile devices are assembled -- will be posted in "early March" on FLA's website. By the time the investigations are completed, FLA will have looked at facilities accounting for 90 percent of Apple's production.

"We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we've asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers," said Apple CEO Tim Cook, in a statement posted on Apple's website.

"We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain," Apple said in a statement provided to TPM, pointing out that the company has conducted its own internal audits of suppliers since 2006 and published the results online. However, the new audits will go into unprecedented detail about supplier practices, and are for the first time being conducted by an independent third party.

The move was greeted with a smattering of applause and a dose of skepticism by workers rights' advocates, who had stepped up protests against the company in recent weeks, following a series of reports detailing atrocious, in some cases fatal, working conditions at Foxconn's factories in the cities Shenzhen, China and Chengdu, China respectively.

On Friday, a few activists working under the banner of two organizations staged a protest at six Apple stores around the world, including those in New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. and abroad in London, UK, Sydney, Australia and Bangalore, India.

The protesters varied in number (only four showed up in New York), but all hand-delivered printed copies of an online petition with over 250,000 signatures, calling upon Apple to create "a worker protection strategy for new product releases," and to release the "NAMES of the suppliers found to have violations and WHAT those violations are, so that there is transparency around the monitoring effort."

The author of the petition is Mark Shields, a D.C.-based consultant and Apple fanatic who was devastated to learn -- from a "This American Life," episode -- about the poor working conditions at Foxconn's Chinese factories, and decided to do something about it. He also participated in the D.C. protest.

The other two organizations involved in the protest were Change.org, a website launched in 2007 to facilitate online grassroots campaigns, and SumofUs, a non-governmental organization launched in late 2011 to "hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable and just path for our global economy."

"We were very excited to see Apple's announcement this morning," said Amanda Kloer, director of organizing at Change.org. "It was an unprecedented step when it came to improving transparency."

"This new announcement shows the pressure is working -- more than a quarter million people have joined our call for an ethical iPhone 5 and Apple has clearly heard us," said Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Executive Director of SumOfUs.org. "But instead of actually solving the problem, they're trying to whitewash it -- hiring a business-funded group with a long track record of serving as a corporate mouthpiece. Apple consumers want real action to improve workers' lives, not more spin. We're not going to be satisfied until the workers who make our iPhones have safe and healthy working conditions."

Apple's been under increased pressure lately over reported inhumane labor practices of its manufacturers, Foxconn in particular. Foxconn had already been the focus of international media scrutiny following a string of worker suicides throughout 2010. Foxconn told Wired magazine in February 2011 that the issues had been resolved thanks to new counseling programs and other benefits for workers (not to mention the installation of new suicide safety nets), but writer Joel Johnson noted that the work was still alienating at best.

But the story continued in 2012. On January 25 New York Times is startling in recounting the numerous vivid abuses reportedly suffered by workers while putting together iPads and iPhones, including under-age labor, fatal explosions, unpaid overtime, cramped worked housing and a deceptive and dishonest management that punished workers who spoke out, among other ills.

Before that, WBEZ's popular public radio show "This American Life," detailed the conditions at the factory from a firsthand account by contributor Mike Daisey (the creator of "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs").

Daisey took to his personal blog on Monday to express his thoughts on Apple's latest move, applauding the company for heeding the complaints but urging it, and the entire tech industry, to go further in demanding supplier accountability.

"This [Apple] press release was sent out in prime time on a Monday," Daisey wrote, "This indicates that Apple has had a change of tactics--they have begun to hear the outrage of millions of Apple users around the world, and they are starting to understand the danger they are in. They have begun to understand that their choices may have caused irreparable harm to their brand."

However, as Daisey added: "It's vital to remember that the entire electronics industry is being put on notice--horrifying conditions are everywhere in the supply chains of all our major electronics brands, and this is the moment to exert that pressure. Samsung, Dell, Amazon, Acer, Lenovo, Motorola, Sony...the list is very, very long. Reforming how Foxconn works will help millions, but it is going to take a real coalition to change this industry."

Foxconn's other major clients include Intel, Dell, Sony, Cisco, IBM, HP and Lenovo, according to files obtained after the Foxconn website was hacked in early February (by a group called SwaggSec) in protest of the Taiwanese manufacturer's working conditions.

Apple revealed its other major suppliers for the first time in January, publishing a list of 156 companies online. It's unclear at this time just how many of those companies the new audits will reach.

Apple also noted separately to TPM that it became "first technology company admitted to the Fair Labor Association" in January.

Still, advocacy groups are still holding out for Apple to publish a "worker protection strategy" in time for the reportedly imminent launch of the iPad 3, said to be unveiled the first week of March, according to All Things D.

"We hope Apple continues to honor and expand upon its commitment, including a proactive worker protection plan," said Change.org's Kloer. "It's important that Apple takes steps as new products are rolled out, especially the iPad 3."

Reddit Bans 'Sexual Content Featuring Minors'

2012-02-13T20:29:40Z

The social news website Reddit announced a swift policy change on Sunday night, implementing a new rule: "No suggestive or sexual content featuring minors."

While the rule itself would seem to be one that even the most libertine Internet user could support, it came with a fundamental change in Reddit's burgeoning number of user-created subsections, called "Subreddits."

Reddit is a content sharing website where users can post links to websites and/or plain text, and carry on discussions with other users below the original posts. Users are encouraged to vote on a post based on its quality, using up or down arrows. The website surfaces the most popular posts at the top of its front page. But the website also contains many distinct "Subreddits," other pages where users can post content centered around various different topics.

As Reddit's administrators wrote in a post on the website: "As of today, we have banned all subreddits that focus on sexualization of children."

Each subreddit is generally organized around a specific topic, and users can subscribe to see all the updates from a particular subreddit.

Aside from that, each subreddit acts very similarly to the parent website, allowing users to anonymously post text and links to content from around the Web. The user who creates a particular subreddit is automatically made the top moderator of that subreddit, and can remove content and ban users. Reddit's administrators communicate with moderators via private messages on the websites.

As a result of the new policy, at least 29 subreddits, with titles ranging from "r/Teen_girls" to "r/preteen_boys," were immediately removed from the website, according to a Reddit user who tracked the changes.

There are over 100,000 subreddits on the website currently, Reddit's General Manager Erik Martin told TPM in a telephone interview, and the majority are not dedicated to the content that's now been banned.

"Most of them are completely appropriate for all ages," Martin said, "There are subreddits about everything from grilled cheese to NFL teams."

Indeed, among the most popular subreddits (by number of subscribers) are "r/pics" -- which is a subreddit dedicated to pictures that expressly forbids "not safe for work" (NSFW) content, and "r/aww," which is described as "Things that make you go AWW. Like puppies. And bunnies... and so on..." Sad posts, like those about "pet loss" aren't allowed, let alone anything more salacious.

But the new change also sparked lengthy, ongoing debates on Reddit itself and other social news websites, with some arguing that Reddit didn't move fast enough over complaints that some subreddits contained child pornography, or didn't go far enough, or was focused on the wrong socially repellant content that's being shared on the website.

Others argued that the changes marked a worrisome new era of editorial control by Reddit's administrators, a "slippery slope" toward censorship of the freewheeling website.

"Freedom of speech is a good thing. Common sense, tact and dignity is even better. Bravo admins. Long overdue," wrote one Reddit user.

"Common sense, tact, and dignity ARE NOT BETTER THAN FREEDOM OF SPEECH," countered another user.

"Why is a subreddit that has legal pictures of 15-17 year olds in sexually suggestive situations banned, but /r/beatingwomen is still up?" asked another user.

Still, there's no denying Reddit had been moving in this direction. The recent change in Reddit's policy came after Reddit shut down a particularly inflammatory subreddit, "r/jailbait," in September 2011.

The "r/jailbait" Reddit, which was dedicated to sharing sexually suggestive images of prepubescent and adolescent boys and girls, was one of the most popular subreddits at the time of its shutdown. But it attracted the ire of the mainstream media and the online social news space alike in late 2011, after Gawker first reported on the section, later detailing how a 14-year-old girl's photos meant for her boyfriend ended up passed widely around several subreddits and other websites.

Yet in the wake of the "r/jailbait" takedown, that type of content didn't leave Reddit entirely. In fact, it simply dispersed to a host of new, similarly-named and themed subreddits, created by users intent on exchanging links to such photos.

Outraged by the reappearance of such content and the apparent complicity of Reddit's administrators, users of the comedy website SomethingAwful.com, who had since September been protesting Reddit over the content, on Sunday called for a new, unified strike, a: "Redditbomb." In short, SomethingAwful asked all of its members to complain to local Parent Teacher Associations, politicians, churches, news outlets and the FBI about the underage sexually suggestive content on Reddit.

"Send the 'Redditbomb' to local politicians schools and churches," read one line of SomethingAwful's post, "Let them see that their children are using a website that exploits and sexualizes children, requesting that children submit their own nude photos."

"The Redditbomb came together in a few hours, and was widely disseminated to various media sources and such," explained one of the authors of the Redditbomb post on a different social news website, Metafilter. "The [Reddit] admins had their chance to fix it; they didn't just fuck up, they actively refused, doing nothing beyond what was necessary to get the spotlight off of themselves. This was the next step; if they will not voluntarily take responsibility for the fact that Reddit is used to trade child pornography, then goddammit they will be forced to take responsibility."

But as Reddit pointed out in its post announcing the new "no underage suggestive or sexual content," rule, it has never allowed child pornography on the website. In fact, Reddit doesn't allow any original content to be hosted on its website aside from text. The rest of the content that appears on the website is just thumbnail images of links to other websites, including image hosting servers. If child pornorgaphy had been posted "on Reddit," the actual file would have been located on another website.

As Reddit's administrators wrote:

In the past, we have always dealt with content that might be child pornography along strict legal lines. We follow legal guidelines and reporting procedures outlined by NCMEC. We have taken all reports of illegal content seriously, and when warranted we made reports directly to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who works directly with the FBI. When a situation is reported to us where a child might be abused or in danger, we make that report. Beyond these clear cut cases, there is a huge area of legally grey content, and our previous policy to deal with it on a case by case basis has become unsustainable.

Reddit's Martin elaborated to TPM: "The legal definition of child pornography doesn't even cover alot of things that we've now elected on our own to ban. To imply that we've ever allowed things that are illegal is inaccurate."

However, as Martin also explained, Reddit's administrators are walking a fine line, attempting to enforce minimum standards as the website grows and gains a new audience, while allowing the users to retain the ability to post anonymous and engage in free-for-all discussion, attributes that have characterized the website since it was launched in 2005.

"We don't impose our own moral judgement on the platform," Martin said of the website's administrators, "We try to have as few rules as possible, because the more rules you have, the more you move away from being an actual platform. That's not something we're interested in doing. There's a lot of stuff on Reddit that I find personally offensive, but we don't make policy changes based on what I or anybody else finds offensive. There's lots of things on other social media websites I find offensive, too."

Speaking of which, there's still plenty of nudity and sexual content to be found on Reddit following the ban, perhaps the most notable of which is Reddit's "GoneWild" subreddit, which features a steady stream of what amounts to amateur pornography. However, that website and other related sexual content on the site is marked with a disclaimer "you must be at least eighteen to view this reddit." Martin said that these websites would remain up, but pointed out that there were other sections that where family friendly as well.

"There are a few great parenting subreddits, where parents can post videos for and of their kids and other advice" Martin told TPM, "Our goal for Reddit is to make it a platform for all different kinds of communities. We hope parents want to come...One of the things we're working on is helping people navigate to different subreddits more easily, based on their interests."

Martin said that Reddit would continue to enforce its new policy against underage suggestive and sexual content by relying on a combination of administrator and moderator vigilance, as well as letting users flag inappropriate content using the "report" button that's been available on Reddit since shortly after its inception.

However, Martin also shied away from making any broad changes to Reddit's overall simple, anonymous-friendly architecture.

Anonymity is "absolutely a cardinal value," Martin told TPM, "There are lot of things people don't post on Twitter or Facebook that they post on Reddit, because they don't want to have to deal with blowback from their employer, or have to explain it to some relative. It's just a different experience. We don't want to have it tied to your real world connections, unless that's what you want. We're never going to add Facebook connect to Reddit."

In that sense, at least, when it comes to online identity, Reddit remains closer to notorious website "4 chan" than it does Facebook.

In January, Reddit reported 2 billion pageviews, a new record for the website. The website was also the spawning grounds of the Web's mass blackout in protest against the antipiracy bills known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

'Anonymous' Claims Takedown of CIA Website

2012-02-10T23:30:28Z

The public website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, was knocked offline Friday evening, and a person claiming to be associated with the hacker group Anonymous took credit for the outage on Twitter.

"[C]ia.gov DOWN. #UMAD?#Anonymous," tweeted one Twitter user, whose name was not given, at 3:10 p.m ET, the Russian news outlet RT reported.

At the time of this posting, the CIA website was still offline and has been for approximately two and a half hours.

"We are looking into these reports," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood, CNN reported.

However, there is some doubt over whether this is a true "Anonymous" operation in the sense that involves any of the group's regular participants.

A search of Twitter's publicly available tweets by TPM did not reveal that tweet quoted by RT, and other accounts under the banner of Anonymous have mainly re-tweeted the link to the RT report. A widely cited tweet by the account YourAnonNews reading "CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous," also linked back to the RT report.

As Gizmodo pointed out, the operator of that account seems as bewildered as anyone as to what's actually going on, later tweeting: "go figure, RT got it up from me, u retweeted and other news sites post your tweet pl0x (this msg will self destruct in T-2 lol."

As Gizmodo points out, the length of time that the website has been unavailable and the lack of chatter about the outage on any Anonymous IRC (internet relay chat) channels, one of the loosely-knit group's preferred methods of communication, indicates that it may not be the work of any of its regulars.

The Alabama Department of Homeland Security also confirmed to CNN that several state websites had been hacked and information compromised.

Crowd-Funding Website Kickstarter Has Double Million Dollar Day

2012-02-10T22:09:37Z

Kickstarter, the Manhattan-based crowd funding website launched in 2009 that's since gone on to fund an iPod Nano Watch and the Occupy Wall Street Journal, among other strange projects, has made two projects into millionaires.

On Friday, the Kickstarter team announced that users had successfully funded two different projects to the tune of $1 million each within the same 24 hour period. Both projects set the record for the most dollars ever raised on the website. One of them also set the record for fastest funded project yet.

Kickstarter allows anyone to launch projects and solicit donations on its website, although it takes a 5 percent cut of all successfully funded projects.

The first project to hit the $1 million mark, at 2:08 pm ET, is a third-party iPhone docking station. But not just any iPhone docking station -- the coveted Elevation Dock, which is made out of solid aluminum and provides for smooth, hassle free undocking with a single tug, whether the iPhone has a case on it or not.

The second project to become a millionaire -- a new adventure game from Double Fine, the acclaimed videogame studio run by Tim Schafer -- did so at 6:42 pm, just 22 hours after it was posted on the website. The project, which initially aimed to raise $400,000, was fully funded within 8 hours of going up on the website, but the mass donations just kept pouring in.

The game, "Double Fine Adventure," which has yet to actually be titled, is slated to be an old school style point and click adventure game. Funders will also have the chance to see the game being made, thanks to a multi-part video documentary by professional documentary outfit 2 Player Productions.

Unsurprisingly, the creators of both projects were ecstatic. "Boom," tweeted Casey Hopkins, the Oregon-based designer behind the Elevation Dock, upon reaching the $1 million sum, later telling Think Brilliant: "It's a big milestone, I think crowd-funding is just in its infancy."

Tim Schafter tweeted a Smiley emoticon and later posted a picture of the Double Fine team celebrating.

But the Kickstarter team itself may have done the most reveling in the good news. After all, they enjoyed several other additional milestones throughout the day, from watching New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn announce a new effort between the city government and Kickstarter to help fund community projects, to watching indie band Black Tambourine launch a Kickstarter project to reunite, to earning over $1 million in pledges for a single day, to the site being featured on Friday's episode of the IFC comedy Portlandia. The team chronicled the days events in an inspiring blog post.

Here's video of the Kickstarter team celebrating in their NYC offices as Double Fine Adventure hits the $1 million mark:

We're celebrating with you! from Kickstarter on Vimeo.

Already, tech and business writers have been quick to point out the significance of the day and what it means for crowd funding initiatives going forward.

"Crowdfunding is coming into its own--fast," wrote Kent Bernhard, Jr. at Portfolio.

"If Kickstarter merely funds things that would have gotten money in some other way, it's a cool thing," wrote Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, "But, if Kickstarter funding allows the creation of fundamentally new and different kinds of stuff, then it is a creative engine of a much-higher caliber."

But for now, the creators of the projects and the Kickstarter team are just focused on enjoying the historic moment.