The now-defunct XY.com and XY Magazine - which targeted gay youth - may be forced to sell as many as 1 million profiles to creditors. Which got the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - who believes this puts the privacy of former members and subscribers at risk.
The site and magazine are now in federal bankruptcy thanks to poor advertising sales and rumored mismanagement of founding editor and primary owner, Peter Ian Cummings. The names, addresses, e-mail addresses, unpublished personal stories and other information about gay youth may be up for grabs thanks to Cummings' personal bankruptcy filings.
As reported by CNET News, Cummings, who founded XY in 1996, declared bankruptcy in February 2010 and among assets including a vehicle worth $1,500 and zero income - citing his status as a graduate student living on loans - he listed the "customer list, personal data, and editorial and back issues files of XY Mag and XY.com."
By including these in the filings, which Cummings did without using a lawyer, his creditors may claim ownership of his assets. His debts to Peter Larson for an unknown amount and Martin Shmagin for about $180,000 - have prompted them to file a claim stating they may sue Cummings for fraud if he does not turn over the personal data.
According to PCWorld, the FTC expressed its concerns in a letter this month to creditors and lawyers involved in the case. David Vladeck, the head of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection, stated in the letter that since XY.com's privacy policy stated "We never give your info to anybody," all the data should be "destroyed." Pointing out that even if Larson and Shmagin used the data to restart the magazine or website, the information may not be consistent with the original purpose for which it was collected.
While the issue of ownership of user data following bankruptcy has come up before following the dot-com bubble burst, those incidents did not include data collected specifically from gay youth between 13 and 17 years old.
In response to privacy concerns, Shmagin and Larson stated in a subsequent filing that "regardless of the debtor's privacy concerns, altruistic or not, the fact remains that movants have fraud claims" that could yet be the subject of a separate lawsuit.
What do you think? Do Peter Larson and Martin Shmagin have a valid claim or is the personal data of young people too private to trade hands in a bankruptcy proceeding? Personally, I can't believe Peter Ian Cummings made a filing mentioning such private data so casually and without a lawyer and while I'm sympathetic to his creditors woes - I'm appalled they'd violate gay youth's privacy to settle a debt.
Twitter is following Dell's lead by offering special deals via a new @earlybird account. Followers of @earlybird will receive tweets or text messages with special deals from Twitter's "partners" - aka advertisers.
According to Twitter's Help Center, @earlybird was created because:
Many of you use Twitter to stay on top of timely, relevant information, and lots of businesses are already sharing special offers on Twitter. We believe that surfacing deals through the @earlybird account will help you discover the best of those deals, as well as find and follow accounts that consistently provide exceptional value.
Although I think the suggestion made by ReadWriteWeb is far more accurate. Twitter has been trying out a number of new ways to generate revenue for a company that so far hasn't been nearly as exciting for investors as tweeters. These efforts have included the Google-esque "Promoted Tweets" and "Promoted Trends" as well as enhanced pages for corporations and making their tweets available to search engines and other sites.
This latest effort to cash in on the site's massive userbase is actually borrowed from Dell's playbook. In December, Dell reported $6.5 million in sales via their Twitter experiment over the past two years. Twitter wants a cut of this success and provide these partners with even more exposure.
All in all - it could be a win-win or an annoying string of ads in your timeline. At least these are ads you can "unfollow" if you so desire. What do you think? Will this idea be a huge hit with big rewards for Twitter's revenue or fizzle out as ads people actually don't want to follow? While you ponder that - head over to our Twitter account and click that fun "follow" button.
David Bohnett, who founded GeoCities at the age of 16 and after selling it to Yahoo! founded the David Bohnett Foundation, has made a $250,000 investment in LGBT social network Fabulis - founded earlier this year. As reported by Mashable, Bohnett's venture capital firm, Baroda Ventures, is known for investing in new social media and e-commerce websites - so long as they have a clear revenue plan in place.
According to VentureBeat and the company's own blog, Bohnett's investment joins ones by The Washington Post Company, Lars Hinrichs, Allen Morgan and Don Baer to bring the site's seed money to $825,000. The spherical looking interface, which ironically you can access after signing up via Facebook integration, is geared towards gay men and "their friends" to "discover where to go, what to do and who to meet."
If you've got an active Facebook profile - you'll fit right in. On my first visit I already had 2256 points, in a system that appears to be an elaborate popularity contest.
As you interact with the site - RSVPing for events online or in your area, networking with other peeps and answering questions in their Formspring style Q&A system - you gain "fabulis bits". For now you can only use these bits to vote up your friends on the fab list (aforementioned popularity contest), but according to a post to their help section - more uses of bits are coming in the future. Personally - I'm hoping you can use bits as currency in their online store featuring some cool pride items (most of which don't have rainbows - Hallelujah!).
I'll be looking more closely at Fabulis over the coming weeks - but in the meantime - what do you think of this new online venture? Valuable addition to the online queer universe or a waste of cyberspace?
A fantastic thing happened on Google's Blog today. Towards the end of a pretty typical Pride Month recap post they made a very atypical announcement. In response to recommendations by LGBT employees and organizations - Google will be providing compensation for the tax levied on same-sex couples utilizing Google's employee healthcare insurance.
As the New York Times explains, under federal law, employer-provided health benefits for domestic partners are counted as taxable income, if the partner is not considered a dependent. The tax owed is based on the value of the partner's coverage paid by the employer.
On average, employees with domestic partners will pay about $1,069 more a year in taxes than a married employee with the same coverage, according to a 2007 report by M. V. Lee Badgett, director of the Williams Institute, a LGBT research group based at UCLA.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, a handful of other organizations, including Cisco, Kimpton Hotels and the Gates Foundation, provide this same compensation as well. Syracuse University was the first higher education institution to do so when they adopted a similar "Grossing Up" policy earlier this year. However, Google is the first Silicon Valley company to take this step to level the playing field (or paying field as the case may be) for their employees.
Based on past experiences and the competition that still exists in the Valley for talent - a pool that has a high number of LGBT members - we can expect other tech companies to quickly feel the pressure to follow suit. The more companies in the US that take this important step - the more pressure competitors will feel and the domino effect continues.
For any policy wonks looking for a quicker solution, look to the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) - an action supported by President Obama and many members of Congress. For a policy change addressing this specific issue, check out the The Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act. Click here for info on how you can help the effort to repeal DOMA and click here for info on passing The Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act.
Chief Executive Cutie Mark Zuckerberg unveiled some new features on Wednesday at F8, Facebook's annual developer conference. In their latest kumbaya like move towards transforming the web into a giant social network, the company has dumped Facebook Connect in favor of "Open Graph" and partnered up with Microsoft to create a Google Docs competitor.
Open Graph is a set of APIs and Protocols that allow a web developer to add to familiar "Like" button to any web page "in just 10 minutes". In return Facebook provides the developer with demographics on their visitors via "Insights" - essentially a mini Google Analytics.
Facebook's partnership with Microsoft has resulted in a sort of Google Docs and Facebook hybrid. The experiment went live today at Docs.com and is based on Microsoft's Silverlight and of course Facebook's new Open Graph.
You might have noticed that Google is almost as prominent in this story as Facebook. That has led some to speculate this is the latest indication that Facebook is winning in a war with Google over control of the Web.
So what do you think? Is Facebook out to conquer the Wild Wild Web or just trying to make the Web a better experience for us all?
Facebook expands presence on other Web sites [SFGate]
Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8 (Live) [Mashable]
Please join me in welcoming our new Homotron writer, Aequalitas. He is the first of a few new Homotron writers. We all look forward to great things from him.
My home has a lot of natural light, and I'm thankful for it. However, I can't help but be intrigued by this idea from Rational Craft. I'm ultimately waiting until I can replace my conventional windows with something like this that also has the ability to be transparent and solar powered. How about that picture window in your living room transforming into an HD theater or displaying still and/or video art? See the videos after the jump.
Magic plasma screens are WAY better than real windows [DVICE]
At 11:34 AM EDT Saturday I received an iPad. It took awhile to get my data sync'd and even longer to download and update apps; yet the end result is pretty outstanding. Ok, yes, it's a big iPod Touch, but saying that doesn't do it justice. I believe that you have to hold it appreciate how different that it is, especially when dealing with apps that are written for the device. In fact, it is notable enough that I felt the need to write about it and finally revive Homotron.
GayGamers may want to check it out. It's my opinion that it will be an incredible platform for games. Even iPhone games seem to work fairly well. I know that many people complain about the 2x enlargement, but I find that that is only annoying on text-based apps. Graphical apps do get a little jaggy, but overall it's not too terrible, especially if you have any history playing the 8 or 16 bit games of yore.
I have spent much of the day exploring the iPad, and I have not yet encountered the problem of it not having support for Flash. I know that I will encounter it eventually, and I expect that to be a bummer when it happens. Until then, there is plenty to keep me entertained.
Like the iPhone, learning to type well is going to take some time. It's still not the same as a regular keyboard, but I know that I got much faster typing on my iPhone, so I'm expecting that I will get the feel for how to type quickly with the iPad.
The number of iPad apps is still a bit limited at the moment, but now that independent developers have the device in their hands, you can expect to see an explosion of iPad apps just like happened for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
After a recent quarterly loss of $209 million, Sun Microsystems may not look like the ideal purchase, but it was Oracle and not IBM that announced today it will be buying the home Java and Solaris for a sum total of $7.4 billion, which nets out at $5.6 billion after cash and debt.
Said Oracle president Safra Catz:
We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.
Speculation as to the motivation behind the buyout has run toward ideas about Oracle "integrating hardware and software with Oracle's Exadata database machine," and the transaction was approved unanimously at Sun.
Safra Catz, who owns a super cool name in addition to one, now two, of the world's top tech firms, made it clear that he does not consider the purchase of Sun as much of a gamble:
"We intend to ensure that it is profitable... We believe we will be able to run Sun at substantially higher margins."
Oracle to buy Sun in $7.4 billion deal [CNet]
The four defendants in Sweden's uber-high-profile PirateBay case have been found guilty, and are facing millions in fines and a year of jail time. I'll let my darling colleague Pixel Poet explain it all:
A ruling from a Swedish court was given today on the case that was brought against the founders of Pirate Bay by many of the big giants in the recording industry. Turns out the founders were found guilty and charged with one year of jail time as well as $4.7 million in damages to pay. The verdict partially came as a surprise to the defendants, the founders of Pirate Bay, since they argued the fact that their servers never held any of the copyrighted material and therefore were not breaking any copyright laws. Peter Sunde, one of the founders, had this to say about the verdict:
"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. . . It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime."
So it seems like the verdict is currently a big win for the record companies who fear the effects that music file torrents has on their bottom line. The verdict also indicates that a program that can be used for malicious purposes, such as the torrenting of copyrighted material, can have legal repercussions on the makers of that software and/or system if they are knowledgeable about its illegal use; however, the founders of Pirate Bay are not going to be walking the plank just yet, one of their lawyers told the press that the verdict is:
". . . outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal. . . This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."
The internet exploded upon hearing this news. Sites like TorrentFreak seem to have been brought to their knees by the verdict, one way or another.
Court jails Pirate Bay founders [BBC]
[Thanks to Philip for the pic, Neij is a cutie!]
I just received an official response from Amazon regarding the Amazon petition I signed earlier today, which corroborates our stalwart Sgt. Sausagepants' update suggesting the whole affair is/was human error rather than human malice:
Hello,
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.
Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:
If yes, click here:
If not, click here:
Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.
To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
Okay. 'Ham-fisted' indeed and it's good to see Amazon acknowledge that. But all those horrible anti-gay books are still popping up on a simple "homosexuality" search for me, which makes me wonder how long it will be before that ham's fist gets removed from Amazon's guts, so to speak. Or have these shenanigans now legitimately skewed the rankings, or something woeful like that?
It seems that Conficker's ultimate purpose has finally been revealed!
Drum roll please!
.
.
.
It's a spam bot!
Yes, that's right. Despite huge amounts of hysteria painting Conficker as some world destroying super spy doomsday botnet, it seems Conficker's makers are a little more practical and therefore... money driven.
According to a report by Karpersky Labs, the purpose of the mysterious download by Conficker machines on April 1 has been revealed as a directive to send out spam offering users a fake anti virus programme for $49.95.
Yep, it's peddling snake oil spam.
How anticlimactic, but money makes the world go round, neh?
Conficker Doomsday Worm Sells Out For $49.95 [Wired]
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3D iPhone glasses. Why?
