Fast Company article on the struggle between the big four

The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company

The Great Tech War Of 2012 BY: FARHAD MANJOOOctober 19, 2011 Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy.

Atlantic Article on attack on the HathiTrust

The Fight Over the Future of Digital Books | Share on LinkedIn

Authors Guild v. HathiTrust is a strange legal twist. For an association of professional writers, the Guild seems to have forgotten some of the basic principles of its craft, such as not placing sympathetic figures like librarians in the role of villains. Almost comically, the Guild's press release trumpeting its lawsuit against HathiTrust augurs a dark day in the not-too-distant future when old works, including obscure Yiddish texts, are "abducted" and "released" to thousands of students and professors.

The core of the networked world of business

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

Dispatches from the information War

Boing Boing

The Revolution will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War by Heather Brooke

Brooke journeys to the hacker scenes in Berlin, San Francisco and Boston, and the radicalized halls of power in Iceland, and spins a story that does a good job of explaining what, exactly, happened with Cablegate: how the cables got out, the intrigues and infighting amongst the players (media, hackers, activists) and the governmental spin in response.

Here is one place where Brooke really opened my eyes: there are many people who make blanket assertions about the US government's manipulation of the press. But Brooke has concrete details, and the surprising intelligence that while the US does not have a "public broadcaster" like the BBC or public newspaper subsidies like Norway, it outspends both of them in its formidable press-offices at every level of government and military. In other words, the US doesn't have public news media, but it spends an equivalent sum on spin-doctors whose job it is to control the narrative in the "free-enterprise" press.

Brooke finishes the book with a manifesto of sorts, a call to arms to press, politicos and public to confront the coming deluge of data and channel it for transparency and accountability, but away from surveillance and invasion of privacy (a delicate operation, to be sure!) and to resist using the net as an excuse for more intrusive information policy. The book's website has more on this.

Google's Privacy Principles

A message about privacy, but one that stresses how important your information is to them.

Chris Poole on Identity online

Web 2.0 Summit 2011: Chris Poole, "High Order Bit" - YouTube

Pre-crime -- coming soon

Terrorist 'pre-crime' detector field tested in United States : Nature News

Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly 'sense' whether you are planning to commit a crime.

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Entertainment Industry Accounting

Hollywoodonomics: how Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix “lost” $167M – Boing Boing

The original post holds this out as an example of why only a fool accepts "net-participation" compensation for work associated with a film, but I think this is also a great example of why all financial numbers released by the entertainment industry should be treated as fiction until proven otherwise. Especially piracy "loss" figures, alleged contributions to national GDP, and job creation numbers.

Dubious tactics in fighting piracy

Private Anti-Piracy Investigator Spills The Beans | TorrentFreak

Boosting Statistics

“At this time, Short Round and I were trotted out to meet Neil and to show him our equipment and discuss tactics. Mr Gane gave the impression of being very committed to stopping the evil scourge of piracy and was far more media savvy than his predecessor.”

“He was adamant that we needed to boost our statistics to make the media sit up and take notice and that the large numbers would make it easier to get the local Police interested. This was especially difficult to do as local police had no jurisdiction over copyright infringing product and the AFP were desperately short on manpower. We were encouraged to find links to drugs and stolen goods wherever possible.”

“We discussed the formula for extrapolating the potential street value earnings of ‘laboratories’ and we were instructed to count all blank discs in our seizure figures as they were potential product. Mr Gane also explained that the increased loss approximation figures were derived from all forms of impacts on decreasing cinema patronage right through to the farmer who grows the corn for popping.”

Gane understood that the media was an essential tool towards AFACT’s goal of getting tougher copyright legislation in place. And for this purpose, it was a good idea to bend the truth a bit. The results of this recalculation are quite amazing.

“2002 impact estimates were $100 million to today’s figure of $1.36 billion in nine years…. That’s a lot of extrapolating,” Warren says.

Amazon and the book supply chain

Amazon Publishing: How it controls whole book supply chain - Sep. 27, 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Amazon's low-priced bestsellers and Kindle e-reader are famous for changing the book industry. What's not so well known is how deeply Amazon's tentacles reach into all parts of the industry, including its growing interest in inking deals with authors to publish some of the hit books Amazon sells.

Booksellers and publishers are crying foul, saying they're being cut out of the chain by an aggressive Goliath. But some authors who have recently signed with Amazon Publishing say the company simply offered them a better, fairer deal than traditional publishers.

Climate change debate

Chart: How the Climate Change Deniers Won | Mother Jones

at this month's Republican debate in California, every presidential wannabe except Jon Huntsman denied that man-made climate change was a problem.