News

It looks like Facebook has already begun sharing user information with Law Enforcement; possibly without consent and in violation of some wiretapping laws. The news comes on the heels of a Reuters Interview with an investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In this interview Jeffrey Duncan said that Facebook contacts law enforcement when they find a post or conversation (through the Facebook messaging system) that contains possible criminal activity.

When I opened my email this morning I saw that one of our readers had submitted a link that had me very excited (no it was not porn… sheesh). The title of the article was “Lego ponders Portal pack”. Now I do not know about you, but what that said to me was that Lego was considering adding Portal to their very popular (and fun) Lego line of video games. I have played many of the other Lego series of games and they are great, so of course I was excited about the possibility that Lego would buy into the Portal franchise. Unfortunately, my imagination got away with me and I quickly discovered that the article was not about a game, but an actual Lego set.

As we reported when they first went into effect the UK and Netherlands’ bans on the Pirate Bay are doing very little to stem the flow of traffic to the popular file sharing search engine. According to a report by the BBC (which cites data from ISPs) the peer to peer traffic is back to around normal about seven days after the event took place. Now, what is interesting here is that The Pirate Bay has very little to do with peer to peer traffic (although it can be argued that Torrents and Magnets are Peer to Peer). It is a small, but vital distinction that the industry seems to forget all the time. Still the entertainment industry in both the UK and the Netherlands still has the wrong idea in mind when they try to view the Pirate Bay as the root of all file sharing.

Today is the day that Microsoft is allegedly going to release Office 15 to the world (although most are galling it Office 2013 now). The rumors started to surface when it was announced that Microsoft would be holding an invite only press event today (July 16 2012) in San Francisco. Just like the debut of the Surface Tablet Microsoft is keeping quiet about the actual news they are going to give out at the event today so they could be announcing almost anything including their own phone, but we think that is unlikely. We know that Microsoft intends to include Office 15 with Windows RT so it is probably much more likely we are going to see something on their new productivity suite.