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A man in Bernal Heights might have had his home searched by Apple Employees who were masquerading as police. According to SFWeekly Sergio Calderón is the person whose home was searched. Calderón’s story, if true, is extremely concerning and raises questions about what Apple will do to get its way.

Calderón says that in July six people (four men and two women) wearing badges showed up at his door saying they were from the San Francisco Police Department. The “Police” claimed they had traced the phone to Calderón’s home via GPS and also asked him if he had been to Cava 22 (the site where the phone was believed to have been lost).

Apparently the “police” also threatened to call INS on Calderón’s family (even though Calderón is an American Citizen and his visiting family members are all here legally). One of the investigators even offered a $300 reward for the return of the phone (which Calderón says he knows nothing about). The thing that makes things even more odd about this story is that one of the “police” who called himself Tony gave Calderón a plain card with a phone number on it. Calderón gave this number to SFWeekly who called it and found that it was a phone number to Apple. This number was answered by a man named Anthony Colon who is currently employed by Apple and a Senior Investigator.

As the plot thickens the SFPD first said they had no knowledge of any search at that location, but now are saying they did assist Apple in searching a house in July.

SFWeekly has more information including the linked-in and facebook pages for “Tony”. This one will be interesting to follow up on, if Apple really did misrepresent themselves it is very concerning as it shows they are willing to stop at nothing to get what they want (regardless of what laws they break). Plus when you add this to the falsified evidence Apple presented in the EU we have to wonder about how concerned they are with the consumer…

Source SFWeekly

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Although the news of this broke a couple of days ago we thought we would wait and take a deeper look at what the recent DOJ (Department of Justice) Anti-Trust suit means to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. First and foremost the DOJ does not have the authority to prevent business mergers nor does the Federal Trade Commission. These two governmental bodies can enforce certain laws if someone files a complaint, but they cannot take direct action in most cases.

However, when the companies merging are very large (like AT&T) or there is direct evidence that the merger will harm consumers or the market, then they can step in and file an Anti-Trust lawsuit to force the companies in question to change things. This is what has happened with the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
The DOJ looked at the claims that AT&T has made and found that some of them just did not make any sense.

AT&T is claiming that the only way they can improve their network is by acquiring T-Mobile. The biggest problem with that is once they do they will have cornered the market on GSM Cellular service in the US. This is something that is certainly not good for consumers (although AT&T claims it is). It is also important to note that AT&T and T-Mobile compete in over 90 out of 100 markets making the deal a big relief for AT&T as far as competition goes.

The sad part is that even though there is a law suit filed it does not mean the deal is dead. AT&T now has the chance to reorganize the deal and present it to Federal Regulators or they can go to court and prove to a judge that the deal really is in the best interest of the consumer. Considering the level of understanding that many of our higher judicial officials have on what is good for the consumer this could be an easy win for AT&T.  We will keep you up to date on this as we find out more.

Read the full suit here

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In what has to be rather big blow to Netflix Starz has ceased contract negotiations with Netflix. This means that once the contract expires in February 2012 there will be no more Starz movies streaming on Netflix. Although this is certainly not a death toll for Netflix it is not good at all. Starz has rights to both Disney and Sony content which makes their contribution somewhat large to the Netflix catalog.

As you can imagine the issue is the amount of money that is changing hands over the deal. Although the exact amount is not known to anyone other than Starz and Netflix there are some estimates that put the amount at around $300 Million to renew for the next four years.  This is an amount that Netflix just cannot afford to pay.
As we mentioned above this does not mean the death of Netflix, it only means that they will have to come to some sort of compromise. As both Netflix and Starz need each other we are sure this will happen but the exact details of this (or any) compromise is guess work. We would suspect a reduced number in return for more restrictive content rules. This would be similar to when Starz pull their Sony content because Netflix had reached the total number of views for those titles.

The Netflix of next year might not be the same as what we were seeing even last month. If the content dries up they will not be able to justify the price increases and they will lose customers. Conversely if they pay the higher amount to keep the content and raise their prices more they will lose customers that do not want to pay that high of a price for a streaming service. To put it bluntly Netflix is between a rock and a hard place…

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So it appears that Google thinks people should use their Chrome Browser even if they work at a company that restricts things of this nature (often with very good reason).  Although you will not hear much about this it has been a well-documented fact that Chrome caches web pages (even in private mode) and also runs certain applications after Chrome is closed. These APIs read and write data to the System Volume Information folder and also do a few other things that are suspicious at best. This (amongst over things) has caused more than a few companies to ban the browser from use inside the corporate network.

However, Google still thinks that it has the right to let people by-pass these restrictions and install software that is not authorized. They have done this with a plug-in called Chrome-Frame. Chrome Frame is an API that allows a web page to be rendered using Chrome’s engine inside the currently running browser.  I guess this is for people that do not want to use multiple browsers, and is fine as long as it is something they want to install and (in the case of someone at their place of employment) it is authorized to be installed. This was not good enough for Google though, they have written a version of the plug-in that allows this to be installed with elevated privileges by-passing restrictions that are in place to prevent this from happening.

Now, I know there are some that will not understand why this is bad. They will say that people should be able to view the internet and that companies that are still on IE6 or 7 (which are no longer supported by GMAIL and other Google sites) are hindering their employees. However, most companies have fairly strict policies on browsing. This is mostly to prevent malware but also to help increase productivity. I know at more than one company I have worked for we provided internet systems in the break room and lunch room, but prevented all browsing on the users workstations. We also were never hit with a virus on any user desktop, but had them on the employee internet systems.  So it is not unusual to place these restrictions on browsing. It is entirely wrong (not to mention arrogant) of Google to create something that by-passes these restrictions. It also opens up a vector for attack as someone will find a way to usurp the plug-in and execute code through that elevated API, it is nothing short of Malware all on its own.

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