exploring media

According to the New York Times, Google is pulling the plug on a bunch of projects including Lively (something similar to Second Life), Dodgeball, Catalog Search and Notebook. The reasons seem to be focused on finding engineers interested in developing the products (and people to actually use them) as well as a poor economy.

Read more here.

Italy police warn of Skype threat

By David Willey
BBC News, Rome

Criminals in Italy are increasingly making phone calls over the internet in order to avoid getting caught through mobile phone intercepts, police say.

Officers in Milan say organised crime, arms and drugs traffickers, and prostitution rings are turning to Skype in order to frustrate investigators.

The police say Skype’s encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities.

Investigators have become increasingly reliant on wiretaps in recent years.

Customs and tax police in Milan have sounded the alarm.

They overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an accomplice to switch to Skype in order to get details of a 2kg (4.4lb) drug consignment.

Use of wiretaps by prosecutors in Italy has grown exponentially in recent years.

Heated debate

Investigators say intercepts of telephone calls have become an essential tool of the police, who spend millions of dollars each year tracking down crime through wiretaps of landlines and mobile phones.

But the law may be about to change.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government has drawn up a bill which would restrict police wiretaps to only the most serious crimes.

Much crime reporting in the Italian media is based on leaks of wiretaps and leading politicians, including Mr Berlusconi himself, have found to their embarrassment that details of their private telephone conversations have sometimes been leaked to newspapers.

Under the new law reporting of details of criminal investigations obtained through wiretaps would become illegal until a final verdict has been delivered.

Given the extreme slowness of Italian justice, this would mean that details of cases now before the courts might be reported by the press only in 15 years time.

Not only have Italian journalists been protesting at the new draft bill, but a heated debate is also going on about it within the country’s highest body for the administration of justice – the supreme council of the magistrature, composed of the country’s top judges.

source CTV News
watch the video here.
also published here.

CTV.ca News Staff

Updated: Thu. Jul. 3 2008 11:46 AM ET

A new online community is attempting to copy the wildly successful format of the social networking site Facebook, but with one big difference.

Instead of finding common ground through mutual interests or friends, members are encouraged to unite over the things they hate.

In fact, Hatebook.org could easily be described as an anti-social networking site, where instead of making friends one makes enemies and instead of receiving messages, one receives junk mail.

“Obviously people feel the need to talk about their neighbour and their friends and their teachers, professors, students, in a negative light while maintaining a pseudonym online, and that’s the forum to do it,” Photi Sotiropoulos, a media expert from McGill University, told CTV’s Canada AM.

The site, which boasts over 65,000 international members — or “suckers” as they’re called by Hatebookers — was started by a German market researcher close to one year ago.

The majority of Canadian members of the site are from Montreal — 530 — and most are male and in their mid-20s, Sotiropoulos said.

Other sites have also tried to copy the successful Facebook format, such as Deathbook, a site that helps members keep their dead loved ones’ memories alive, and the self-explanatory Dogbook and Catbook.

A quick perusal of Hatebook reveals some striking similarities to Facebook. It mimics the site’s look and style, though instead of the familiar blue and white, Hatebook uses an angry-looking red and pink.

And in terms of content, not surprisingly it’s pretty negative with messages showing up such as this one from someone calling himself “drevil”: “We love to hate – this world is so ridiculous – be evil – take over the world!”

While some posts are quite vitriolic and the language is often foul, most messages appear to be playful slams directed at other members rather than rants about specific issues.

While Facebook and other sites like LinkedIn or MySpace allow members to create a social network and as a result connect with people of similar interests, hobbies or passions or to reconnect with long-lost friends, Hatebook seems simply predicated simply on, well, hate.

“The motive of this website is hate and it’s this very counter-intuitive thing. Nobody really understands its raison d’etre,” Sotiropoulos said.

But he suggested that sites like Hatebook are gaining popularity as a backlash against the more mainstream sites and their “anti-social” feel — and that they serve as proof that online social networking is here to stay.