Technology Talk

If you’re anything like me, not a day goes by without receiving at least one stock tip via email. I’ve had days where I receive upwards of twenty of them within only a few minutes.

The point of the email is to convince you that this stock is so hot that you’d be stupid not to buy in. Since most sell for pennies a share, those people looking to get rich quick and cash in on easy profits snap up shares quickly. Read the rest

The Attorney Generals from 21 states believe that Anheuser-Busch isn’t doing enough to keep underage kids off its Bud.tv site, Advertising Age is reporting. While they aren’t threatening to sue just yet, they have sent a stern warning stating

“We feel strongly that since you are creating the programming and controlling the internet-based network, not just advertising on it, you have a higher responsibility to ensure that youth are not exposed to the marketing on your site,” the letter to A-B reads. “We fail to see how your use of age verification on the Bud.tv site is a genuine attempt to keep youth from accessing the site’s content.”

Read the rest

Phishing scammers are adding voice over IP (VoIP) technology to their mix and ensnaring victims over the phone. In phishing schemes, scammers send an email impersonating from Paypal or a high profile bank. They usually mention that your account is about to expire or they detected fraudulant activity and ask you to log into a site to correct the info. The site you are referred to looks just like Paypal’s or the bank’s website, but it’s not affiliated with the company. When you log in, you effectively hand over your username, password, and any other sensitive data you input directly to the scammer. Read the rest

Last week, AOL released 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users. A few hours later, they realized this was probably one of the dumbest things they could have done, quickly removed the data, and apologized. A mirror site containing the 439 MB compressed download is still available (it expands to 2GBs) and is some fascinating stuff for anyone interested in search behavior, data mining, or online marketing in general.

For those of you who don’t want to download the info, there’s a number of web interfaces up at AOLSearchDatabase.com, AOLSearchLogs.com, and AOLStalker.com to allow anyone to search the database - or you can get some of the highlights from CNN.com. Read the rest

I wrote previously about the lawsuit YouTube faces for showing copyrighted video clips of Robert Tur’s 1992 LA riot footage. This week’s BusinessWeek (Aug 7, 2006) addresses the revenue generating concerns.

As I mentioned previously, most lawyers seem to agree that YouTube is protected by copyright law as long as it responds to the copyright owners’ requests to remove their content. A side question seems to be whether it’s ok to run advertising beside the videos. Read the rest