Cody Taylor

Ford is gambling on the power of social media for the new marketing campaign surrounding the Ford Fiesta subcompact. The auto giant handed over 100 new Fiestas to “agents” selected from 4,000 applicants and created YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts for them to relay their experiences. “Ford is taking a hands-off approach and telling participants not to hold back their opinions, bolstering the campaign’s credibility. ‘We’ve told them to be completely honest — that’s the only way it’s going to work,’ Monty told us. ‘We won’t tell them what to say, nor will we censor or edit any of their content.’ So far, it’s working in Ford’s favor. The tweets on the FordFiesta Twitter page are generally favorable, if a bit dry, as are the posts over at The Fiesta Movement Facebook page. None of the 80 pictures on the Fiesta Movement Flickr page show broken down cars. There are a few hundred videos on the FiestaMovement YouTube account if anyone’s got a few hours to kill.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini, who counts Google as one of his clients, sketches out a way that the GOP could ‘win back’ Silicon Valley — but he gets smacked down by tech businessman Francis Cianfrocca. ‘Patrick’s basic thesis is that the VC firms that fund the Valley will rebel at being regulated by [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner, who is talking about increasing reporting requirements for both private equity and venture capital. Assuming I understand them both correctly, something tells me that neither Geithner nor Ruffini understand deeply what venture capital is all about.'”

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Now Things Will Get Even More Interesting!

Noksu writes “Despite of the recent plunge in Nokia’s profits, the company is doing well in the surveillance business. The infamous ‘Lex Nokia’ got ratified in Finland and the company has launched a massive Nokoscope research project for data gathering. In the meantime Nokia’s new smartphones forward e-mail account credentials to a remote server. Surprisingly enough, this is done in HTTP request headers. The company has been informed, but there has not been an official statement yet. Time for class action suit in the US?”

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Techdirt has an interesting look back at some of the more interesting predictions on copyright. The article looks at two different pre-DMCA papers and compare them to what has happened in the world of copyright. “The second paper is by Pamela Samuelson, and it discusses (again, quite accurately) the coming power grab by “copyright maximalists” via the DMCA, entitled The Copyright Grab. It clearly saw the intention of the DMCA to remove user rights, and grant highly questionable additional rights and powers to copyright holders in an online world. Samuelson lays out many concerns about where this is headed — including how these proposals appear to trample certain fair use rights — and in retrospect, her fears seem to have been backed up by history. Samuelson, by the way, has just written a new paper that is also worth reading pointing out how ridiculous current copyright statutory rates are — an issue of key importance in the ongoing Tenebaum lawsuit, which (thankfully) the judge in the case is going to consider.”

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “A Swedish internet service provider, Bahnhof, has begun deleting customer identification information in order to prevent it from being used as evidence against its customers under Sweden’s new legislation against copyright infringement via peer-to-peer file sharing. According to this report on ‘The Local,’ it is entirely legal for it to do so. The company’s CEO, Jon Karlung, is identified as ‘a vociferous opponent of the measures that came into force on April 1st,’ and is quoted saying that he is determined to protect the company’s clients, and that ‘It’s about the freedom to choose, and the law makes it possible to retain details. We’re not acting in breach of IPRED; we’re following the law and choosing to destroy the details.'”

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evariste.galois writes “Wikipedia has a special section called, ‘Language Philosophy,’ in every article for a programming language. This section looks at the motivation and the basic principles of the language design. What if we investigate further than that? What deeper connections between philosophies and programming languages exist? By considering the most influential thinkers of all time (e.g. Plato, Descartes, Kant) we can figure out which programming language fits best with aspects of their philosophy (Did you know that Kant was the first Python programmer)? The list is not exhaustive, but this is a funny and educative start.”

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