Cody Taylor

In an effort to better understand how people use the web, Mozilla has launched a new data gathering project for usability studies called Test Pilot. It’s still just a concept, but as an aggregation model, it shows great promise.

An anonymous reader writes “The new White House website privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, Obama’s legal team has quietly exempted YouTube from this rule. Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video — even those users that do not click the “play” button. As CNET reports, no other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver.”

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Web-developers can create user-friendly horizontal or vertical navigation menus using CSS. Javascript makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible navigation to any website. Today we wanted to highlight 10 brilliant Multi Level Navigation Menu Techniques built using different Javascript Libraries including jQuery

You’ve probably never heard of many of them, but chances are you’ll be using some of these Web sites by the end of this year.

Ian Lamont writes “The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the National Security Archive are praising President Obama’s executive orders to make the federal government more open. Yesterday, Obama issued two memos and one executive order instructing government agencies to err on the side of making information public and not to look for reasons to legally withhold it. The moves are expected to make it easier for people to file Freedom of Information Act requests, and should also boost the amount of information that agencies place on their websites. The general counsel for the National Security Archive (an NGO that publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) even predicts that agencies will use blogs to share information. Obama’s directives reverse a 2001 memo from former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft instructing federal agencies to generally withhold information from citizens filing FOIA requests.”

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Gamasutra is running an in-depth look at the regulation of video games in the US and other countries. They discuss the reasons for such legislation, such as child protection and intellectual property restrictions, as well as what gamers can expect to see in the coming years. “Fairfield also points out combinations of laws, which, when put together make for strange outcomes. The biggest of these, for video games, is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In short, gaining unauthorized access to someone’s computer and doing 0 in damages opens you up for criminal charges. It’s good for prosecuting hackers, but it makes for a strange fit with social networking websites and user-generated content. That fit was especially strange when prosecutors weren’t quite sure how to approach the widely publicized case of Megan Meier. The 13-year-old Meier committed suicide after being deceived and bullied by another girl and her mother, Lori Drew. Unable to find a good way to approach the issue, prosecutors charged Drew under MySpace’s End User License Agreement, effectively giving MySpace the power to dictate criminal law.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.