CEO Jeff Bezos said removing copies of e-books from customers' Kindles was "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles
By Deborah Gage Information Week July 24, 2009
In a brief but pointed statement Thursday, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for removing copies of e-books from customers' Kindles last week, a move that angered consumers and forced Amazon to defend what appeared to be arbitrary and controlling behavior.
Amazon's targets were the books Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell, two novels about the horrors of repressive societies.
The company deleted the books both from customers' Kindles and the Kindle store, where they'd been sold. An Amazon spokesman said the books had been added to the store by a company that didn't have rights to them and were unauthorized copies.
The irony of Amazon remotely deleting novels about repression was not lost on customers. Although they were offered refunds, several were upset just the same. "I liken it to a Barnes & Noble clerk coming to my house when I'm not home, taking a book I bought from them from my bookshelf and leaving cash in its place," one customer wrote on Amazon's Web site. "It's a violation of my property and this is a perfect example of why people (rightly) hate DRM."
On Thursday, as Amazon reported quarterly revenue that missed Wall Street's expectations and suffered a drop in share price of nearly 7%, Bezos was contrite.
"This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle," he wrote on Amazon's site. "Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission."
Bezos' post has received over 250 comments so far.
Some customers also reported losing copies of other e-books on their Kindles, including novels by Ayn Rand and some of the Harry Potter books.
Amazon has promised not to remove books from customers' Kindles again, although it is not clear whether the company will also change how it monitors the Kindle store for unauthorized works.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Gates' Liberal College Town No Stranger to Racial Dust-Ups
Racism Allegations in Recent Past at Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
By PATRIK JONSSON
The arrest of an African-American professor at his home near Harvard University gives a rare view into racial tensions in a seemingly unlikely place: America's ivory tower and its liberal environs.
At least in the popular mind, flare-ups between police and minorities tend to occur in the 'hoods and barrios of poverty-ridden American cities. But the liberal bastion of Cambridge, Mass. (per capita income: $31,156; black population: 12 percent), the home of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has its own complex encounters with racial attitudes.
Five years ago, Harvard's S. Allen Counter, a black professor of neuroscience, was stopped by Harvard campus police in what many saw as a racial-profiling incident.
About three years later, an assistant professor at MIT, James Sherley, raised a ruckus over his failure to get tenure, a decision that he claimed was race-based.
Related
No N-Word, But Still Subtle Racial Prejudice
Obama Keeps the Faith on His BlackBerry
Obama Invites Gates, Cambridge Cop To White House
Those claims were never proved, but MIT has embarked on what it calls the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity to address the university's problems in hiring black faculty.
And last week, Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested after one of his neighbors called police saying that two black men were trying to break into Gates' house. The scholar, who had a tense encounter with the police, was charged with disorderly conduct.
To be sure, there's debate about whether Gates engaged in a battle of wills with a Cambridge police officer. But whatever the case, authorities dropped the charges Tuesday.
Gates, for one, is still angry and considering his legal options.
These incidents indicate that for liberal institutions and communities like Cambridge, race can be a complicated and, at times, paradoxical issue.
On the one hand, U.S. universities have created hundreds of departments for African-American studies -- of which Harvard's is arguably the most preeminent. But on the other hand, racial diversity among faculty at U.S. universities -- which columnist Stephanie Ramage calls "bastions of equality and enlightenment" -- is, on the whole, lagging.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/story 7-25-2009
By PATRIK JONSSON
The arrest of an African-American professor at his home near Harvard University gives a rare view into racial tensions in a seemingly unlikely place: America's ivory tower and its liberal environs.
At least in the popular mind, flare-ups between police and minorities tend to occur in the 'hoods and barrios of poverty-ridden American cities. But the liberal bastion of Cambridge, Mass. (per capita income: $31,156; black population: 12 percent), the home of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has its own complex encounters with racial attitudes.
Five years ago, Harvard's S. Allen Counter, a black professor of neuroscience, was stopped by Harvard campus police in what many saw as a racial-profiling incident.
About three years later, an assistant professor at MIT, James Sherley, raised a ruckus over his failure to get tenure, a decision that he claimed was race-based.
Related
No N-Word, But Still Subtle Racial Prejudice
Obama Keeps the Faith on His BlackBerry
Obama Invites Gates, Cambridge Cop To White House
Those claims were never proved, but MIT has embarked on what it calls the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity to address the university's problems in hiring black faculty.
And last week, Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested after one of his neighbors called police saying that two black men were trying to break into Gates' house. The scholar, who had a tense encounter with the police, was charged with disorderly conduct.
To be sure, there's debate about whether Gates engaged in a battle of wills with a Cambridge police officer. But whatever the case, authorities dropped the charges Tuesday.
Gates, for one, is still angry and considering his legal options.
These incidents indicate that for liberal institutions and communities like Cambridge, race can be a complicated and, at times, paradoxical issue.
On the one hand, U.S. universities have created hundreds of departments for African-American studies -- of which Harvard's is arguably the most preeminent. But on the other hand, racial diversity among faculty at U.S. universities -- which columnist Stephanie Ramage calls "bastions of equality and enlightenment" -- is, on the whole, lagging.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/story 7-25-2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Hacker break-in of Twitter e-mail yields secret docs
Underscores problems broadcasting life's secrets to the world, say experts
By Gregg KeizerJuly 16, 2009 01:16 PM ET
Computerworld - A hacker made off with confidential Twitter documents after breaking into an employee's e-mail account, the company's co-founder confirmed yesterday.
Security experts today said that the breach and theft highlights the problem people have with creating, and then remembering, strong passwords, and the increasing tendency to disclose personal information on services like Twitter and Facebook.
"What it boils down to is that people are lazy and lackadaisical about their personal paranoia," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. "People should be thinking twice about what they're making public."
The breach occurred about a month ago, said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, when a hacker calling himself Hacker Croll broke into an administrative assistant's e-mail account, then used that to collect information that let him access the employee's Google Apps account. Twitter workers use the corporate version of Google Apps to share documents and other information within the company.
Hacker Croll then forwarded hundreds of pages of internal Twitter documents to Web sites, including TechCrunch, which in turn has published some and referred to others. Among the finds: Financial projections by Twitter that it will have a billion users, $1.54 billion in revenue and $1.1 billion in net earnings by 2013.
The privately held Twitter does not disclose the current number of users or its financials, but some metrics firms estimate the site has six million unique visitors a month. Documents disclosed by TechCrunch said Twitter was projecting 25 million users by the end of this year.
Stone denied reports that a bug in Google Apps was responsible. "This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps, which we continue to use," he said in a blog entry yesterday. "This is more about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets. This was not a hack on the Twitter service, it was a personal attack followed by the theft of private company documents."
Exactly, said security experts today, who put the blame on a combination of online password retrieval systems and people's disclosure of their personal life on social networking services.
"This has nothing to do with cloud computing," said Sam Masiello, vice president of information security at Englewood, Colo.-based MX Logic. "It's about weak passwords that are easily guessable, with a huge contribution from people's habit of putting online information that they wouldn't otherwise share with anyone but their closest friends. It's not hard to crack [password resets] with the information you can find freely available on social networking sites."
Like the breach of Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account last fall, security researchers guessed that Hacker Croll gained access to the Twitter employee's account using Google's password rest feature which poses several personal questions to authenticate the user. Hacker Croll likely dug up possible responses by rooting through the Web for details on the assistant, then used those to reset the password to one only he knew.
From Computerworld.com
See--http://harlemvoiceblogs.blogspot.com
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Google: The World's Most Successful Failure?
David Coursey, PC World Thursday, July 09, 2009 8:30 AM PDT
The amazing thing about Google is how a business that makes 97 percent of its revenue selling advertising has people convinced that it is a technology company. And then gets a free pass despite a series of failures outside its core competencies in search and online ad sales.
Right now, Google seems to be flooding the market with products that are not quite finished. People do not care because the products work well enough and are free. But, suppose people had to pay for them? Then where would Google be?
(See Related: Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures
Even though Chrome will be a "free" OS , it will still come loaded on a computer people well be asked to spend perhaps $300 to $400 to purchase. That puts Google under real pressure to perform, something it has never really faced.
Google's Android smartphone OS is well-liked by some and seems to be gaining acceptance, even though its yet to prove itself with paying customers. My impression is that Android will ultimately demonstrate the importance of controlling both hardware and software if you want smartphone success. Apple, RIM, and Palm have that control, while Google and Microsoft do not.
Besides selling ads and providing search results, what successes has Google actually had in the technology space? There's, er, and, uh, and then what? OK, Gmail, but it relies on ad sales tied to content, making it an extension of the core search business.
Gmail does, however, demonstrate that Google is technically more than competent and is capable of real innovation. Nevertheless, its ability to turn innovation into profits remains tied to ad sales.
Based on results so far, there is little reason to believe Google can make its Chrome OS into the world-changer most everyone already seems to believe it will become. It may happen, and I would welcome it, but it is not a foregone conclusion.
Google's applications haven't done terribly well (especially in attracting paying customers), its ventures into selling radio, newspaper, and television advertising have run aground, it's first adventure into operating systems is moving slowly, and now it's going head-to-head with Microsoft on netbooks?
If any other company were doing this, we would say they were daft. However, being the darling that it is, Google's Chrome OS is already being treated as a foregone success.
Maybe that will happen. But, unless Chrome is dramatically more successful than all the Linux-based operating systems that have come before, there isn't a lot of reason to believe Chrome will do more than force netbook pricing concessions from Microsoft. If that.
My hunch is that Google will manage to get Chrome OS onto a bunch of netbooks and then hit a brick wall of unfulfilled customer expectation, at least initially, because the infrastructure doesn't exist to support a mostly web-based computing experience.
The counter argument is that the iPhone has managed to become a real computing platform that, if run on a netbook, could actually get a lot of work done. Provided people are willing to accept its limitations.
So, if you're willing to accept a netbook that is able to do whatever Chrome OS can manage, then you're set. If, however, you expect a netbook to do what your laptop does, only smaller and less expensively, then you will be disappointed and buy Windows instead of Chrome.
The move to cloud-based computing makes a lot of sense and I am a supporter, but still believe a hybrid computing experience that includes both installed and online applications makes the most sense for most users right now and, probably, for years to come.
To me, that says Windows today and maybe another OS someday, but not right away.
Nevertheless, we have to take Google very seriously. By decoupling its technology investments from the need to actually produce profits, Google has an ocean of money to spend in search of its next big thing and little pressure for an immediate return on that investment.
Nevertheless, Google has made a number of bets, only a few of them successful, while many more remain in play. While definitely the most interesting company in technology, Google is not software or online services company in the traditional sense. That is both Google's strength and its weakness.
Tech industry veteran David Coursey tweets as techinciter and can be reached via his Web site at www.coursey.com
See---http://harlemvoiceblogs.blogspot.com
The amazing thing about Google is how a business that makes 97 percent of its revenue selling advertising has people convinced that it is a technology company. And then gets a free pass despite a series of failures outside its core competencies in search and online ad sales.
Right now, Google seems to be flooding the market with products that are not quite finished. People do not care because the products work well enough and are free. But, suppose people had to pay for them? Then where would Google be?
(See Related: Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures
Even though Chrome will be a "free" OS , it will still come loaded on a computer people well be asked to spend perhaps $300 to $400 to purchase. That puts Google under real pressure to perform, something it has never really faced.
Google's Android smartphone OS is well-liked by some and seems to be gaining acceptance, even though its yet to prove itself with paying customers. My impression is that Android will ultimately demonstrate the importance of controlling both hardware and software if you want smartphone success. Apple, RIM, and Palm have that control, while Google and Microsoft do not.
Besides selling ads and providing search results, what successes has Google actually had in the technology space? There's, er, and, uh, and then what? OK, Gmail, but it relies on ad sales tied to content, making it an extension of the core search business.
Gmail does, however, demonstrate that Google is technically more than competent and is capable of real innovation. Nevertheless, its ability to turn innovation into profits remains tied to ad sales.
Based on results so far, there is little reason to believe Google can make its Chrome OS into the world-changer most everyone already seems to believe it will become. It may happen, and I would welcome it, but it is not a foregone conclusion.
Google's applications haven't done terribly well (especially in attracting paying customers), its ventures into selling radio, newspaper, and television advertising have run aground, it's first adventure into operating systems is moving slowly, and now it's going head-to-head with Microsoft on netbooks?
If any other company were doing this, we would say they were daft. However, being the darling that it is, Google's Chrome OS is already being treated as a foregone success.
Maybe that will happen. But, unless Chrome is dramatically more successful than all the Linux-based operating systems that have come before, there isn't a lot of reason to believe Chrome will do more than force netbook pricing concessions from Microsoft. If that.
My hunch is that Google will manage to get Chrome OS onto a bunch of netbooks and then hit a brick wall of unfulfilled customer expectation, at least initially, because the infrastructure doesn't exist to support a mostly web-based computing experience.
The counter argument is that the iPhone has managed to become a real computing platform that, if run on a netbook, could actually get a lot of work done. Provided people are willing to accept its limitations.
So, if you're willing to accept a netbook that is able to do whatever Chrome OS can manage, then you're set. If, however, you expect a netbook to do what your laptop does, only smaller and less expensively, then you will be disappointed and buy Windows instead of Chrome.
The move to cloud-based computing makes a lot of sense and I am a supporter, but still believe a hybrid computing experience that includes both installed and online applications makes the most sense for most users right now and, probably, for years to come.
To me, that says Windows today and maybe another OS someday, but not right away.
Nevertheless, we have to take Google very seriously. By decoupling its technology investments from the need to actually produce profits, Google has an ocean of money to spend in search of its next big thing and little pressure for an immediate return on that investment.
Nevertheless, Google has made a number of bets, only a few of them successful, while many more remain in play. While definitely the most interesting company in technology, Google is not software or online services company in the traditional sense. That is both Google's strength and its weakness.
Tech industry veteran David Coursey tweets as techinciter and can be reached via his Web site at www.coursey.com
See---http://harlemvoiceblogs.blogspot.com
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