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Top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department met to examine ways to search the Internet to identify potential “deranged” gunmen before they strike, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“The techniques would include cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,” Commissioner Kelly said. “The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans.” Kelly said the technique was similar to those being used to spot terrorists’ chatter online. The new searches would target “apolitical or deranged killers before they become active shooters,” he said.


New York Police Department to Use Internet to Try to Stop Mass Shootings
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The English Premier League, home to the country's best soccer teams, is at the top of its game. It recently negotiated huge price increases outside the U.K. for broadcast rights to its matches, and it's drawing top players from all over the world as megarich foreign owners pour money into their teams. But some English clubs complain that the foreign largesse isn't benefiting all teams equally, while others say it's hurting the sport.

In a sign of the EPL's global appeal, the league sold overseas TV rights for 2010-2013 games for a total of £1.4 billion ($2.25 billion). That dwarfs the sums secured by other leagues in Europe, including Spain's La Liga, home to Barcelona and Real Madrid. It's now negotiating regional deals to show Premier League matches overseas for the next three seasons, and it has already secured big price increases. But in contrast to other leagues in Europe, the EPL shares the money from its deals equally among its 20 clubs. Liverpool, the club from the Beatles hometown, says the arrangement hurts it. If it could negotiate its own overseas broadcast packages, it believes it would profit from its global popularity, a result of its 1980s heyday.


TV Rights Split Soccer Clubs
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Now that the Federal Trade Commission has published its updated privacy protections for children online, Facebook may finally open its site to children under 13, industry analysts say. But those very same new rules, they say, may prompt some small app developers to pull out of the children’s market altogether.

The revised rules, widen the list of children’s personal information that will require parental permission to collect. It will now include children’s photos, videos or voice recordings, the IP addresses of their computers and the locations of their mobile phones. The updated rule also requires social networks, advertising networks and other third parties to get parents’ permission before knowingly collecting data from children’s sites and apps. But the rules have radically different implications for big Web sites and small app developers. The final children’s online privacy rule uses an “actual knowledge” standard for collecting information about children. That means social networks and ad networks that collect information from children without knowing that their software is operating on a children’s site or app will not be liable.


Children’s Online Privacy Rules: Winners and Losers
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Instagram has taken another step to mollify users who balked at the photo-sharer’s recent terms of service changes. But it has left itself plenty of room to maneuver.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom says the company will change part of its new contract with users that deals with advertising, and will use the same language the company has always employed. But to be clear: Instagram still plans on introducing advertising to the service. And that advertising could conceivably incorporate users’ photos. And to be clearer: Instagram’s original language already said that. If you don’t want to see ads on the service, or want to be assured that your stuff won’t show up in an ad, you’re going to want to look somewhere else.


Instagram Walks Back Ad Language, but Leaves the Door Open
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Motion Picture Association of America chief Chris Dodd said the film and television industry wants to "do our part to help America heal" from the shooting in Newtown.

"As chairman of the MPAA and on behalf of the motion picture and television studios we represent, we join all Americans in expressing our sympathy as well as our horror and outrage at this senseless act of violence," Dodd said. His statement comes as lawmakers have called for Congress to take a closer look into whether violent video games, movies and TV shows are contributing to aggressive behavior. "Those of us in the motion picture and television industry want to do our part to help America heal. We stand ready to be part of the national conversation.”


MPAA’s Dodd: Film studios ready to 'do our part' after shooting
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With Senate floor time "in flux" and unable to get a quorum of the Senate Commerce Committee to vote on the nomination of Federal Communications Commission commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the heads of the committee have come up with plan B -- seeking unanimous consent from the Senate on discharging the nominees from the committee. That would mean they would only need a full Senate vote to be confirmed. If no Senator objects, the nominations would not have to go through a committee markup and vote. There would still need to be a vote in the full Senate, but that one could happen quickly, too.


Senate Commerce Committee Leaders Seek to Fast-Track Clyburn Approval
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How helpful is Apple Maps? Not very, according to a company that found Apple Maps is three times more likely to get someone lost than Google Maps.

Most generally regard Google Maps as the superior software, but the crowdsourcing company Crowdflower decided to take a look at the data and figure out how exactly the two softwares, and Bing, compare. Specifically, Crowdflower set out to answer how often each service will get you to the right location. To find out, the company took a look at directions to 1,000 businesses in the US and another 100 in the UK. The company used its resources to go to the website of each business and find the address listed. Crowdflower then went to each mapping service and searched the business name and the city it's in. The company was looking for two things: Does the mapping service give a result, and is the result accurate? In the first category, Google led the way in the U.S., finding 89% of the businesses. Bing followed with 79% and Apple Maps with 74%. For U.K. businesses, Google also got the best results with 91%, followed by Bing's 57% and Apple Maps with 47%.


Apple Maps three times more likely to get you lost than Google Maps
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[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed media ownership rules changes: a newspaper and a TV station in the same town would be allowed to merge if the station is number five in the ratings or worse and if it is also in one of the top 20 markets in the country and if there would still be at least eight media voices left in the town. Not exactly radical stuff.

Internet has increased the number of voices and provided many other benefits, but at the same time undermined the economic models that had previously subsidized local journalism. Newspapers are still laying off reporters by the thousands. So, if an occasional merger can save a local newspaper, we shouldn’t automatically rule it out just because it is a merger. The FCC is considering the reasonable step of lifting the ban on newspapers owning radio stations in the same town. Yes, this change allows “consolidation,” but permitting a newspaper to buy a radio station—perhaps to create a local radio news channel—could actually help communities. After all, commercial news radio has been declining: only 30 all-news commercial radio stations are left, down from 50 in the 1980s.

Instead of having a theological debate about consolidation—“good” vs. “evil”?—is it possible to create media policy that allows mergers that are likely to help the local media ecosystems and blocks those that are not?


How to fix the media ownership debate
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The Federal Communications Commission continues to solicit comment from the public on media ownership and diversity, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), in a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, said she was concerned with reports that the commission intended to "revive some form of the same lax media cross ownership rules that the Third Circuit Court invalidated in July 2011."

Rep Waters is a long-time consolidation critic and continued in that vein in her letter, opining that only a few companies own the major broadcast nets and the vast majority of the top 50 cable nets. She says the FCC should not proceed with a vote on the ownership proposal until it has analyzed the findings of a recent ownership report (the so-called 323 report) that found little improvement in minority or female station ownership and the impact on that diversity landscape of even more deregulatory changes.


Rep Waters to FCC: Don't Wade Into Ownership Just Yet
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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced legislation to regulate the use of broadband data caps. "Data caps create challenges for consumers and run the risk of undermining innovation in the digital economy if they are imposed bluntly and not designed to truly manage network congestion," said Sen Wyden.

He hopes to address three issues with his proposal:

  • First, he wants to increase the amount and accuracy of information provided to consumers. His bill empowers the Federal Communications Commission to regulate ISPs' methods for measuring bandwidth usage with an eye to improving their accuracy. And it requires ISPs to provide their customers with realtime tools for tracking their usage and comparing them with the ISP's established caps.
  • Second, the bill requires that any data caps employed by ISPs function to "reasonably limit network congestion without unnecessarily restricting Internet use." According to a statement released with the legislation, "some data caps are so blunt that they may work to discourage Internet use even when doing so has no bearing on network congestion."
  • The most ambitious part of the legislation is a kind of network neutrality rule. It requires that any data cap (which is defined to include metering schemes) not be used to "provide preferential treatment of data that is based on the source or content of the data." That would ban a practice that is frequently mentioned by advocates of network neutrality regulation: the creation of a paid "fast lane."

Senator Wyden introduces bill to regulate data caps Wyden Introduces Data Cap Bill (B&C)