What's Now: Recording industry wins big against Usenet file sharing service
Mom in MySpace teen-suicide case may be sentenced today
July 2, 2009, maybe > The Missouri woman convicted of charges related to a hoax that caused a former friend of her teenaged daughter to commit suicide is expected to be sentenced today on three misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization. Lori Drew, who was outed as the perpetrator after an initial story in a St. Louis newspaper led to near-universal online outrage and made "cyberbullying" a cause celebre, escaped conviction on the more serious felony-level charges concerning intentional infliction of distress on 13-year-old Megan Meier. Ms. Drew could face up to three years in jail; sentencing in the case was postponed back in May when the judge agreed to consider a defense motion to overturn the verdict.
Grant process begins for broadband-deployment projects
July 14 - August 14, 2009 > Vice President Biden on Wednesday announced guidelines for $4 billion of the stimulus funding earmarked to expand broadband access across the nation. The Departments of Commerce and Agriculture will be fielding applications for this round of funding from July 14 to August 14.
Time to slough off SQL?
Real Soon Now > Eric Lai at Computerworld spotlights a growing community of database mavens who are over the relational-database model and looking for better ways of managing masses of data. They don't even like the word "database," even though some of the noSQL movement's poster children are processing as much as 20 petabytes of structured data every day. Institutional prejudices and tech-support crises are harder problems to manage.
Thursday's tech headlines
The Register
• A self-proclaimed hacker in Texas was planning a massive DDoS attack against the hospital (!) where he worked as a security guard. Dan Goodin says that he went around botnetting the building's computers, messing with the building's air-conditioning systems, and making videos of his 133t sk1llz for online posting. Jesse William McGraw, 25, of Arlington, Texas, who also calls himself "GhostExodus," allegedly belongs to a group calling themselves the "Electronik Tribulation Army" and refers to the July 4 celebrations as "Devil's Day."
• Ascentive, which has a history of conflict with both Google and StopBadware.org for making questionable claims about their antimalware services. The Reg picks up the tale from OUT-LAW.com, which says that now Ascentive's claiming that Google broke the law by removing the firm from its search results.
• Alistair Dabbs reviews the new Iomega eGo 320GB external hard drive I've had my eye on, and gives it a so-so rating for speed and the Protection Suite software with which it's bundled. Alas, he is no braver than I am about drop-testing the device's ruggedization claims.
USA Today
• The digital ad industry would like to ease your mind (and perhaps Congress') about what they do with your data, and so they're rolling out broad self-policing guidelines. The new rules were co-developed by American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Council of Better Business Bureaus and Direct Marketing Association.
• The mighty Ed Baig compares Google and Bing in a search-off, and struggles with his habit of using "google" as a verb. (Don't we all.) And the winner is...
Washington Post
• Those online petitions people keep asking you to sign on Facebook, and turning your Twitter avatar green, and most of those "days of action" that get organized online? Are about as effective as you thought they were, sighs Monica Hesse.
• If you promise to use the information widely, Ashley Halsey III will tell you about a site that maps speed traps around the nation.
Wired
• The saga of Clear rolls on. Now Congress would like to know more about what will happen with all that personally identifiable client information. And there's a class-action suit in the works, according to a short item by Ryan Singel.
• A first from a sad last: Michael Jackson is now the first recording artist to sell one million digital downloads in the space of a week. (And a gold star to Wired for the first photo they're using to illustrate this piece -- nice background, guys.)
• Writing for the Danger Room blog, David Hambling reports that a fellow in Kansas -- oh dear -- has been awarded a restraining order against a former business partner whom he claims is harassing him with "jolts" of electromagnetic radiation.