In Britain, Judge Finds for Google in Libel Case

Google is not liable for defamatory material that appears in its search results, a British judge has ruled, a decision that lawyers call significant because of the country’s reputation as a haven for libel claimants.

The decision was in a case involving Metropolitan International Schools, a British company that operates Internet-based training courses. The company wanted to sue Google over negative comments posted by a reader of a technology news Web site; the comments appeared in text blurbs with the results of Google searches related to Metropolitan.

David Eady, a High Court judge, ruled that Metropolitan could not sue Google, saying it was not a publisher of the material. “It has merely, by the provision of its search service, played the role of a facilitator,” he wrote.

Lawyers said the decision, the first of its kind in Britain, was consistent with court decisions in several other European countries. In the United States, search engines are protected from liability for the contents of the results they turn up. Several European countries have extended similar protection.

Still, lawyers said Judge Eady’s decision, published Friday, was significant because of uncertainties over libel law in Britain. British courts are often seen as sympathetic to defamation plaintiffs, and Web hosting services in Britain have been held responsible for the contents of sites they host.

“It’s significant because it’s consistent with what we thought the law should mean,” said Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer at the firm Pinsent Masons in London. “If the judge had ruled otherwise, it would have been a terrible decision for search engines.” Read more…

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U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving

In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel.

They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.

But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.

On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site.

In interviews, the officials who withheld the research offered their fullest explanation to date.

The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states. Read more…

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Palin Slams Obama’s Energy Plan

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who recently caught political observers by surprise with her decision to resign as governor at the end of the month, slammed President Obama’s support of a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, in a Washington Post op-ed piece Tuesday morning.
Ms. Palin called it a “cap-and-tax” system that would “undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.” Job losses, higher food prices and skyrocketing electric bills would result from such a system, she argued.

Cap-and-trade legislation is currently being considered by Congress.

Ms. Palin instead urged domestic solutions, such as the building of a pipeline to help tap Alaska’s abundant natural gas resources. Read more…

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Obama’s Chief Auto Adviser Steps Down

Steven Rattner is quitting his post as President Obama’s chief adviser on the troubled automobile industry at a time when an investigation into his former Wall Street firm’s role in a scandal involving public pension funds has intensified.

Mr. Rattner, who has won plaudits for directing the rapid restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler, has been under a cloud since shortly after arriving in Washington in late February after it was disclosed that his firm, the Quadrangle Group, made payments to middlemen that helped it win state pension business.

It is unclear whether Mr. Rattner’s departure is directly connected to the inquiry, or whether he felt that it was time to leave because Chrysler and G.M. effectively had emerged from bankruptcy. A person who has worked with him in Washington said he understood that Mr. Rattner had decided to leave because his role on the task force had come to its natural end. Mr. Rattner could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for Quadrangle declined to comment.

An investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo has picked up in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the matter who did not want to be identified. Quadrangle faces potential civil charges and is said to be eager to resolve the matter, according to these people.

Several other firms, including the Carlyle Group, a prominent private equity firm, have already paid fines and agreed to change their business practices as a result of payments they made to get pension business.

Still, a fine against Quadrangle could make it difficult for Mr. Rattner to remain in a position of authority in Washington, given his role in the matter. Mr. Rattner, according to people close to the investigation, arranged for his investment firm to pay $1.1 million to an agent who helped Quadrangle obtain New York pension business. The agent who received most of that money has been indicted and accused of selling access to the pension fund, but neither Mr. Rattner nor Quadrangle is expected to face criminal charges, according to people close to the matter. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating pension fund abuses. Read more…

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How One 19-Year Old Is Shaking Up Online Media

Michael van Poppel used to be like a lot of young people, trawling the internet for interesting news about the world. Just like many others have considered doing, he created a place where he could post the most interesting news he finds, as fast as he can.Today he’s one of the most-watched movers and shakers in online news media - and he’s not yet twenty years old.

In September 2007, when seventeen years old and living in the Netherlands, van Poppel decided to launch a news aggregation business called Breaking News Online. Months later, somehow, he came into possession of a full video of an Osama Bin Laden statement before any of the major news outlets had it, and sold it to Reuters.

That was just the first strange chapter in a very strange story leading up to today, when van Poppel announced plans to release a push iPhone app for his fast-growing Breaking News Online network next month. A 19-year old announced that he would be releasing an iPhone app in a month and many people around the world took pause and noticed. How did this all happen? Asking that question illuminates some of the most interesting trends on the web today.

Why BNO is Exciting

Three days after van Poppel sold the Bin Laden tape to Reuters, he said in an interview with Inside Cable News that he’d originally reached out to CNN’s iReport with the tape. They were unresponsive. He then tried to contact a number of other news outlets before connecting with and making a deal with Reuters. Breaking News Online had already launched months earlier, but the experience must have underlined van Poppel’s belief that he could find, select and push out news faster and better than other larger media outlets. The experience probably provided some funds for that vision as well. Read more…

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Google Inc.

Founded in 1998, Google runs the world’s most popular Internet search engine. For hundreds of millions of Web users, an online session starts at the Google search box. It’s a position that has given Google an outsize influence over anyone doing business on the Internet and that has allowed the company to build a hugely profitable and fast-growing online advertising system.

But Google’s ambition far exceeds the confines of Internet search and advertising. The company has an expansive interpretation of its already far-reaching corporate mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google has built a powerful network of data centers around the globe in hopes of, among other things, connecting users instantly with high-resolution satellite pictures of every corner of the earth and sky; making the entire text of books, in and out of print, available online; and becoming the leading distributor of online video through YouTube, which it acquired in 2006.

At the same time, Google has taken its advertising system offline, as it tries to capture portions of large ad markets in television, radio and newspapers. It is investing heavily in mobile phone technology to replicate its online success in the wireless world. And it has built an array of online software programs, including e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets that it hopes will become the building blocks of a new computing paradigm — one that, unlike the Microsoft-dominated PC world, will have Google at its center.

On July 8, 2009, the company mounted a blunt challenge to the dominance of Microsoft, whose Windows operating system runs more than 90 percent of PCs, by announcing its own operating system. The system involves a browser-based technology that will be available on computers in the second half of 2010. Read more…

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CIOs Have Three Paths to Mobile Victory

Mobility matters. It matters to our commander in chief and your employees. It matters to the executives at the top of the house and the managers in the middle. It matters to your customers. Mobility is emerging as the new make-or-break test of CIOs. Do it right, and you can be a hero. Do it wrong, and you run the risk of becoming an on-the-way-out-the-door dog.

In some ways, mobility is like the weather, but a lot more interesting. Everyone experiences it, and we all have an opinion about it. Like the weather, it can be a great conversation starter — “Hey, what kind of phone is that?” But what makes mobility interesting goes well beyond the latest downloadable apps for the hottest new smartphones. Part of that interest stems from mobility’s growing importance for our users, and part of it comes from the looming question of just how we as IT leaders are going to address those users’ mobility needs.

It’s the question of the moment. Many in the underground press of the technology industry — the blogs, e-newsletters and white papers — have labeled this the Summer of the Smartphone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer found mobility compelling enough to show up at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where in the course of an interview, he uttered an understatement for the ages: “Strategically, phones are very interesting.”

So, what do you do about mobility? I see three possible routes, which I’ll label BYOD, Bespoke and Bauhaus. Many IT executives find themselves at the pointy end of the mobility spear. We are at a critical decision point. CIOs are torn between the macroeconomically induced mandate to materially manage costs down and the simultaneous need to keep up with — if not anticipate and lead — constituent-driven demand for lightweight, high-design, easy-to-use, secure, very-short-life-span, works-anywhere-in-the-world portable devices and services. Read more…

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Career Watch: Finding a Job When Times Are Tough

The executive director of Robert Half Technology discusses finding a job in a deep recession.

How is IT holding up in the downturn? Companies are downsizing, but IT has been more resilient than other areas. In fact, the unemployment rates for many positions within IT are significantly lower than the national average. [See chart below.]

In our quarterly Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, 8% of CIOs polled said they plan to expand their IT departments in the second quarter. Those that plan to hire cited reasons such as the increased need for customer/end-user support, rising workloads, corporate growth or expansion, and system upgrades. CIOs planning to reduce staff said the primary reasons are reduced IT budgets, postponed IT projects and companywide layoffs.

When companies are doing mass layoffs, it’s even more difficult than usual to find another job. What can help? A good way to jump-start your search is to reach out to members of your professional network. Be specific about the skills you can offer and the type of position you seek to give people a better chance of helping you. Candidates should take a high-touch and high-tech approach to networking. Be active at industry, business and community events, and explore online professional and social networking avenues like LinkedIn and Facebook to track down job leads.

Make sure you update your résumé, and not just with details of your last job. Look at it from top to bottom to determine if it needs a complete overhaul. Employers want to see the quantitative results you’ve helped a company achieve, whether it’s saving time or money, or improving IT efficiencies. Read more…

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Survey: Majority of IT Execs Have No Plans for Windows 7

Microsoft announced today that businesses can get Windows 7 a month and a half before the general release date of Oct. 22, but a new survey suggests that many of them may not want it.

Results of a survey of more than 1,000 IT administrators sponsored by systems management software company ScriptLogic show that nearly 60 percent of respondents have no current plans to deploy Windows 7.

Despite the good reviews of Windows 7 and user interface and networking improvements over Vista, IT managers surveyed still see barriers to deployment such as lack of time and resources and application compatibility.

Data from the survey reflect an ongoing problem for Microsoft: businesses are happy enough with Windows XP that there is no urgency to upgrade.

“While it is important that our staff have access to the latest operating systems, we won’t migrate to Windows 7 until at least the first service pack has been released,” Sean Angus, senior PC LAN tech for Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut, was quoted as saying in a survey press release.

The leading way that companies are saving money is by “skipping upgrades or delaying purchases” (35 percent), according to the survey data. This provides context for the survey’s smoking gun statistic: 60 percent of respondents said they have no plans to deploy Windows 7 at this time. Thirty-four percent of respondents plan to deploy the OS by the end of 2010. A mere 5.4 percent plan to deploy it by the end of 2009. Read more…

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Teens Don’t Dig Twitter, Says Teen; World Implodes

It’s hard to say what’s more shocking — that the words of a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern lit London’s financial world on fire, or that no one before thought to ask teenagers what they think (and actually listen).

To backtrack, Morgan Stanley Research in Europe published a report called “How Teenagers Consume Media,” (PDF) consisting almost entirely of intern Matthew Robson’s thoughts. Though unscientific, the report prompted calls from dozens of fund managers and CEOs, and the volume of responses was five or six times greater than Morgan Stanley’s usual research, spokesman Edward Hill-Wood told The Guardian.

Much of the report is common sense — teens don’t listen to radio, they play video games in long bursts, they like viral marketing, but not billboards, they rarely pay for music and they don’t read newspapers — but the real shocker, apparently, is that teenagers don’t use Twitter. Read more…

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