US Court of Appeals threw out the cap on the number of consumers that a cable operator may serve–saying that the 30% subscriber limit is “arbitrary and capricious”.

This decision was based on the assumption that the market is becoming more competitive and therefore can allow an increased means of competition.

“[T]he Commission has failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30% of all cable subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming” (Court statement).

Investigative units of the National Advertising Review Council, Attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission are seeking to build more requirements for blogs to clearly differentiate between sponsored content and and regular content.

The Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program is an an investigative unit of the National Advertising Review Council for the e-commerce industry. The Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation programs are voluntary, but should the offending company refuse to comply then the complaints are forwarded to the Federal Trade Commission who will then potentially sue the offending company for violating guidelines.

The F.T.C. is close to updating its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials for the first time since 1980.

Apple and Google have created an unofficial agreement not to compete for each other’s employees. Supposedly no formal written agreement exists for the deal.

The Justice Department has looked into whether companies such as Apple and Google have violated antitrust laws by arranged the recruitment of each other’s workers.

Human capital is a prime resource for tech companies–perhaps the most important resource tech companies possess. That is why Microsoft sued Google in 2005 after it hired Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft.

Averatec N2700 is the missing link in the struggle for computer manufacturers and software companies to compete in a netbook world.

Averatec has created a full-featured notebook that weighs and costs only a tad more than a netbook. Averatec N2700 is a 12.1 inch laptop with a dual core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM and toting a 250GB hard disk, along with an onboard DVD±RW drive. All this for a four-and-a-quarter-pound package total.

LegitScript.com reported that 89.7% of pharmaceutical category ads on Bing’s adCenter were from illegal pharmecies. Microsoft responded stating that the number of illegal ads was far lower than reported by LegitScript but admitted to the violations.

Microsoft adCenter has taken a number of security steps since to remove the bad entries, inlcuding: manually reviewing pharma-related keywords, investigating reports of hijacked and misused landing pages, documenting the process of how the illegal advertisers use the Bing/Microsoft ad system.

The multisearch extension to Firefox alpha 3 for Ubuntu Linux is being developed to help improve the default behavior of new tabs and  search capabilities. It was admitted by the company that there was one other purpose for the extension–to generate revenue by collecting user data unbeknownst to the user. The extension installs itself and offers no warning about potential privacy issues.

In order to get out of this, the user will have to disable the extension via the TOOLS > Add-ons menu.

Issues fixed in this extension:
1. Awesome bar does not do “feeling lucky” type search
2. The custom search results page is not aesthetically pleasing
3. The custom search page lacks useful functionality (images, videos, maps, etc…)
4. “Multisearch” is not a descriptive name
5. Search UI on New Tab pages is visual clutter, not useful
6. Currency conversions don’t work

Time Inc. announced that it will close Southern Accents magazine. South Accents is a lifestyle periodical that Time Inc. has published bi-monthly since 1985. The magazine’s online component will continue to operate.

Southern Living, Southern Accents had a circulation of 400,000, however in the past few months its advertising revenue had dropped 37 percent.

Rupert Murdoch demanded that Amazon turn over all Kindle users info. Amazon has yet to comply with Murdoch’s request.

This demand follows News Corp negotiating a larger share of revenue from Amazon sales–in which News Corp stated that content from the The Wall Street Journal would not be made available unless Amazon provides a more generous revenue share and more publisher-friendly policies.

“Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us.” – Murdoch

Google aims to be able to track its users to within 100-200 feet of their location through new wireless networks in order to serve them with relevant advertising from local businesses. Google and EarthLink wins bid as most promising candidate for connecting San Francisco to the web without wires. In recent news, Google was served a sopeona from the Federal Government to turn in the collected data from one week’s worth of US internet searches. Google resisted the Federal Governement’s urges into Google’s data treasury. Should the sopeona have yielded the hand-over of such data, it would have established a strong prescendent for future actions. Yet, the fact that Google has access to such vital data as collected through it’s instruments such as the notorious search engine and the installable local desktop application, makes us at the Mystery Channel feel a cold chill of caution with this budding mega-venture.