As per JetLaw's June7th article, google is looking at coughing up some serious coin (even for google) for showing "illegal online pharmacy ads"."Google is facing a $500 million dollar fine “in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers,” they disclosed in their 10-Q last week."HuffPosts August 24th article points out that google chose to settle paying the full half billion so that they would not face criminal charges.
"It sends a clear message to both Google and to others that contribute to America's pill problem that they will be held to account for endangering the health and safety of the residents of this district and to persons all across the United States," said Neronha, who described the forfeiture as one of the largest in U.S. history.It will be interesting to see how this will change how you get your adds included in Googles AdSense.
PC Magazine reports that the U.S. government used convicted con artist David Whitaker, owner of an online business selling steroids and human growth hormone to U.S. consumers, to help federal agents in a sting operation against Google when he began advertising with Google with advertisements that included the statement 'no prescription needed,' clearly violating U.S. laws.
geek.com has a writeup about Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins who built a very cool remote RC plane that scans the airwaves below it, tracks wifi nets, and pen tests them. It runs the full backtrack suite on the plane, and can be remotely managed, but it can also do everything (fly and sniff) on its own.
Gulp. The world's largest stop-motion animation shot on a Nokia N8. from Nokia HD on Vimeo.
Cool PBS show about life on board a Nimitz class air craft carrier. Good highlight would be landing on a pitching deck (one & two) where the pilots who are already on deck, sit around eating popcorn making bets on if their approaching buddies will safely land, die, or miss and need to fly back around.
As pointed out in TechCentral, Greg Mahlknecht created a free online ocean cable map showing who owns the cables, their stats, and what they link. akg-random also points out an old undersea cable map from 1901!
Akamai's state of the internet is out, and it's an interesting read. Gizmag has a writeup of the details, including notes about increasing access speeds, more mobile users and attack stats.
cnet security has an article/interview with Kevin Mitnick about how easy it is to listen/hack into to others voicemails. (use asterisk, dial up your cell# and in caller id, say your coming from your cell#)
From Pragmatic Capitalism, I found Robert Reich's 2.5 min, six bullet skinny on the economy:
