Friday, January 11, 2013

Google’s Autocomplete Advised to Sell Apple Shares

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Employers in California and Illinois Banned from Viewing Employees’ Facebook Accounts

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Ireland Made Linking to News Illegal

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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Ireland Made Linking to News Illegal

From now on, publishing a link to a news article from Ireland might appear an expensive business for some. Recently, a group of Irish newspapers have taken a decision that the way to make money from the Internet is to charge anyone who links to their news stories.


According to the National Newspapers of Ireland group, they have adopted a new licensing scheme which requires the websites to pay if they want to link to one of its members. The group has already been sending out notices demanding payment and called everyone who legitimately linked to their news a pirate.
Thus far they have written to Women’s Aid, since the latter had linked to articles in newspapers having positive stories about their fundraising efforts. Now the current fine is €100 for a link, and the group of fifteen newspapers believes that mentioning an article online is copyright violation.

In other words, the plan is that Irish newspapers want to get paid for getting their member websites more traffic. However, there’s no case law to back this up, but there’s a lot of EU case law which proves that there needs to be legislation to get anything remotely like this.
As for publishers, they have so far been targeting Google for its use of news stories in search results. However, it looks like the National Newspapers of Ireland group isn’t interested in taking on Google, but rather interested in demanding money from blog owners.

In Belgium, after Google lost the court case, the company had to comply with the court order to delist the newspapers from the search results. And the newspapers’ sites lost much of traffic and money. Even after that, the Irish newspaper group doesn’t seem to realize that a link is free advertising for the company which runs a web page itself.

Google’s Autocomplete Advised to Sell Apple Shares


The search giant has apologized to all consumers who were upset that Google’s share advice on Apple was set to “sell”. The matter is that when people typed in “sell” in the search bar on Google Finance, they were automatically directed to the page for Apple’s stock.


Press claimed that Google must know something it didn’t, and accused the company of intentional undermining the value of Apple’s stock. Some seemed to be implying that because the company’s Android was a rival to Cupertino, so Google used its own search system to cause financial problems for Apple. Overall, the situation became so bad that a Google’s representative was dusted off to make a comment. He explained that this happened because of its algorithm rather than any concerted effort to undermine Apple’s shares. It turned out that the algorithms were keying off of the words 'sell' and "sells" in the description of this stock symbol. The search engine is currently working on how to adjust this and prevent it from happening again.

According to press reports, the algorithm is already fixed, so when you search for "sell" on Google Finance, it brings up a list of stocks, but Apple is off the list. But there might be a very good reason for Apple being on Google’s sell list – its shares were actually overpriced and had lost almost 1/3 of their value in the last quarter.

Indeed, the company’s share price peaked above $700 last September and is now trading a little bit above $500. Actually, Apple's stock is down much less than either Hewlett-Packard or RIM, but this plummeting has cost Apple shareholders a lot more money.

According to the latest business reviews, Apple shareholders have lost $175 billion within the last 3 months. Although true Apple shares were worth much more than a year ago, those who invested only three months ago lost a lot.

Moreover, the experts believe it’s likely that the share price in Apple will fall further after shareholders realize that China failed to be the low hanging fruit as some press reports previously claimed. The search giant’s algorithm, it could be argued, was working perfectly before it was tweaked to factor in the Reality Distortion Field that the company and its cohorts work under.

Employers in California and Illinois Banned from Viewing Employees’ Facebook Accounts

Bosses two US states will now be unable by law to demand access to their workers’ social media accounts. Earlier, the employees weren’t protected by law if their bosses demanded access to their password-protected social networks, including the most popular one – Facebook. 


More than 400 measures, including the ones which dealt with topics ranging from consumer protection to healthcare, were suggested and introduced last year. This particular social network protection legislation and a number of others came into effect 1 January, 2013, and more will take force later in 2013.

Despite the fact that employees are exempt from employers bullying their way into privately held accounts, the legislation doesn’t extend to protecting against data found publicly or otherwise on social networks – it only prevents private access. In other words, openly tweeting about an employer’s intrusive online snooping could still land employees in trouble. People are also recommended to keep in mind that the information held by social networks can still be accessible for law enforcement.

In the meantime, in Michigan, schools could be punished in any cases if they refuse to admit pupils who didn’t agree to provide personal data like passwords for private social networking and email accounts.