DTV Delay Gains Ground [Multichannel News]
President Obama's goal of delaying the digital television transition may be on track for a vote in the U.S. Senate this week. Senate Republicans have reached a compromise with Senator Jay Rockefeller over the provisions in a bill that would delay the digital transition until June 12th. The current deadline is February 17th.
The compromise may add even more confusion into the marketplace. It allows stations to voluntarily convert prior to the cutoff date which, if they do, probably will catch many people unprepared. It will also mean that the call centers being set up by the cable and broadcast industries may not be open for business when a station goes off.
While it's still not completely clear whether the compromise delay bill will have enough votes to pass in the Senate, if it does, it will likely be put on a fast-track for passage in the House of Representatives, where a similar bill now sits in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Much of the impetus behind the delay legislation is the fact that the federal government's digital converter box coupon program has run out of money and is currently placing coupon requests on a waiting list. Republicans in both the House and Senate have filed legislating allocating an additional $250 million in tax dollars toward the coupon program - aimed at allowing the program to begin processing coupon requests again in advance of a February 17th or June 12th transition deadline.
Monster.com Reports Theft of User Data [PC World]
Have you been job searching online lately? If you've been using the popular Monster.com web site, your personal information may have been stolen from the site's internal user information database. Monster.com has disclosed that a security breach allowed hackers to access Monster.com user IDs, passwords, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender and ethnicity. The site recommends that users immediately change their passwords, and if they use the same password on other sites, that they change those passwords also.
There's no evidence that the security breach has yet resulted in the stolen data being misused, but it's an important example of why users should use different passwords for each site they use. If one password is compromised, like in the case of Monster.com, other site passwords will remain safe if they differ.
Detecting new "Googlebombs" [Google Public Policy Blog]
Googlebombing is the phenomenon of attempting to fool the Google search engine into displaying results for a specific search that would otherwise not be associated with that search phrase. One of the most famous Googlebombs made the official White House biography of former President George W. Bush show up in Google's top results for the search phrases "failure" or "miserable failure." Google has attempted to find and fix the Googlebombed searches, since they usually aren't directing users to the items they're really looking for.
In the most recent case of a Googlebomb, President Obama's official White House bio showed up as a top result for the same search phrases that originally returned President Bush's bio. Google's Public Policy Blog reveals how the search engine ran a specialized algorithm that rooted out the source of the Googlebomb and fixed the Googlebombed results.
Wikipedia considers limiting user edits [CNET News]
Watch out students! Looks like one too many term paper finally has been written containing factual errors thanks to prank edits over at Wikipedia. Last week I wrote about Encyclopedia Britannica moving to become more like Wikipedia by allowing user-edited articles on the web version of the world's oldest encyclopedia.
Well, it turns out that Wikipedia may be imitating Encyclopedia Britannica also. Britannica's editing interface requires all changes to articles be reviewed by editors prior to posting for public viewing. After two high profile U.S. Senators' articles were edited on Wikipedia to reflect their death while they were still very much alive last week, Wikipedia has indicated that it's throwing down the gauntlet on false and misleading edits.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has proposed that Wikipedia adopt a set of guidelines that provide for reviewed edits by trusted Wikipedia users. Under the new plan, Wikipedia editors would be responsible for fact checking and edit approval before the publicly available version of articles changed.
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