For some, 123people.com provides a new tool for re-establishing lost connections or making contact with new clients or colleagues. It also signals a further erosion in any perceived privacy of information  on the net as it brings a deeper search into personal info to the masses.

“After months of private beta tweaking and adding new features to improve the high powered people search, 123 People launches to the US public,” the European-based website announced in a blog posting at 123people.com.

123 People collects publicly available information about people from social network profiles, blog entries, news articles and other sources and displays links, pictures, videos, email addresses and phone numbers.

The first and last name of the person the user is seeking information about is entered into a search box on the 123people.com home page. The results are displayed on a single web page. (Yahoo)

The duality of good technology is that while it provides tools to expand the capabilities of the individual for the greater good, as well as better enabling those who wish to do harm. If you value your privacy, it behooves you to be ever vigilant in what you place in public or even semi-public view. Best practice: never assume anything you post or upload will be private, or that it will be used by others in your best interest.

We’ve been covering the largely self created implosion of pulp media for most of the last year. The economy has stalled and advertising spending is down everywhere, but for the New York Times and other pulp media, it’s a disaster:

The company, which reported a 16 percent drop in advertising revenue at its news media group, also said it may write down the value of its New England operations by up to $150 million, underscoring the dismal state of newspaper advertising.

Its shares fell more than 10 percent on Thursday afternoon, hitting its lowest level since 1991.

Separately, Moody’s Investors Service said it might cut its ratings on the Times into junk territory, citing concerns about revenue declines and risks associated with financing its debt. (Reuters)

The failure of the NYT to shift its emphasis to interactive electronic delivery combined with the erosion of content from infomation gathering to agenda based propagandizing are a certain formula for collapse. There’s still time for the “paper” to proactively restore editorial credibility and put of all of the in depth and archival content online, perhaps supplemented by a smaller dead tree tabloid. Sadly, I doubt that this will be done, making the NYT a museum piece within the decade.

The Columbus Dispatch has one of the longest continuous relationships with Associated Press. Almost 150 years. But no more. The Dispatch will terminate that relationship in 2009. More here.

Welcome to a world where up is down, wrong is right and nothing is the way it seems. In this world run by corrupt politicians, corporations and lawyers, you must prove you own the copyright to your own music the music you created and recorded before you can give it away on the Internet. If you haven’t done that, you will be the victim of the copyright take down police.

Around a week ago, the  label (that the musician owns to distribute his own music) was notified by its webhost that it had some copyright music files on its server, which was no surprise to them since they were tracks by Arrogant Sons of Bitches, one of the label’s bands. The tracks the webhost referred to were actually written by Jeff himself. Jeff spoke with someone at the host on the telephone, explained that they were his own tracks and was informed this wasn’t a problem.

Three days later the labels site went down completely, due to Jeff hosting his own copyright files on his own site - a claimed violation of the hosting company’s Terms of Service. In order to solve the problem, Jeff would have to send his copyright registration forms to the host by mail, to prove he held the copyright, a problem in itself, explains Jeff:

“I called the company to explain that a lot of this material was NOT in fact registered with the US copyright office, instead we did the ol’ poor man’s copyright. The music that was copyrighted was done so under a Creative Commons License, which is a digital copyright that cannot be viewed if the website where the files are posted is down.”

It seems amazing that a host should be proactive like this, especially since it has clearly made a huge mistake. However, a week later and Jeff’s site is still down and he’s quite rightly upset: “I guess the scary thing for me is that it seems that my hosting server employs a guilty before proven innocent policy, which is terrifying for anyone who does not physically mail forms for every small idea they’ve ever had in their bedroom to the US copyright office. What a great new digital age, stuck in the trappings of wasteful forms and red tape.” (Torrentfreak)

Paranoid web hosting companies afraid of costly litigation will shoot before they ask questions at the “checkpoint”. Your papers are not be in order comrade! It’s off to the Gulag for your web site! Next, you’ll need to post documentation to perform in public like a building permit…. Welcome to the world of the DMCA!

Well yet again the papers continue their slide. The Boston Globe, a NYT sub, is reducing paper count. —

The Boston Globe is consolidating its daily paper into four sections as part of a redesign that will launch Friday, Oct. 24. The paper will no longer publish a free-standing business section — it will be folded into the a newly named “Metro†section — except on Sundays.

The Globe, which has seen its revenue and circulation plummet in recent years, says it will save about 24 pages per week in printing costs.

Of course, by giving readers less, they probably won’t reverse the plummeting circulation trend. I continue to think that newspapers, and other media, might help their situations by producing a better product, with more useful and interesting news and less half-baked opinion, but that strategy doesn’t seem to be as popular with management as trimming page-counts and the like.

HT: Instapundit.

In a macabre situation worthy of Vincent Price a husband has hacked his estranged wife to death. The reason? She changed her martial status on her Facebook page to single! –

A husband who hacked his wife to death with a meat cleaver in fury over her Facebook entry was jailed for a minimum of 14 years at the Old Bailey today.

Wayne Forrester, 34, drank alcohol and took cocaine before driving 15 miles to the family home to attack wife Emma as she lay in bed.

The couple had separated four days before the murder in February and Forrester later told police he had been provoked by his wife changing her marital status to “single” on her Facebook entry, the court heard.

Forrester, a HGV driver, admitted murder in February this year in New Addington, near Croydon.

The world is a strange place. Given the right circumstance and the proper button pushed anybody could go over the edge I guess. Though you would figure as the husband if you are separated then what would you expect? But I could think of a lot of things OTHER than a Facebook page that would set me off.

Be careful out there!

Linky.

In a cost cutting move the Tribune Co. [LAT, CST] has send notice of termination to AP starting in 2010, per their contractual obligation to do so. Tribune represents the first major daily defection from the news aggregrator. –

Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do so since the recent controversy over new rates began.

Tribune, which owns nine daily papers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, joins a growing list of newspapers that have sought to end AP contracts, or given notice of that, following plans to introduce a new controversial rate structure in 2009. The notice was given earlier this week.

AP Spokesman Paul Colford confirmed the cancellation notice, but said he had no more specifics. He issued the following statement about it:

“We understand that in this climate a lot of newspapers are re-examining their strategies. The Associated Press will continue to work with all members of the cooperative to ensure that we are providing the most efficient, valued and essential news service for them.”

I guess a subpar product and new, higher prices aren’t sitting to well!

Linky.

Open source projects are often community built projects with many contributions, and divergent distributions and forks. Many of the best creative types opt for careers in software or contribute work to open source are also aspiring musicians. Ubuntu’s community lead, Jono Bacon just happens to be one of these individuals. He’s releasing an album as a open source project. Free to be distributed, remixed, repackaged, improved or repurposed. Watch out, NASCAP and BMI: Open source distribution negates your business model. Open and collaborative music could easily evolve into the ultimate fan’s dream of direct participation in making the music they love with their favorite artist.

Bacon has been working on a nearly complete full solo heavy metal album, and will record it performing all vocals and instrumentals himself. He adds: “I will then release all of the final pieces from this new album online at www.severedfifth.com under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. This will allow anyone to download, listen to, share and re-mix the songs freely, with the only condition that suitable attribution and credit is placed.”

Bacon says his overarching intent is to test “the new economy of the music industry.” Bacon has been drafting volunteer helpers to help his efforts in areas such as web design and community growth, and he is going to be inviting remixes of his songs. This is an open source-like approach that has worked for successful bands such as Nine Inch Nails, as we’ve covered before. (OStatic)

Well at the bench, legal and otherwise, the RIAA is 0 for 30000. But they are nothing if not persistent. Ms. Thomas, the first to be convicted by the RIAA for misappropriate of music had her case thrown out by the original judge. The judge declared a mistrial. The RIAA is now back for a third bite at the apple –

His decision meant that the RIAA’s 5-year-old copyright infringement litigation campaign has never been successful at trial.

The RIAA is petitioning (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to allow the appeal to go forward, and wants the judge to stay a retrial that has not been scheduled yet.

The RIAA is seeking a federal appeals court to review Davis’ decision that focused at the heart of all file sharing cases: What level of proof was necessary for the RIAA to prevail.

Davis had instructed (.pdf) the jury last year that the recording industry did not have to prove anybody downloaded the songs from Thomas’ open Kazaa share folder. Davis read Jury Instruction No. 15 to jurors saying they could find unauthorized distribution — copyright infringement — if Thomas was “making copyrighted sound recordings available” over a peer-to-peer network “regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.”

When will someone with the guts and deep pockets bring the RIAA up on RICO charges. Mean heck, its already happening to ACORN for a heck of a lot less in a framework for conspiracy. Music industry, keep digging baby. You kill the goose and the eggs will stop coming.

Linky.

The streaming player battle is heating up between Adaobe and Microsoft, with a bunch of smaller also ran’s still in the game jockey for a pice of the booming TVoIP delvery market. Flash 10 extends Adobe’s franchise just as Silverlight 2.0 was announced by Microsoft. This means more online content is coming and it will look and sound better than ever.

Hey duopoly! Where’s our fat pipes?

Adobe on Wednesday will launch Flash Player 10, the latest in its ubiquitous 13-year-old line of multimedia plug-ins. For online video watchers, one big improvement is dynamic streaming, which will automatically shift bitrates as media is being streamed, depending on changing bandwidth. Content owners will need to use an upcoming release of Adobe Media Server to implement this feature.

Other improvements include 3D effects and better support for sound, drawing and text. Adobe has also moved some visual processing tasks to the GPU to improve performance. Support for what’s called RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) will turn the player into a managed peer-to-peer environment and should help enable things like multi-user games and online collaboration. (GigaOm)