By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

On our second edition of the Betanews podcast, we take a look at the ongoing effort to keep stuff that we share on the Internet from not being shared so much. The Transportation Safety Administration and the American citizen are very much in the same bucket today, as both are being faced with a new and intriguing privacy and sensitivity debacle...essentially the same one, just in two different respects.

Here's links to the source information referenced in the podcast:

• "TSA manual misstep leads to discipline" by Spencer S. Hsu, from the Washington Post, December 10, 2009.
• "Redacting PDFs" - a December 16, 2005 blog post by Adobe product manager Rick Borstein showing users of current versions of Adobe Acrobat at that time how to make text look like it's redacted, when it's really not.
• The PDF redaction problem: TSA may have been using old software, by Scott Fulton.
• Not the first, not the last, technology predictions for 2010, by Carmi Levy.
• "New Tools to Control Your Experience" by Ruchi Sanghvi, product manager for privacy at Facebook. Here Sanghvi introduces the new privacy controls unveiled today. The video excerpted in today's podcast also appears here.
• "Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" by Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Exactly what online news should be or become is a subject that consumed the "blue sky" discussions among publishers since the late 1990s. Despite every concept they've ever created, tried or untried, what publishers typically end up with is either something that looks segmented and departmentalized like CNN.com or NYTimes.com, or is basically a blog whose scroll reveals a history of news, like it was printed on a roll of paper towels.

So the concept that Google Labs began attempting yesterday with its "Living Stories" concept (whose name for some reason brings to mind a certain peacock) is absolutely not new. It's been discussed before, in some fashion or another, and even approved -- for what it's worth. But on a large scale, it's never been done until yesterday: assembling all the stories relating to a pertinent, current topic on a page devoted to the topic, not the publisher and not some permanent department of the publication like "Sports" or "Tech."

Conceptually, the Living Stories concept makes a lot of sense, making the topic the center of the news. It requires the publisher to think differently about not only how news is presented, but how it's gathered. Publications typically assign reporters based on their defined coverage area, or "beat." Over the years, I've been involved in discussions on the subject of topic-centered publishing, and one question I've often heard raised is, "Won't this mean we have to start designating topics to reporters rather than beats?"

At last, the Washington Post and The New York Times have decided to actually try the experiment in practice, and see the answers for themselves. The papers are Google Labs' initial partners, although which paper came first is a matter for some debate -- naturally, the Post's Howard Kurtz reported this morning that the Post was first.

As Google News product manager Josh Cohen implied in a blog post yesterday, the question of which came first isn't as important as who's providing the platform: "This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the Web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We're providing the technology platform, the Times and Post's journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we're continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision."

Kurtz' reporting also revealed an interesting detail: The platform that Google is providing will also serve as the container for the papers' content -- it will actually be hosting these stories, perhaps for as long as the next 90 days.

In the initial run, it appears that the Post and the Times have divvied up the rights to certain topics. For example, all stories pertaining to Health Care coverage are covered by the Post, while the Afghan War and the Swine Flu are topics delegated to the Times. This precludes the first stage of the experiment from being able to demonstrate what could have been its most impressive achievement: blending together the timelines and the resources from multiple sources, into a single portal.

Maybe a single portal cannot be accomplished without appointing some automatic algorithm as its gatekeeper -- something like Google News, which publishers have learned to simultaneously love and hate. So will the culmination of the Living Stories project be a single, viable business model for online newspaper publishing, in which Google plays a role? Betanews asked Google spokesperson Chris Gaither this afternoon.

"Our goal from day one -- a goal shared by both Google and our partners -- has been to take whatever lessons we learn and tools we develop together and make them broadly available to any news publishers interested in taking these ideas forward," Gaither told Betanews. "In the long term, this could be one of many solutions that increases the amount of time people spend on news sites, which could lead to more revenue for publishers. But right now we and our partners are most interested in experimenting with ways to build more engaging Web experiences for users."

Next: Is there any money in it?

Is there any money in it?

Is there a plan for the Times and the Post to be compensated for their appearance in Google Living Stories? "As for direct compensation, this was a collaborative effort: Google provided the technology platform for Living Stories, the Times and Post's journalists wrote and edited the stories, and we collaborated to make the user interface fit with these news organizations' editorial vision," responded Google's Chris Gaither. "We decided with our partners that Google Labs was the best place to host this experiment for now as we test the ideas behind it, but our goal is for publishers to host Living Stories on their own Web sites."

That's a very interesting assertion, especially given Kurtz' revelation that "the story pages will reside at Google Labs for an experimental period...and revert to the papers' own Web sites if all goes well." Apparently, Google Labs is working on software that would eventually enable online news publishers to present articles using the Living Stories format, through their own servers. Whether these stories will be meshed together in a collective timeline, the way the first Living Stories test does now, may be undetermined at this point. That would imply that stories are also available through a single portal -- a collective portal that publishers may perhaps "opt into" as an alternative or supplement to Google News, the company's current released version of its aggregation service.

In the meantime, Google is actually offering the concept of the format as a kind of free contribution to the publishing community, assuming anyone out there had the software to accomplish it.

"Google Living Stories represents one possible implementation of these characteristics," reads the company's Principles of Living Stories, published yesterday. "Any news organization, however, can apply these elements for a living story section on their site."

Or as Gaither put it to us, "If publishers decide to implement Living Stories on their own Web sites, they certainly can.

"Our goal is to innovate on existing presentations of journalism that take greater advantage of technological capabilities on the Web," he added. "We hope that news publishers find the ideas embodied in the Living Story compelling, and consider adopting it on their own Web sites. For this reason, we plan to work on open source tools for creating Living Stories that any news organization can use. For the duration of this initial experiment, however, Living Story Pages will contain news content provided only by the Times and the Post."

Although the "editorial vision" of Living Stories, for now, may represent the insight of just two publishers (which have collaborated together before -- in the case of the International Herald Tribune, for 37 years), the financial vision for the system has yet to be supplied by anyone at all. Gaither told us that advertising -- Google's core business -- will not play a role in Living Stories during the experiment.

But it's unimaginable that Google would attempt this experiment on such a high level with zero business interest whatsoever. Last September, the company revealed in its response to a questionnaire from the Newspaper Association of America, that it was working on a hosting system for news content that would enable publishers to invoke a micropayment model, paying as little as fractions of a cent for reading articles from participating publishers...assuming publishers participate.

And that may be what Living Stories is truly about: getting at least two publishers to participate in something Google is doing.

"The news industry is undergoing a difficult transition, driven in no small part by print subscription declines and increased competition for classified and display advertising dollars," noted Chris Gaither to Betanews today. "Journalism is an important source of the high quality information for which Google users search, and it's crucial for an informed citizenry. We're happy to see so many news publishers trying experiments, and we want to partner with them to help them build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences, and generate more revenue."

That may also be what some publishers want -- at least, that's what one publisher said today in Google's public forum for comments on Living Stories.

"It would be far more helpful to most news organizations if Google worked with publishers on developing new business models," wrote Industry Standard Managing Editor Ian Lamont. "Looking at the prototype, I don't see any indication that display advertising or other revenue-generation services are part of the plan, or how these pages would be adapted to online news sites' existing templates that have revenue-generating services built-in."

Technology System Integrator. 2009

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The European Commission has agreed to a proposal by US-based memory parts designer Rambus, to limit its royalties that memory makers worldwide will pay for double data rate (DDR)-based memory units to 1.5% per unit, and DDR memory controllers to 2.65% per unit. This in order to put to rest an ongoing EC investigation into Rambus royalties practices -- one which continued long after the US Supreme Court upheld an April 2008 Appeals Court ruling that stated the entire global memory standards system had lost its credibility.

During a morning press conference in Brussels Wednesday, EC Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes told reporters Rambus made this offer in order to redress prior conduct: specifically, manipulating the memory standards process in order to claim exclusive rights to high royalties.

"A US standard-setting organization called JEDEC developed an industry-wide standard for DRAM chips. The standard was very successful. JEDEC-compliant DRAM chips represent around 95% of the worldwide market and are used in virtually all PCs. In 2008, worldwide DRAM sales exceeded 23 billion euros," Comm. Kroes stated. "Rambus is claiming royalty payments on all these products, which represents a very substantial cost to industry. The Commission was concerned that Rambus may have only been able to charge these royalties because of a so-called patent ambush, in breach of EU antitrust rules' ban on abuse of a dominant market position. A 'patent ambush' means that during the standard-setting process a company intentionally conceals that it holds essential intellectual property rights relevant to technology used in the standard being developed. It only starts asserting its intellectual property rights, and claiming royalties on them, after the standard has been agreed, once other companies are locked in to using it."

Those are the same concerns raised by the US Federal Trade Commission, which ruled in August 2006 that Rambus had abused its position by manipulating the JEDEC standards organization in order to steer memory manufacturers towards using its intellectual property. Rambus' defense had been that if it had disclosed to JEDEC the nature of its proprietary standards prior to their having been submitted for discussion, they would no longer have been entitled to patents, having just told the world what it was up to.

The FTC didn't buy that argument, stating in its ruling three years ago (PDF available here), "If a competitor merely read or heard Rambus's disclosure, copied its application, and filed first in a foreign jurisdiction, the competitor would not have invented the technology and would not be entitled to a patent. Rambus failed to identify any foreign jurisdiction in which its ability to obtain patent protection would have been threatened by disclosures within JEDEC. Under these circumstances, and on this record, the only effect of Rambus's behavior was to prevent JEDEC participants -- who expected Rambus to conduct itself cooperatively and without deception -- from making their standard-setting decisions with knowledge of the consequences. That is not pro-competitive."

But the US District Court of Appeals for DC struck down that FTC ruling, and revealed in so doing that it had investigated the nature of business at JEDEC, coming to the conclusion that it really wasn't doing business as a formal organization anyway. Not following the rules of an organization that didn't abide by its own rules, or even really have any rules, couldn't be ruled illegal.

Sure, JEDEC had a "manual," but it didn't amount to very much, said the Appeals Court: "As the Federal Circuit has said, JEDEC's patent disclosure policies suffered from 'a staggering lack of defining details,'" wrote Senior Judge Stephen Williams last October. "Even assuming that any evidence of unwritten disclosure expectations would survive a possible narrowing effect based upon the written directive of Manual 21-I, the vagueness of any such expectations would nonetheless remain an obstacle. One would expect that disclosure expectations ostensibly requiring competitors to share information that they would otherwise vigorously protect as trade secrets would provide 'clear guidance' and 'define clearly what, when, how, and to whom the members must disclose.' This need for clarity seems especially acute where disclosure of those trade secrets itself implicates antitrust concerns; JEDEC involved, after all, collaboration by competitors...In any event, the more vague and muddled a particular expectation of disclosure, the more difficult it should be for the Commission to ascribe competitive harm to its breach."

Of course, the EC is not bound to adhering to findings of US law, or that of any other country. But Europe's independence from the US with regard to matters that take place on the same planet as Europe, was made crystal clear yesterday when Comm. Kroes spoke publicly on another matter: the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. There, she told fellow lawmakers that US Senators pressing her to complete her investigation of Oracle should mind their own business -- specifically, to go argue about health care reform and leave her to mind the business of fair competition.

Kroes' remarks were quoted by the Associated Press, but have not yet been released in official EC reports on the speech. Nonetheless, EC spokesperson Jonathan Todd told Betanews this morning that the AP's citation of her comments was accurate, though he declined to elaborate further.

Rambus' behavior had been the subject of private IP-related lawsuits against it, including from Hynix Semiconductor. Since 2000, Hynix had been working to invalidate the very patents that Rambus is now charging royalties for. Rambus' defense at the time appeared to say the entire memory industry was conspiring against it -- a defense which, for most, seemed implausible.

But then in 2006, Hynix plead guilty in US District Court of conspiring along with memory giant Samsung, Infineon, Micron Technologies, and other companies to fix the prices of DRAM sold in the world market, in an effort that might have continued to shortchange Rambus were it allowed to continue.

Technology System Integrator. 2009

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Come November 1, Amazon's Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a "quadruple extra-large" AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).

The new high-end instances won't come cheap -- they'll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called "extra large," had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.

However, revenue from the new super-high-end will help drive down prices for everyone else, starting November 1. At that time, the per-hour price for the smallest and cheapest instance available, running generic Linux, will be reduced by 15% to $0.085 per hour. Windows Server instances will be trimmed a bit, but not by as much percentage-wise -- the "extra large" price, for instance, will drop only 4¢ to $0.96 per hour.

The price cuts come as Amazon looks to offer more competitive buildouts, for customers that continue to prefer to deploy entire machine instances -- rather than just applications, such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft offer -- in the cloud, administered using everyday software. Already Amazon has been offering pre-configured AMIs with Microsoft SQL Server (at about a 10% premium per-hour), and IBM DB2 (somewhat higher at $0.38 per hour). Now Amazon is committing to offering its own brand of database server, called Amazon RDS, in lower-priced instances that will compete with its SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 instances, using MySQL as the underlying engine.

"For customers whose applications require relational storage, but want to reduce the time spent on database management, Amazon RDS automates common administrative tasks to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership," reads a statement from Amazon AWS to Betanews this afternoon. "Amazon RDS automatically backs up a customer's database and maintains the database software, allowing customers to spend more time on application development. With the native database access Amazon RDS provides, customers get the programmatic familiarity, tooling and application compatibility of a traditional RDBMS. Customers also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with a Relational Database Instance via a single API call."

Customers will still be expected to maintain their own databases, Amazon's statement tells us, although instancing in the cloud will enable them to re-provision resources as necessary on a more granular basis. Multiple statements today managed to make mince meat of Amazon's quoted rates for transfer, but a blog post this afternoon managed to straighten the matter out: RDS customers will be charged 10¢ per gigabyte per month for storage, and another 10¢ per month for every one million I/O requests. Bandwidth charges should then be the same as for Amazon's existing, non-relational SimpleDB instances: The first gigabyte of data in or out is free, then fees rise to 10¢ per gigabyte in and 17¢ per gigabyte out, declining to 10¢ per gigabyte out after 150 TB.

This will not be the first appearance of MySQL on Amazon's cloud; the commercial MySQL Enterprise has been available under Sun Microsystems' branding since this time last year.

Technology System Integrator. 2009

The interchange wars between merchants and payments companies came to a temporary ceasefire Wednesday at the annual Cards & Payments Loyalty Conference in New York.

Edward Pinto has more to say about the shortcomings of the Treasury’s Home Affordable Modification Program.

Neel Kashkari may have escaped to the woods of California, but that hasn’t spared him a vicious skewering by the Huffington Post.