Fake Steve Jobs, outed some time ago as Forbes’ Daniel Lyons, is retiring his satirical blog “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” thus ending one of the more enduring runs as pop Web iCon.
In a post titled “I’m sailing away,” Lyons says he’ll be launching a new site next week, perhaps reincarnating Fake Steve as Fake Somebody Else. His new form will be sitting at a desk at Newsweek.
Lyons doesn’t go into detail about the closure of the site, but if he is reinventing himself at Newsweek, the “A Forbes.com Site” at the top of the blog could be trouble for at least a couple of people.
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Chairman Kevin Martin says that the cable provider has run afoul of regulations that guarantee open access to the Internet, and should be punished.
Martin used a September 2005 policy statement from the Federal Communications Commission as the basis for his position, which was intended to ensure that broadband networks were open and affordable. It did however allow for “reasonable network management.”
The FCC chairman argues that Comcast is blocking traffic arbitrarily, regardless of how much bandwidth is being used, and is failing to inform consumers of its actions. Its move is a result of an earlier complaint that users of BitTorrent were being blocked from using the service.
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The new partnership would allow users of Yahoo’s photo sharing service to make their images available for licensing to clients of Getty’s digital image service.
No timetable for the service’s launch has yet been announced, however the images culled from Flickr would reside in a specially branded collection. Getty will invite select users to participate, and will select imagery based on the needs of its clients.
The details of exactly how Getty would compensate Flickr users have yet to be disclosed. Traditionally, Getty has shared 30-40 percent of the revenues of imagery sold with exclusive rights, and 20 percent of that sold with non-exclusive rights, with its contributors.
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The G8 Summit began today in Tokyo, Japan. Among the topics expected to be discussed is the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty proposal drafted in secret primarily by the office of the US Trade Representative and legislators from Californiia. Not surprisingly, the California lawmakers are well known for supporting just about any legislation that increases the term or scope of copyright or strengthens penaitles for infringement.
Despite some attention from websites like Techachino, public interest groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and news publications in Canada we don’t really know anything more now than we did when a draft of the proposal was first published by the watchdog site Wikileaks.
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Although Nokia has now made a financial concession to Bochum, Germany worth well over $30 million USD, the city will still be left without its main source of income, after Nokia pulls up stakes and moves its factory to Romania.
Through an initiative announced July 3, Nokia will contribute 20 million euros — the current equivalent of 31.4 million US dollars — to help fund a new program rather ironically entitled “Growth for Bochum.”
Further, while Nokia won’t be fueling any economic growth through continued employment of city residents, the Finnish-based cell phone company has also promised to pitch in to the program with proceeds from the planned sale of its factory and property in the German city.
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Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.
Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield (who still officially runs Flickr) will leave on July 12. Kakul Srivastava, the director of product management for Flickr, will take over Stewart’s role as general manager of Flickr. Sara Wood will take over Kakul’s previous position.
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The European Commission appears to have thrown its weight behind the principle of net neutrality, after the telecommunications commissioner told a global internet forum that the issue was “a political question to be answered by the people”.
Viviane Reding was speaking to delegates on Tuesday at an Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) ministerial meeting in South Korea, on the subject of the “future of the internet economy”. Because of “explosive developments” such as the dramatic proliferation of online video, she said, “some are starting to question the founding principles of openness and neutrality that have been essential for the development and tremendous innovation power of the internet”.
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With giants in the social networking field opening up their APIs to developers, social news sharing site Reddit is going a big step further today, opening its site’s entire source code to the open source community.
Reddit competes with Digg, Newspond, Mixx, and similar news aggregation sites. Its Web site was built using an open source platform and open source tools, but now the site’s source code will be freely available to everyone, downloadable from this address.
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The sixth annual Canadian Telecom Summit kicked off on Monday with Rogers Communications stressing that the future of the industry would be all about wireless.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” said Nadir Mohamed, president and chief operating officer of Rogers Communications Inc., “that what we’ve seen in the wired internet world, in terms of market share and penetration, will in fact happen in the wireless world.”
Mohamed said the arrival of the iPhone and the growing popularity of Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, demonstrates that wireless web usage is about to explode.
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Though not yet officially announced, reports have surfaced that FCC Chairman Martin supports the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio companies, and will recommend that the Commission vote to push the transaction through.
The willingness of XM and Sirius to comply with demands set forth for their merger appears to be working. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said on Sunday that he will support the combination of the two satellite radio providers given their adherence to certain stipulations.
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