Dear candidate that's not your song

The rock group Survivor, around 1979. Their hit “Eye of the Tiger” was used by Newt Gingrich.

NYT- Let’s say you’re a Republican running for president. You’re looking for a rousing pop anthem to pump up your troops and underscore your message. There’s plenty of music out there, but you have a problem: most of the pop stars, it seems, prefer Democrats.

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were forced this week to stop using songs at their rallies after songwriters complained that the campaigns had played the pieces without permission. Strike another two songs from the Republican playlist: “Eye of the Tiger,” by Survivor, and “Wavin’ Flag,” by the Somali-born musician K’naan.

It seems that every campaign season the issue of politicians’ use of pop songs without permission crops up, often with partisan overtones. And with the Internet making it easier for musicians to track the use of their songs, and with the country’s politics becoming more bitterly divided, more musicians are making legal complaints and prevailing.

In 2008 Jackson Browne successfully sued Senator McCain and the Ohio Republican Party for using his hit “Running on Empty” as the music for a campaign ad attacking the energy policies of Barack Obama. He won an undisclosed cash settlement and a public apology from Senator McCain. Two years later David Byrne sued Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida for using the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” in a commercial attacking his opponent Marco Rubio. The governor paid an undisclosed penalty and post a videotaped apology on the Internet.

Because the politicians paid damages, the suits against Senator McCain and Governor Crist were a turning point, political strategists and copyright experts said. Before, there had been little incentive for campaigns to seek permission, since legal actions were rare. Until the recent cases, the only risk to the candidate was a spot of bad publicity

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/arts/music/romney-and-gingrich-pull-songs-after-complaints.html

Private GPS snooping - is it legal?

Yasir Afifi of San Jose, Calif., showing where he found a GPS device the police had put on his car.

NYT - Only yesterday it was the exotic stuff of spy shows: flip on a computer and track the enemy’s speeding car. 

But today, anyone with $300 can compete with Jack Bauer. Online, and soon in big-box stores, you can buy a device no bigger than a cigarette pack, attach it to a car without the driver’s knowledge and watch the vehicle’s travels — and stops — at home on your laptop.

Tens of thousands of Americans are already doing just that, with little oversight, for purposes as seemingly benign as tracking an elderly parent with dementia or a risky teenage driver, or as legally and ethically charged as spying on a spouse or an employee — or for outright criminal stalking.

The advent of Global Positioning System tracking devices has been a boon to law enforcement, making it easier and safer, for example, for agents to link drug dealers to kingpins.

Last Monday, in a decision seen as a first step toward setting boundaries for law enforcement, the Supreme Court held that under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle is a search. Police departments around the country say they will be more likely to seek judicial approval before using the devices, if they were not already doing so.  Still, sales of GPS trackers to employers 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/gps-devices-are-being-used-to-track-cars-and-errant-spouses.html

Did Newt Fake His Followers ?

Newt has never been short on ego, but would he revert to deception to make it seem he is more popular than he actually is? This Gawker story contends there are problems with Newt's numbers. One thing for sure: The Internet allows people to cover their tracks and make things look better than they are. We have already read about content farms, people gaming search results and bogus reviews. Now it appears that viewers need to be suspect of what they consume on Twitter as well.  - MT

Gawker - Yesterday Newt Gingrich laid out a new argument for why he should be the GOP presidential nominee: He's got the most Twitter followers. But according to a former Gingrich staffer, he bought them.

Gingrich complained yesterday that the press is ignoring his prodigious Twitter audience: "I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count." Which is true! Gingrich currently boasts 1,325,842 followers, whereas competitors Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann have yet to crack 100,000.

But if Newt is winning the Twitter primary, it's because of voter fraud. A former staffer tells us that his campaign hired a firm to boost his follower count, in part by creating fake accounts en masse:

Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater.

About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various "follow agencies," another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt's profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn't follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you'll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn't it?

Football Players Tweet Away

Bloomberg - National Football League players at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii are being encouraged to use Twitter during the game, an action that cost one player $25,000 in fines two years ago.

The league will set up a computer on each sideline during the Jan. 29 all-star game for players to go onto the social media website Twitter during television commercials, or when their offensive or defensive unit is not on the field, the NFL said in an e-mailed release. Players are encouraged to interact with fans, teammates and opponents during the game, and can also update on Facebook, league spokesman Brian McCarthy said in an e-mail.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-26/nfl-encourages-players-to-tweet-during-the-pro-bowl-in-reversal-of-stance.html

Cruise ship sinks creating panic

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/01/14/multimedia/100000001286116/cruise-ship-runs-aground.html

January 17, 2012 - A recorded telephone conversation with the captain of the Costa Concordia reveals he abandoned the cruise ship long before all passengers had been evacuated.

Wearing your computer

Instead of going through life staring into a mobile device, people one day may be able to wear a computer.


Millions of people stroll through life staring into a mobile device, absorbed by their screens.  Technology will solve this problem by creating wearable computers. The idea of someone looking at a screen tapping away with their thumbs may soon be a thing of the paste and computers become more portable - and wearable. Yes, wearable.


Nick Bilton of the New York Times reports that Apple and Google have secretly begun working on projects that will become wearable computers. Their main goal: to sell more smartphones. (In Google’s case, more smartphones sold means more advertising viewed.) In Google’s secret Google X labs, researchers are working on peripherals that — when attached to your clothing or body — would communicate information back to an Android smartphone.


The U.S. military has been studying ways to embed radio transmitters in clothing that would allow soldiers to keep in touch with each other by talking to their clothing. Carbon fibers woven into the shirt or outer wear would pick up wireless signals.

More details here:  http://nyti.ms/vOrGXx

Getting Too Social Online

Lewis Holloway, a schools superintendent in Georgia, has imposed a strict social media policy.

NYT- Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The policies come as educators deal with a wide range of new problems. Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.

But the stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students. In Missouri, the state teachers union, citing free speech, persuaded a judge that a new law imposing a statewide ban on electronic communication between teachers and students was unconstitutional. Lawmakers revamped the bill this fall, dropping the ban but directing school boards to develop their own social media policies by March 1.

School administrators acknowledge that the vast majority of teachers use social media appropriately. But they also say they are increasingly finding compelling reasons to limit teacher-student contact. School boards in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia have updated or are revising their social media policies this fall.

“My concern is that it makes it very easy for teachers to form intimate and boundary-crossing relationships with students,” said Charol Shakeshaft, chairwoman of the Department of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied sexual misconduct by teachers for 15 years. “I am all for using this technology. Some school districts have tried to ban it entirely. I am against that. But I think there’s a middle ground that would allow teachers to take advantage of the electronic technology and keep kids safe.”
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/business/media/rules-to-limit-how-teachers-and-students-interact-online.html