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Word of the FTC’s crackdown on blogger endorsements first broke in June and set off a wave of chatter in communities of bloggers who are well used to receiving and keeping free products from marketers and PR agencies–most notably the thriving “mommy blogger” sector.

It’s going to be hard to police–there are a lot of bloggers out there, not to mention a lot of different kinds of bloggers, and a lot of marketers. And as some media critics have pointed out, undisclosed endorsements of freebies have plagued some sectors of the magazine industry for decades now.

This marks the first time that the Guides document has been updated since 1980.

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers–connections that consumers would not expect–must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

That means, theoretically, that if a celebrity gushes about a new car on his or her Twitter account and it turns out that the car was given away for free, the celebrity could be fined by the FTC.

Independent bloggers who fail to disclose paid reviews or freebies can face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to the agency’s “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” published Monday.

From an FTC-issued release:

The FTC also has its eye on celebrities. “Celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media,” the release explaining the revisions explained.

The news comes on the heels of a victory for the founders of The Pirate Bay.

8-25-09, 8:07 a.m. To include that The Pirate Bay is back online. To see a detail story on the site go here.

The most popular BitTorrent tracker in the world appeared to be inaccessible to many in the U.S. on Monday morning but the blog TorrentFreak reported that the site had found a new connection to the Web and there were reports from readers that they were able to log on to the site. Citing a source close to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak said that the tracker was still down but would be back up on Tuesday.

“The Court’s ruling yet again confirms the illegality of The Pirate Bay’s operation and demonstrates the liability of ISPs that provide internet services to The Pirate Bay,” the IFPI wrote. “The Pirate Bay seeks to continue to infringe our members’ rights on a commercial scale and further actions against ISPs who enable access to The Pirate Bay are planned.”

It’s unclear how long Black Internet will be forced to stop service for The Pirate Bay. The company may not be able to resume service until the appeal filed by The Pirate Bay founders is settled, SvD reported.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry issued a statement applauding the decision by the court and Black Internet.

A Swedish district court has ordered an Internet service provider there to stop servicing The Pirate Bay.

An executive with Black Internet told Swedish newspaper SvD that the court informed the company that it would either shut off The Pirate Bay or face penalties. The founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright violations last April.

Sweden’s government run debt-collection agency, commonly referred to as the bailiff, said it could find no attachable assets belonging to three of the four founders of the site. A group of media companies had asked the bailiff to collect the $4 million a court had awarded them after finding the four Pirate Bay founders guilty of copyright violations.

At the very least, the launch of a new Pirate Bay, one with authorized film and music copies, is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

The executive told the newspaper that Black Internet is not the only ISP servicing The Pirate Bay but is probably the largest. He said none of the other ISPs were affected by the decision. He added that the company is considering options.

At this point, the future of the site, at least in name, appears to rest with the software maker Global Gaming Factory X, the software maker and operator of Internet cafes. The company said in June it would pay $8 million to acquire The Pirate Bay and the deal is supposed to close on Thursday. But Swedish regulators halted trading in Global Gaming on Friday over questions about the company’s financial readiness to complete the transaction.

The merger has already been approved by Sun stockholders and by the U.S. Justice Department.

That initial investigation showed that Oracle’s proprietary databases and Sun’s open-source MySQL compete directly in many areas of the market, so the Commission wants to address a number of issues, including Oracle’s incentive to further develop MySQL as an open-source database.

Pointing out the importance of databases to corporate IT systems, the Commission said that in light of the current economy, companies need cost-effective solutions. “And systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions,” said Kroes. “The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.”

The European Commission announced Thursday that it has launched an in-depth investigation into the proposed merger between Oracle and Sun. The agency said its preliminary probe raised concerns that the deal could threaten competition in the database market in the European Economic Area (EEA), an association composed of 30 different European countries.

The Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, now has 90 working days, until January 19, 2010, to make a final decision on the merger.

Oracle had little comment except to say in a statement that the Commission had decided to “seek out more information regarding the merger by launching a Phase Two inquiry,” which indicates a more in-depth follow-up to the initial probe.

Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement: “The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world’s leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world’s leading open source database company. In particular, the Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover.”

Final approval of Oracle’s $7.4 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems has just hit a snag, courtesy of European regulators.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Mind you, I’m not opposed to the creation of different ways to get people into stories. An old mantra in publishing is to provide “multiple entry points” for readers. If I get users to my pages from Fast Flip that I otherwise wouldn’t get, who am I to argue? But Web designers have spent the past 10 years building sites that work in browsers, and Fast Flip by its existence tries to tell publishers that there’s still life left in the old print-based, dead page model. I think we’ve moved beyond that.

Fast Flip also displays Google ads alongside publisher content. I presume Google will share revenues with content providers, but this scheme does take control over advertising away from publishers.

Here’s what I’d like to see instead: first, I agree with the Fast Flip designers that loading pages takes too long and that caching pages in a Web app is a good way to bring speed back to content browsing. But can we do it with real pages instead of static graphics? Second, the idea that there’s a recommended linear reading order of pages on a site is intriguing, even if the order is simply chronological. But I don’t think readers want to be locked in to that order. How about we give readers standard forward and back content navigation buttons (not browser forward and back) to take them through a site in addition to the hyperlinks they’re used to?

In Fast Flip, neither standard Web rules nor print layout concepts apply. For example, in Fast Flip, you can only scan left and right (page by page). You can’t read down the page. If you click anywhere on the page, you leave Fast Flip and go to the Web. Links don’t work. And multimedia doesn’t work on the page either. Fast Flip previews are, in fact, flat graphics files, which explains their lack of interactivity. On the mobile versions of Fast Flip, zooming in on a column is likely to leave you with text at a readable size but displayed on a column that’s too wide to read without scrolling back and forth, making the feature rather useless. Hey Google, wasn’t HTML invented for a reason?

Fast Flip is clearly an experiment, and as I said, if it gets more people to read online content, I’ll applaud it for that alone. But I’m not going to actually like it from a technical perspective, or as a user, until it gives publishers, designers, and readers more control over their content.

See also: Zinio.

Dozens of sites are participating in the Fast Flip experiment.

Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed really fast. But it still feels forced. It’s an intermediate online format that gives you an experience that’s even more linear than a print publication, and it provides less overall context than you can get from a moderately well-design Web site.

You can quickly flip forward or back through pages, or jump to a particular page by clicking on its thumbnail view.

Google on Monday released an experimental new content browser called Fast Flip that makes it possible to see a curated set of content sites using a physical “turn the pages” metaphor. Fast Flip pages are cached by Google and load very quickly, which is cool. And if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it’ll feel natural to use.

Maybe it’s just me–Donald Bell thought the browser was great–but I can’t imagine using this browser for any length of time.

Regardless of how you’re trying to navigate, the on-screen keyboard seems to require more finger accuracy than the fault-tolerant keyboard on the iPhone (probably because of the smaller screen). The back button is hard to hit–I kept selecting the favorites menu by mistake. Sites are also considerably slower to load, and the resolution doesn’t seem to be nearly as good as the iPhone or iPod Touch, with a noticeable flicker on pages with white backgrounds.

Microsoft says the Zune HD’s browser is based on the mobile version of Internet Explorer, but it doesn’t look like any version of IE I’ve ever seen. The address bar is hidden–you have to pull up on the gray bar at the bottom of the screen to get to it. The other alternative is to click on a small magnifying glass to conduct a search on the mobile version of Bing, which I found difficult to use. (No slam against the full browser-based version of Microsoft’s search engine, which I like.) For instance, when I conduct a search on my employer’s name, “Directions on Microsoft,” Bing Mobile assumes I want news stories that cite the company, when in fact I just want our home page. There’s a link on the Bing Mobile site that says “web,” which I assume is supposed bring me general search results from around the Web, but when I clicked it repeatedly, nothing happened. There’s also no auto-suggest or auto-complete for search queries–each time you want to search for “Chinese restaurants,” you have to type the whole query in.

CNET's Donald Bell had better luck with the on-screen keyboard than I did.

After a few hours on Tuesday of playing with the Zune HD that Microsoft sent me, I found a lot of things I like about it–the slim size, the Quickplay user interface feature that gives you immediate access to recently added and favorite songs, the big on-screen volume controls, and the Zune Pass, for example. But the Web browser seems like an afterthought.

I know that mobile Web browsing isn’t the same as PC browsing, but I’ve used Safari on the iPhone for more than a year, and it’s great–I actually read articles, for work and fun, on my bus commute to work. It’s so good, I’ve been taking it for granted. Not anymore.

(Credit:
Donald Bell/CNET)

In fact, it’s almost certain that SpringSource sold too early, at least as measured the size of potential exits it could have had given a bit more time. Like Zimbra before it, SpringSource had unbounded potential to shake up the application server and development market.

Astute observers will notice that the operating system, Red Hat’s core competence, becomes increasingly less relevant in this world. Vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and others have less to fear from this threat, because they’re already building high-value solutions above the operating system.

Red Hat is, of course, taking a leadership role in virtualization and increasingly cloud computing. But it will need to quickly move beyond its dependence on its operating system business to sell a larger, strategic story or it faces the prospect of being an excellent, limited basic infrastructure vendor.

Red Hat doesn’t. Red Hat is exposed by this VMware and SpringSource combination. It needs to become more aggressive.

Second, SpringSource’s ubiquitous Spring Framework already threatened Red Hat’s booming JBoss business. But add VMware’s leading virtualization technology and suddenly Red Hat is under siege by a highly credible and disruptive competitor that could well outflank it.

First, with every acquisition of a leading open-source company by anyone other than Red Hat, Red Hat becomes more and more isolated. Other companies are integrating open source into their business strategies. Red Hat’s differentiation as “the” open source company doesn’t have much of a shelf life left.

The SpringSource + VMware vision

I’ve been writing a lot lately about SpringSource, largely because it has demonstrated a big vision (nothing less than the redefinition of the application server and an end-to-end application story), and so I wasn’t terribly surprised today to see VMware buy SpringSource for $420 million. On roughly $20 million in sales, much of that services, it’s a rich valuation, but one that is absolutely deserved given SpringSource’s potential.

Johnson describes the offering:

Happy as Fenton is with the SpringSource acquisition, I wonder if he feels the same as he did about Zimbra. So much money left on the table.

(Credit:
SpringSource)

But in denying the rumors, Bearden, COO at SpringSource, suggested that given “one more year…(SpringSource) will be bigger than MySQL,” acquired by Sun for $1 billion.

Indeed, I found out about the SpringSource acquisition back in July, apparently even before formal discussions started between the companies (due to a leaky source at VMware). SpringSource CEO Rob Bearden denied the existence of acquisition discussions between the two companies and Rod Johnson, the company’s founder and CEO, was on vacation at the time.

I remember talking to Peter Fenton, partner with Benchmark Capital and an investor in both SpringSource and Zimbra. He indicated that the firm had made tremendous efforts to keep Zimbra from selling to Yahoo as it still had so much potential to build toward an even bigger valuation.

Here’s what it looks like:

I think Bearden was right. The company’s valuation has been soaring due to efficiently run operations (Bearden) and a big vision for the company’s prospects (Johnson and others). It was only a matter of time before it IPO’d or was acquired.

I had hoped, however, that Red Hat would complement its JBoss business with SpringSource, but it’s not to be, and this doesn’t bode well for Red Hat, on two counts.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a platform as a service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

Google continues to lay the groundwork for the stable version of Chrome on other operating systems, too. Mac users of the dev build, which has been updated to version 3.0.197.12 for them, now get extensions enabled by default. Linux users, meanwhile, should no longer find Chrome crashing when reading their Gmail.

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Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Jump lists in Windows 7 for Internet Explorer 8 (left) and Google Chrome 3.0.197.11 (right).

The jump list, accessible by right-clicking on the Chrome taskbar icon or by holding down the left mouse button and dragging, mimics the Internet Explorer jump list. What IE calls “Frequent”, Chrome labels “Most Visited Sites”, but both merely show your most frequently visited Web sites. Both lists of URLs are configurable, so you can remove sites from the list.

The developer’s build of Chrome can be downloaded directly or enabled using the Chrome Channel Changer.

Google Chrome fans who live on the edge and use the developer’s build now get access to one of the best features in Windows 7. Browser jump-list access had previously been limited only to Internet Explorer, but Chrome version 3.0.197.11 supports it.

Below the frequency list is a short list of tasks. Chrome again copies IE here, offering a quick start link to open a new private browsing window. Where IE offers a link to open a new tab, though, Chrome curiously offers a link to open a new browsing window.

Power7 will be used in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications “Blue Waters” supercomputer, the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications, according to the NCSA. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

On Tuesday, IBM will give a presentation on its next-generation server chip, the Power7. IBM documentation describes the chip as having up to eight cores. A dual-chip module holds two processors for a total of 16 cores, according to IBM.

Each core has a rated performance of 32 gigaflops, providing 256 gigaflops per processor–one of the fastest chips to date based on this scientific-centric performance benchmark.

Intel will also discuss Moorestown, an upcoming version of the Atom processor targeted at mobile Internet devices and smartphones. Intel will also give a presentation entitled “Understanding the Intel Next Generation Microarchitectures (Nehalem and Westmere) transitioning into the Mainstream.”

Other chips to be described at the conference include the Sparc64 VIIIfx: Fujitsu’s new 8-core processor for Peta scale computing. Sun will discuss its “next-generation multi-threaded processor Rainbow Falls” and AMD will spell out its Magny Cours processor, 12-core chip.

The Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif this week is focusing on high-end chips for servers and scientific computers, with IBM’s upcoming Power7 as a standout.

Power7 “will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM. The design includes extensive research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments,” according to the NCSA.

Intel will present a paper on its upcoming Nehalem server processor.

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PayPal)

Of course, PayPal being PayPal there is a cost to this service. PayPal takes a $1 cut for every ATM withdrawal, which comes on top of any ATM fee considering the card is not affiliated with any banks. There are also the typical PayPal percentage fees for using that debit card outside of the U.S. either on purchases or trips to the ATM. For things like online purchases, or in-store purchases, there are no fees or limits though. There also aren’t any sign up fees, load card fees, or annual fees.

The other design behind the card, and one that goes far beyond tracking beer money spending, is to create an ecosystem of PayPal users that become acclimated to handling their finances within the service’s confines. Considering parent-child money transfers may happen long after college attendance is complete, PayPal has incentive to get both parties used to dealing with its system.

(Credit:
CNET )

A good example of this is that these students will one day have the option to “graduate” to having their own full PayPal accounts that they manage on their own and that includes a complete history of transactions they made when they were in school. Don Fotsch, who is PayPal’s VP of user experience and design, told me that you cannot currently do this–but that it would be worked in by the time some of the early users reached that point. PayPal will also be working on a way to let students integrate any outside income they’re getting from an after or during school job to be able to continue using that debit card on other purchases.

The system has more of an allure for parents though. It’s easier for them to dole out cash and track where it goes. In other words, your kid can have the $20 they said they needed for gas money, but if it ends up being for the late-night beer run, you’re going to know about it.

PayPal on Tuesday is introducing a new service for parents with kids who are in high school or college. Called Student Accounts, it centers on the use of a special PayPal-branded Mastercard debit card that’s tied to a parent’s PayPal accounts. The parent acts as the provider and can funnel money in whenever they feel like it at predetermined dates, or–at what will most-frequently happen–the behest of their kids.

Subaccount pages let parents monitor activity, set permissions, and make new transfers.

As Fotsche explained to me, this system worked out great for him when his daughter needed to spend an extra $10 on a checked bag at the airport. But parents could also just set up one of these cards for their kids as a real emergency credit card and one they wouldn’t have to worry as much about if it were stolen since it couldn’t be maxed out. And even if some parents do end up setting up one of these cards for such a purpose, that’s two users already in PayPal’s pocket.

Some of the perks include no overdraft fees and the use of a debit card that’s not tied to a particular bank account, meaning the balance can come from a variety of sources.

One thing that makes the service really neat is that if the child runs out of money, they can send a text to PayPal to request more. The parent then gets a text message from PayPal asking if they want to transfer the money and can reply with a simple yes or no. The money is then piped into the account within two minutes.

I know what you’re thinking. We’re both thinking the same thing.

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who returned to earth Friday, had been on the International Space Station since March. And, well, I don’t know quite how I am to put this, but he didn’t change his underwear for a month.

Not even in the the darkest, most slovenly days of our student youth did we wear the same pair of knickers for 30 days. Around seven days was our limit. Then we’d at least manage a hand wash in a sink.

I know you’ll be wondering what astronauts normally do with their soiled undies. Firstly, they take them off. Then they pack them up with the trash, which they shoot into outer space on human-less Russian cargo ships. On the way, the dirty undies are cremated.

But I am gravely concerned about an experiment that has been going on up there in space.

I know that there was a lady astronaut a little while ago who wore diapers on a long car journey, but this is surely couture from another realm.

Which makes two pulsating thoughts thud around my cranium.

Will we only have two pairs in the drawer one day? Or even one?

Well, now, in polite society one doesn’t normally comment when a fellow worker suffers something of a digestional malfunction, so how can Wakata be sure that his fellow astronauts weren’t furtively making sniffy remarks about certain odors emanating from his person?

One: what if the anti-static, flame-resistant, odor-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent qualities didn’t work so well? Especially the last two. What effects might imperfect performance have on poor Mr. Wakata’s inner well-being?

(Credit: CC Mike52ad/Flickr)

I know robots will soon be ordering us around like wait staff at the Ritz.

But here’s the thing with Wakata’s undergarments: the Japanese space agency, Jaxa, which designed them, has no firm idea just how well they performed their task.

This is quite understandable. I rarely talk about my underwear to my clients. Not even my underwear clients. However, wasn’t just the occasional merest stink caused by this novel eco-friendly fashion show?

“I wore it for about a month and my station crew members never complained, so I think the experiment went fine,” he said.

I know science thinks it can do everything.

The London Times quoted Wakata as saying, pre-landing: “I haven’t talked about this underwear to my crew members.”

And two, I must do the washing.

But here was the intrepid Wakata, prepared for the sake of all our futures to don anti-static, flame-resistant, odor-eating, bacteria-killing, water-absorbent underpants. Yes, water-absorbent.