March 2010

Mobile services like Loopt and Google's Latitude have promoted the notion of constantly beaming your location to a map that is visible to a network of friends — an idea that is not for everybody. But now there is a different approach, one that is being popularized by Foursquare. After firing up the Foursquare application on their phones, users see a list of nearby bars, restaurants and other places, select their location and "check in," sending an alert to friends using the service. This model, which may be more attractive than tracking because it gives people more choice in revealing their locations, is gathering speed in the Internet industry. Yelp, the popular site that compiles reviews of restaurants and other businesses, recently added a check-in feature to its cellphone application. And Facebook is expected to take a similar approach when it introduces location features to its 400 million users in coming months. If checking in goes mainstream, it could give a lift to mobile advertising, which is now just a tiny percentage of overall spending on online ads.

To the consternation of Internet companies and civil liberties groups, lawmakers in Britain are seeking to punish those who illegally copy music. The British proposal is set to be taken up by the House of Commons on Monday.

Under an amendment to the bill in the House of Lords this month, courts would be empowered to order Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that provide pirated movies, music and other media content. Supporters of the amendment say it would finally give copyright holders the tools to tackle the piracy problem at the supply and demand levels, after more than a decade of largely futile efforts. But critics of the bill say it raises the threat of censorship on the Internet, and could undermine the development of Britain's digital economy. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns against restrictions on the Internet, said the bill contained unusually broad scope for abuse. Individuals or companies, he said, may try to use it to suppress any Web content they find objectionable, under the pretext of protecting their copyright.

The Obama administration's first year of efforts to improve access to government information has yielded mixed results, according to an audit of Freedom of Information Act requests set to be released Monday.

The report by the National Security Archive at George Washington University comes at the start of Sunshine Week, the annual attempt by federal groups and news organizations to promote better access to government information. President Obama issued new guidelines on government transparency on his first full day of office, ordering agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor" of FOIA requests and laying the groundwork for the eventual release of reams of previously undisclosed government information on the Internet. But less than a third of the 90 federal agencies that process requests for information have significantly changed their practices since that initial order, the report said.

The departments of Agriculture and Justice, the Office of Management and Budget and the Small Business Administration earned especially high marks for completely or partly fulfilling more requests and denying fewer of them during fiscal 2009. The departments of State, Transportation and Treasury, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have fulfilled fewer requests and denied more of them in the same time period.

AT&T will unveil today a suite of mostly Web-based services that it says will make it possible for consumers to use inexpensive new cellphones to handle tasks mostly associated with higher-price smartphones.

The suite includes an address book that will store information remotely. There's a messaging service that enables users to reply to a single person or as many as 10 contacts. AT&T also will make it easy for subscribers to transfer photos and videos from their phones to a home PC, other people's phones and social-networking sites such as Facebook. The changes are part of "a slow, subtle, but tectonic shift (in wireless phones) that AT&T is driving," says analyst John Jackson of market research firm CCS Insight. "It's an experiment in creating stickiness and brand loyalty around AT&T instead of iPhone or Google. It's questionable whether it's a viable long-term strategy. But it's an appropriate thing for AT&T to try." The company hopes to drive a new category of phone that it calls the Quick Messaging Device.