Week In Review: Will Bin Laden’s Porn Stash Distract Us From Facebook’s Snafu?

 

Anybody surprised?  Anybody?

If you didn’t read about it earlier, Reuters is reporting a porn stash was found at Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.  The stash was described as “fairly extensive” and included “modern, electronically recorded video”.  So apparently it’s all “death to America” but there’s an exception for technology which makes porn possible and a culture where murdering a woman in your family for being perceived as possibly sexually active is considered, you know, wrong.

Facebook and Google are beefing.

Earlier this week USA Today reported that public relations firm Burson-Marsteller was trying to convince journalists to write anti-Google stories.  At that time, it wasn’t known who was paying the PR firm to plant negative stories.  Facebook has now admitted they were financing the PR firm.  Their excuses were that they think Google may be invading privacy in their own social networking feature Social Circle (oh the irony) and that Google is attempting to use Facebook data for Social Circle.  It appears Facebook attempted to whip up paranoia about Social Circle to undermine the competition.  They may have a good reason to worry: last month Google CEO Larry Page sent a memo letting employees know 25% of everyone’s bonus this year will depend on how well Google does at social networking.

Burson-Marsteller is a relatively-respected firm which has represented several Fortune 500 companies in their nearly 60-year history, but the two Burson-Marsteller execs caught up in the scandal — Jim Goldman and John Mercurio — are going to be “retrained” rather than fired.  Jim Goldman is a former CNBC tech reporter, and John Mercurio used to be a political writer for the National Journal.  One of the two (Goldman) majored in “Ethics in Political Journalism and Political Philosophy”.  Seriously?

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  • Pornography found in bin Laden hideout (Reuters)
  • The Best Of Twitter’s #BinLadenPornTitles Hashtag (Uproxx)
  • 20 #osamaporn tweets (Buzzfeed)
  • Facebook caught hiring a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google. (TheDailyBeast)
  • The two PR flacks caught up in the Facebook scandal are going to be “retrained” instead of fired, and Gizmodo hilariously points out that one of the two men was an Ethics major in college. (SAI)

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  • Researchers in China and Hong Kong claim using Facebook can actually improve a student’s grades, partly because connecting with other students reduces dropout rates and also because students are using Facebook to create study groups and connect with professors. (GOOD, picture via)
  • Anti-piracy legislation introduced into the Senate would give the government the authority to forbid anyone — including search engines — from linking to a website accused of copyright infringement and forbid advertising firms from working with the accused website. Another bill introduced the same day, if passed, would make streaming illegal content a federal felony, meaning you could serve more than a year in prison and lose all your voting rights for watching an old movie you didn’t pay for. So much for the Eighth Amendment. (ArsTechnica, CNET)
  • LimeWire has agreed to pay the RIAA $105 million, which works out to $10,808 per song brought in as evidence (the maximum penalty is $150,000 per song).  Unfortunately, none of the money will go to the artists who wrote those songs; hopefully they were all Black Eyed Peas songs so we don’t have to feel bad about that. (TorrentFreak)

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  • A new study found the amount of software piracy occurring last year hit a new record high of an estimated $59 billion, a 14% increase since 2009 and a 100% increase since 2003. I swear I photoshopped the banner picture with legally-obtained software, and hopefully they won’t revoke my user license for making it. (CNET)
  • No wonder Facebook is gunning for Google so hard: in a pew research study, 40% of the traffic to the top 25 news sites was coming from outside referrals. 30% of all referrals were from Google, but Facebook was the second or third largest referrer to all 25 sites. Meanwhile, Twitter barely registered on the list, probably because it has 200 million accounts to Facebook’s 500+ million, and many of Twitter’s user names are inactive. (via TNW, graphs at Mashable)

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