TwitterWhere is the latest Twitter mash-up to come out the wildfires in San Diego California, and while it has uses far beyond that, it’s fairly obvious that tracking the fires was at least partially the impetus for the new service.

TwitterWhere does what it sounds like it does — enter a location (by city, state or postal code) and a radius and TwitterWhere will track all the tweets coming from that region. You can then add the resulting RSS feed to your reader for quick access.

There’s also an XML feed that mimic the public timeline on Twitter if you’d like to take the data from TwitterWhere and do something further with it.

It’s not as focused as using the tracking feature we mentioned the other day, but it doesn’t require other users to specify a topic either. As you would expect, only public Tweets with valid geo location data are included in the feed.

TwitterWhere is the brain child of developer Matt King and lives on his server, but so far it seem to be holding up to the traffic. There appears to be an alternate domain setup here, with support for OpenID logins, but I wasn’t able to get it working.

via Read/Write Web, photo from NASA

See Also:

• California Fire Followers Set Twitter Ablaze
• Twitter Now Offers Global Alerts
• 8 Cool Twitter Tools
• Twitter Moves To Your Mobile Browser

The Times Online is reporting that Burma’s ruling military dictatorship is trying to seize United Nations computers, which contain information about opposition activists. The hard drives reportedly contain information that could help the junta identify and detain opposition leaders and bloggers who have been reporting on the brutal repression by government forces in Burma.

Many of the images and video of the tens of thousands of monks parading through Rangoon and the subsequent beatings and round-ups have come from e-mails and blog posts by brave Burmese citizens, many of whom have been forced into hiding as a result.

The Times writes:

Some of the demonstrators have reportedly been arrested after being identified in footage of the rallies. The junta is going after the UN, in the belief that its officials allowed images to be transmitted through their own internet links — channelled via satellite phones and therefore less vulnerable to interference by the authorities.

“It’s part of this systematic, repressive response to the demonstrations,” said a Western diplomat in Rangoon. “We’ve seen them focus on people who directly participated in the demonstrations by picking them up through the videos Then they’ve arrested people with cameras containing images of the demos. And now they’re trying to track down the means that were used to send them out.”

But the images and video clips have made their way to mainstream media sites and into stories that have drawn condemnation from governments across the globe. Last weekend demonstrations were held in Sydney, London, Washington and around the world with protesters denouncing the Burmese regime.

So far the military has not actually raided the U.N. headquarters. Military officials reportedly showed up at U.N. headquarters requesting the hard drives and other data, which U.N. officials refused to hand over. The dictatorship then filed a formal request asking for information about the U.N.’s satellite set up in Rangoon.

It’s unclear exactly what data is on the U.N. hard drives, but one likes to think they would be using some sort of encryption and hopefully an anonymizing service for the internet connections. Unfortunately, if the U.N.’s grasp of tech is anything like that of the U.S. government, it probably has the data stored in cleartext.

[Photo credit]

Carnegie Mellon University, the distinguished birthplace of most cutting edge robotics, one time study hall of mathematician John Nash and host to an undergraduate Andy Warhol, is also the birthplace of a somewhat more suspect invention: the smiley.

Love it or hate it, the smiley is well embedded into our cultural syntax at this point and today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first appearance. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says he was the first to use the now ubiquitous keystrokes that gave birth to a whole range of emoticons.

Fahlman posted the first emoticon Sept. 19, 1982 in answer to a discussion about the limits of humor in online test and how users could denote comments meant to be taken lightly. Despite the protests of many an English professor, who claim (quite correctly) that the limits of humor in text are the result of poor writing skills, emoticons are here to stay.

For the record Fahlman is open to the idea that he didn’t invent the emoticon, though he does claim that he has never seen hard evidence that the sequence was in use before his posting. If you happen to know different head over to Fahlman’s page and set him straight.

[via Slashdot, photo credit Gene J. Puskar / AP]

Google’s privacy chief, Peter Fleischer, has called on the U.N. to help set up global privacy standards for the future of the internet. Speaking just before a UN agency conference, Mr Fleischer said, “Three quarters of the countries in the world have no privacy regimes at all and among those that do have laws, many of them were largely adopted before the rise of the internet.”

Google says that, because vast amounts of personal data are regularly sent around the globe electronically, we need some sort of privacy framework to govern those transactions. The BBC quotes Mr Fleischer as saying, “every time a person uses a credit card their information may cross six or seven national boundaries.”

I’m sure that the irony of Google calling for worldwide privacy rules is not lost on Compiler readers. The search giant has been under fire in recent months for its own privacy policies. Although Google has made some changes to how it stores user data, many still think it has a long way to go; one report characterized Google as outright hostile to privacy concerns.

But Google’s desire for international guidelines might in fact have something to do with its own privacy guidelines. Google is in the difficult position of having to enact different privacy standards according to local laws. International guidelines would help untangle the company’s snarl of privacy statements.

When he addressed the Strasbourg Unesco conference, Mr Fleischer called for countries to adopt principles similar to those agreed by some Asia-Pacific nations. The APEC guidelines have nine principles that aim to protect the individual and safeguard data collection and have been accepted by countries ranging from Australia to Vietnam.

But the APEC guidelines have also been criticized repeatedly in the past and may not in fact offer much in the way of privacy protection for consumers.

[Photo credit]

See Also:

• Privacy Group Claims Google Has An "Entrenched Hostility to Privacy"
• Unlike Google, Ask.com To Offer Real Privacy Controls
• New Google Search Cookie Policy Changes Nothing
• Microsoft And Ask.com Call For Increased User Privacy

Apple’s announcement that it would begin selling ringtones through the iTunes Store has kicked off quite a debate over ringtones. New York Times columnist David Pogue recently asked his readers to explain to them why the heck anyone would want to pay for ringtones and got back some interesting answers — no one wants to.

So why are we paying for ringtones? Well, if you read the Wired How To Wiki on the subject, hopefully you’re not, but if you are, here’s a thought from copyright attorney Nilay Patel: You’re a sucker.

Well, actually Patel doesn’t say that, he merely points out that there’s no legal basis whatsoever for charging for ringtones.

In fact, the dreaded RIAA made sure that was the case by successfully arguing, as Patel says, “since making a ringtone doesn’t count as a derivative work, you’re not infringing any copyrights. Just don’t sell or distribute anything, and you should be fine.”

The reason the RIAA wanted that decision was because it wanted to collect royalties from those who sell ringtones, without giving any money back to the artists who created the songs. In order to set that up, the RIAA had to first prove ringtones were not derivative works, and a judge agreed with them.

The only thing I can conclude from this is that turning around and paying for ringtones makes us all suckers.

John Gruber has a great piece on Daring Fireball where he nicely sums up how we came to have a multi-billion dollar industry surrounding ringtones. In a word: marketing.

The whole ringtones racket is predicated on the notion that ringtones are something different than songs. This notion is bullshit. You don’t turn songs into ringtones; you treat them as ringtones. They’re not even a different file format. It’s just a different context for playing the same song on the same device.

This false notion that ringtones are something in and of themselves is an anachronism, an artifact dating back to the time when mobile phones existed in their own ecosystem, wholly separate from the PC or the Internet. There was no way to transfer songs from your computer to your phone, because phones didn’t support USB or Bluetooth. Back then, if you wanted new ringtones, the only way to get them onto your phone was through your mobile service provider. And because people did want them, and there was no other way to get them, the mobile providers were able to charge exorbitantly high prices for them.

…

The distinction between ringtones and songs is an artificial marketing construct. It is a misconception, albeit a widely held one, that there is any foundation in copyright law for this, i.e. that an honest consumer is obligated to pay for ringtones separately from “regular” songs for some legal reason. Not so.

So stop being a sucker. Head over to the Wired How To Wiki and get to it. One caveat: Apple’s Terms of Service for the iTunes store prevent you from re-using protected songs as ringtones, but so long as you only use songs you’ve ripped from a CD you’re probably fine.

See Also:

• Rogue Amoeba Automates IPhone Ringtone Hack
• ITunes: Now With Ringtones
• IPhone Hacks: Add Custom Ringtones Via An Intel Mac
• Create Ringtones The Open Source Way
• ITunes Update Overwrites Custom Ringtones

In a move that might surprise some, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems announced a partnership yesterday that will make Sun a Windows Server Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), selling x64-based servers that come bundled with Windows Server 2003.

Other key details of the announcement include both companies pledging better interoperability between Windows and Sun x64 systems. Part of that project will be the construction of a “Interoperability Center” at the Redmond campus.

According to the press release, the new center will act as a working lab for Windows on Sun development, “including joint Sun/Microsoft solutions in areas such as databases, e-mail and messaging, virtualization, and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) support.”

While the partnership between the two is not without some precedent, it still strikes us as slightly odd to see a company that vowed to to bring down Microsoft, turn into a manufacturer of Windows servers — if you can’t beat ‘em….

Check out Epicenter’s coverage for more details about the announcement.

Mark your calendar, this Saturday, September 15th, is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The goal is to educate the public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS software.

The Software Freedom International organization has set up a website which coordinates SFD, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but the bulk of the work is done by (who else?) volunteer teams organizing local SFD events in their own communities around the world.

One of the SFI’s main goals is to foster a general understanding of software freedom, and encourage adoption of free software and open standards, and, as always, the free here means both free as in beer and free as in “libre.”

If you’d like to give something back to the FOSS community, or just want to support Software Freedom Day, check out the SFI’s listing of events in your area. And, at the very least, raise a glass to all the hardworking FOSS developers this weekend.

See Also:

• Linux Founder Answers Questions From The Linux User Community
• Open or Closed? Jimmy Wales Discusses the Future of Search
• GPL Adding To Open Source License Confusion
• Open Source Bites Back

The music industry versus the internet is heading into round ten million. In the left corner, Universal Music Group, a struggling, archaic distribution service is trying to get a foothold in the new online ring. In the right corner, new media, user-generated online video distributor Veoh isn’t looking worried.

Veoh opened the bout last month with a preemptive swing, but now Universal has decided to file a lawsuit against the video sharing site claiming that Veoh “follows in the ignominious footsteps of other recent mass infringers such as Napster, Aimster, KaZaA, and Morpheus, engaging in high-tech theft in the name of ‘sharing.’”

This fight looks a lot like the one down the hall where Google And Viacom are duking it out in another ring. Presumably Universal decided to pick on a smaller site because Viacom has already stolen all the thunder that comes from taking on the big boys.

Veoh has taken the punch, but doesn’t look to be not backing down. Veoh previously issued a statement saying that it “derives no financial benefit from the availability of allegedly infringing material on its system.”

Veoh claims that it “lacks the ability and right to directly supervise the content provided by the 85,000 video publishers that frequent and populate its site and utilize its software.”

Interesting Universal has never filed a DMCA copyright notice with Veoh and more than likely is simply trying to drive the site out of business, which doesn’t look like it’s going to work.

Be sure to join us later this week for round 1,000,000,001. Featuring the same old players suing whichever new site is hot.

[via Ars Technica]

In case you haven’t seen it, Wired News ran a story this morning in which David Kravets sits down with the most hated man in technology — CEO and president of SCO Group, Darl McBride — to talk about the recent court decision against SCO.

On the outside chance you’ve been on an interstellar journey for the last ten years here’s the background: SCO has been fighting it out with Novell over the rights to Unix (and consequently large portions of Linux, according to SCO) for some time now. The majority of the dispute revolves around the wording of the purchase, which according to McBride, says at one point that SCO is purchasing “all right, title and interest in the Unix operating system,” but then later says “excluding copyrights and patents.”

McBride and SCO tout the most liberal interpretation of the former passage and are suing over the later, but a Utah judge recently ruled that SCO did not own Unix copyrights outright. However, McBride tells Wired News that the ruling also says “copyrights of Unix up to 1995 are owned by Novell. (But) any of the copyrights developed by SCO after 1995 are owned by SCO.”

It’s an interesting read if you’ve been following the case and it gives a look a face behind the name that Linux users everywhere love to drag through the mud.

If it wasn’t a household name already, YouTube’s contribution to the Democratic debates will prove the tipping point. Hosted by Anderson Cooper, last night’s televised debate featuring questions from YouTube users brought the popular website into the living room.

With questioners ranging from a talking snowman to a man strumming a guitar, the users of YouTube proved once again that the masses are, if nothing else, more unpredictable than your typical debate moderator.

As for the candidates, they managed to dodge questions, brush off pointed inquires for position statements and generally skate by on vague promises with the same aplomb they’ve mastered in more typical debates.

Highlight reels follow.