BestBuy should be on the hook for damages and penalties related to identity theft linked to the lost laptop. Hard to add that up to $54M, though.

Raelyn Campbell seems to be VERY highly connected and if her contacts — maybe many with unlisted phone numbers — have been compromised, there is more to this story than is covered in the article.

Lost laptop? Sue for millions!

Is your laptop worth $54 million? Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C., is suing Richfield-based Best Buy for that amount after it lost her laptop computer while it was in for repairs.

Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday, filed a negligence lawsuit suit against the company in Washington Superior Court on Nov. 16, seeking fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.

Best Buy spokeswoman Nissa French said in an e-mail that Campbell “was offered and collected $1,110.35″ as well as “a $500 gift card for her inconvenience.”

According to Campbell’s blog at bestbuybadbuyboycott.blogspot.com, Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, just secured a $29.5 million B round of financing.

Automattic’s $1.2 million first round was secured in 2006. In this round, The New York Times joins their investors.

January 23, 2008
Times Company in Group Investing in Blog Publisher
By BRIAN STELTER

 Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company.

WordPress is open-source software used by bloggers to publish posts. Its chief competitors are Blogger (owned by Google) and TypePad (owned by the software company Six Apart).

Automattic received $1.1 million in financing about two years ago. Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures and Radar Partners were joined by the Times Company in the second round of financing.

Toni Schneider, the chief executive of Automattic, said the additional funds would provide the profitable company with a buffer as it invests in other services, including an antispam filter and an online-identity product.

The companies did not disclose the size of each firm’s investment, although the Times Company’s stake is the smallest.

The Times Company had previously maintained a business relationship with Automattic. The About.com guide site, which was purchased by the Times Company in 2005, is published using the WordPress platform. The New York Times has also produced more than 50 blogs using the platform.

Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the publishing technology at the foundation of WordPress and harness the platform’s ability to aggregate blog posts.

“As we’ve adopted blogging and started to treat it as a mainstream publishing platform, there are all sorts of things we might do going forward to improve our approach,” he said.

Citing a potential application of the technology, Mr. Schneider said blog posts from across the Internet could be featured alongside stories on The Times’s Web site.

A Møøse once bit my sister …

* Cell phone with MP3 ring-tone support
* CD or MP3 of the song
* Any method of transferring the ring tone from computer to phone (USB, Bluetooth, e-mail, instant message, etc.)
* Audio-editing software that allows export to MP3. If you don’t already have this, Audacity is a good open-source program you can download for free, and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. You’ll also need the LAME library for Windows, Mac or Linux. (LAME is a free downloadable MP3 codec that enables Audacity to encode to MP3.)
* About 20 minutes

Instructions:

If you’re creating your ring tone from a CD, rip the song you want as a WAV (Windows) or an AIFF file (Mac). Using iTunes, specify this type of ripping in File/Preferences/Advanced/Importing. It’s a good idea to specify a new ripping location, too, so the ripped song doesn’t end up lost in the rest of your collection. In iTunes, set the “rip to” folder in File/Preferences/Advanced/General.

If you’re creating your ring tone from an MP3, just copy that MP3 into a new folder so that your ring-tone editing won’t affect the version of the song in your digital music collection.

Once you have the song as a digital music file (whether WAV, AIFF or MP3), run your audio-editing software. I highly recommend Audacity for this task. It’s free, it’s open-source, it runs on all major platforms, it rocks. If you don’t plan to use it, skip the rest of this tutorial and consult your software documentation.

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Audacity converts — read on!

Before Audacity can export audio to the MP3 format your cell phone wants in a ring tone, you’ll need to download the LAME library. LAME is open-source MP3 audio-compression software that rates among the best anywhere for recording fidelity. It also claims a legal exemption from MP3 patent royalties, meaning it’s free, for now at least. Find the link for your operating system listed above on this page, and download LAME to a new folder on your computer (it will need to stay there for Audacity to access it for MP3 encoding).

Run Audacity, go to the Audacity/Preferences menu, and click the Find Library button near the bottom of the screen. Navigate to the LAME Library on your hard drive, and select it. I recommend setting your bit rate to 128 Kbps. You can choose a lower bit rate to save space on your phone, but you’ll get lower-quality sound.

In Audacity’s File menu, select Open and find the song you ripped for your ring tone.

You’ll see your song laid out from left to right. Click the cursor around until you find the section you want for your ring tone. You’re looking for a phrase of 10 to 15 seconds or so. Take a few passes at highlighting your future ring tone. Press the space bar to preview the selections. When you find the right one, you can export it as is — or you can personalize the ring tone with audio effects.

Audacity comes with several effects; to try them out, leave the ring tone selected in the Audacity window, and then select anything in the Effect menu.

I recommend trying the Echo and Phaser. Each has various settings to tweak. Adding these effects is a matter of taste, but I figure it adds a bit of spice to the ring tone and makes it more of an individual statement.

Creating a derivative work of a copyright song is technically illegal. I’m no lawyer, and this does not constitute legal advice, but I am fairly certain that one could successfully defend these highly unlikely charges on the grounds that creating — and not distributing — a ring tone from a legally purchased song is covered by the affirmative defense of fair use.

After you’re happy with whatever effects you’ve decided to use (the Edit/Undo function often comes in handy here), leave the ring tone selected in Audacity and choose File/Export Selection as MP3.

It’s time to transfer the MP3 ring tone onto your phone. The easiest way to do this is with Bluetooth, assuming you have already paired your computer and cell phone. If your phone came with a USB connection, use that; otherwise, try e-mailing or texting it as an attachment. Put the ring-tone file into the Audio folder if your phone has one, and then select the new ring tone in your Tools or Options menu.

10. Transformers - XBOX

9. iPhone “Hello”

8. Sony “Universe of Entertainment” PS3 Ad

7. Disturbia

6. Dell m1330 “Devo” Ad

5. Sony Bravia “Rabbits” Ad

4. Garmin Man Ad

3. Philips “Robot Skin” Ad

2. Zune “Academy of Dreams” Ad

1. The Bourne Ultimatum

Click to enlarge.

OK. Almost for real. It was cute. Here’s the original my wife found:

Click to enlarge.

Here’s Aaron’s poster concept for a related product:

Follow-up: Seems like the idea’s been done, before.

Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted! I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago

December 20, 2007 (Computerworld) — A Microsoft Web evangelist hinted yesterday that news of Internet Explorer 8’s development progress was disclosed months earlier than planned because Web developers recently stepped up criticism of the company’s support for standards.

The news of IE8’s ability to pass a widely used Web standards test also came just two weeks after Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates said he didn’t know why the company’s IE development team was keeping a tight lid on information about the next browser.

IE8, the next upgrade to Microsoft’s browser, passes the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test, according to Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group’s general manager. “On Wednesday, Dec. 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode,” Hachamovitch said in a post to Microsoft’s official IE blog yesterday. “While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards-compatibility that we’re committed to for this release.”

A week before IE8’s first Acid2 exam, Web standards advocate and blogger Molly Holzschlag had asked Gates about the lack of information coming out of the IE8 group. Gates’ answer: “I’ll have to ask [IE General Manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on. I mean, we’re not, there’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE.”

In his blog Wednesday, Hachamovitch seemed to take a shot at those who had criticized his team’s silence. “For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations,” said Hachamovitch. “We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. [But] now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.”

Posts placed on the IE blog last month drew disdain from a large number of users, many of whom identified themselves as Web developers frustrated with the lack of information about IE8’s support for standards and angry at the current IE7’s lack of support for those same standards.

Another Microsoft employee, Joshua Allen, essentially said that the timing of the IE8-Acid2 news was prompted by complaints from users and developers. Allen, an evangelist at Microsoft and one of the hosts for MIX Online, echoed Hachamovitch’s news about IE8’s progress, but said the news was intended for March 2008.

“I had hoped that we could keep the news secret until MIX08, but the masses were demanding information,” said Allen, who linked to an earlier Hachamovitch blog post that had attracted more than 580 comments, the majority of them negative.

MIX08 is the Microsoft-sponsored Web developer conference slated to run in Las Vegas March 5-7, 2008.

The comments attached to Hachamovitch’s Tuesday post, however, were generally supportive, although some users remained cautious. “Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted!” said a user going by the name David Lane. “Who would’ve thought. [But] I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago.”

I am not David Lane nor do I play him on TV. But it’s funny to restate his cogent point about their MSIE browser:

Well, slap me with a moldy turnip and color me flabbergasted! I just think it’s a sad thing that Microsoft is receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should’ve done five to seven years ago

Read the rest.

Learn about ACID2.

Image above from Turnip Family Secrets.

I’ve been with WordPress since it was b2. I’ve tinkered with Movable Type. I’ve agonized through MT’s compiles. I came to the conclusion about 18 months ago that few new blogs should go the route of MT over WP but that existing installs, especially professional sites, certainly didn’t need to do a tear-down.

WordPress is PHP-based and MT is PERL-based, if that matters to you or your tech staff. Background. I live eat and breathe MySQL databases and HTML and I haven’t needed to manipulate text much since my days doing pattern matching for an art museum back in the late 1980’s, so PHP is my preference.

The wisdom of MT going open-source is good for MT and good for its client base and good for all of us. It means that more people will be contributing plugins, more will be testing, and it will be come a more secure and robust product. Competition is good.

Prediction: 2008 will probably be a banner year for script-kiddies hammering MT political sites. If you’re running MT and you’ve got anything controversial, make sure your webmaster and your web host is up on security measures. If you’ve been running MT and are happy with it, make sure it’s current and there’s no reason to change. If you’re on the fence and need to develop something soon, I’d go with WordPress until the dust settles and the first few waves of script kiddie mischief have been managed by the MT folk.

No doubt, like the early days of the WordPerfect and Microsoft Word wars, there will soon be open source conversion utilities allowing your new site to be morphed into the latest superior open source content management system.

And let’s not kid ourselves… it’s far beyond blogging software now.

Students Must Carry And Pay For GPS-Based Cell Device reports this headline from Montclair State.

Here’s the money quote from the article:

“What it does is allow students to have an extra pair or group of people watching over them when they’re going from one location to another,” Montclair Police Department Chief Paul Cell said.

Going back as far as 2004, when PC World noted Privacy Watch: Soon, Your Cell Phone May Be Tracking You: GPS chips in handsets make cell phone tracking services a reality, you were warned that the chips in your phones may also be used to spy on you. More recently, this year, the more left-leaning PBS had a special entitled GPS Technology Helps Parents Track Teens.

I don’t know about you, but I am a big bearded guy between the ages of 20 and 50 who doesn’t mind being wanded at the airport. I’m more concerned about leaving my cell phone powered on and who might be tracking where I am when I am not aware of it.

What do you think? Comment.