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Wandering around FARK, I happened upon a story titled “Ten major news stories the media is ignoring” from MarketWatch.com. Here are the stories they have picked…

• The Feds and the media muddy the debate over Internet freedom
• Halliburton charged with selling nuclear technology to Iran
• World oceans in extreme danger
• Hunger and homelessness increasing in the United States
• High-tech genocide in Congo
• Federal whistleblower protection in jeopardy
• U.S. operatives torture detainees to death in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Pentagon exempt from Freedom of Information Act
• World Bank funds Israel-Palestine wall
• Expanded air war in Iraq kills more civilians

I’m not so sure the press is under-reporting the torture of detainees, or the civilian deaths in Iraq. I agree with the other ones, especially the one about Internet freedom and Halliburton selling nuclear technology to Iran. Each deserves more coverage than, say, some wacko that claimed to have murdered Jon Benet Ramsey.

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If you pay any attention at all to tech industry news, or for that matter CNN, you would have heard about the large amount of search data AOL released in an effort to help researchers and marketers.

Of course without the major news outlets having to worry about a murder that happened 10 years ago, this story might have got more coverage. It did get enough press to cause some heads to roll over at AOL. As you can imagine, the stock price of Time Warner (TWX) took a brief hit, but it’s just about back up to the level it was at before the news hit the wire.

If anything, I hope news like this helps make the general public aware of privacy issues. I don’t think enough people understand the amount of data that is available to companies, and on the web in general. Particulary annoying to me are the nasty/confusing/horrible privacy policies many companies have. It’s very difficult to prevent the information you provide to them from being sold to another party without your knowledge. Tricks range from saying you have to renew your “opt-out” designation, or mailing a new policy to you periodically, thus forcing you to renew the “opt-out,” or just plain telling you that they will use your information within their “related” companies.

Personally, I’d like to see legislation preventing companies from selling/utilizing your address for any purposes not directed by you. In other words, a consumer would be automatically “opted-out” of any marketing effort or sale of their information. Companies can complain all they want about this, but frankly, it’s in the best interest of consumers for these types of policies or laws to exist.

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Everyone knows who Neil Armstrong is. Maybe that’s a bad assumption to make, but at least everyone in the USA knows who Neil Armstrong is. Ok, maybe that was an even worse assumption, considering the state of our public education system. Anyway, it seems that our buddies over at NASA might have lost the tapes that recorded the famous first steps Mr. Armstrong took on the moon.

It’s funny, in a serious way, because this type of thing is exactly what my job is trying to prove people need to have control over. My clients will put procedures in place to make sure they don’t lose backup tapes and can recover the information from a tape when needed. We audit those procedures to make sure the procedures they say are in place are actually, in fact, working.

I get this strange feeling that NASA might not do so well if we tried to audit their ability to know where things are and if they can get them back. Kinda makes you wonder if they should send people into space, doesn’t it?

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For those that don’t pay attention to the web as closely as I do, you may not have heard of newsvine. Essentially, it’s a new type of news site. It combines some features of digg, Google News, and other great news sites. Stories can be promoted, commented on, and there’s also the feature that lets users create and post their own stories for the community to review.

Right now, the community is only open by invitiation, which I was able to obtain through the generosity of one Daniel Sale. I don’t know if I have invites to give out yet, but will update if I do.

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Well, it looks like the folks over at digg have a little competition now! A new site, Shoutwire, went live in November. It runs under the same premise as digg, but contains news articles about many topics, not just tech-related ones. Basically, users submit stories, and the community votes them to the front page in the form of “shouts.”

There is a great interview with one of the site’s founders here. I actually found it through the story submitted to digg about Shoutwire. It was quite interesting to watch the thread grow, and the resulting effect over on Shoutwire. I wish I had taken a couple screenshots, because the users at digg basically spammed the article base with horrible accusations and useless junk. Fortunately, the Shoutwire admins got it under control and back to normal.

I’m looking forward to reading news from Shoutwire, and submitting stories to it!

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