Corporations & Media

Activist Post | The farmers are concerned that Monsanto’s aggressive agenda to genetically alter the planet will ultimately result in a severe threat to the organic integrity of farms worldwide. It is not hard to believe that many ‘organic’ farms have already been contaminated with GMO crops, as nearly 93% of soybeans are now admittedly genetically modified.

Huffington Post | Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Douglas Carnahan ruled Wednesday that the automaker misled Heather Peters about the potential fuel economy of her hybrid car and awarded her $9,867 – much more than the couple hundred dollars cash that a proposed class-action settlement is offering.

Huffington Post | In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Initial reports from sources suggested that an ABC News camera was also prevented from taping the hearing; ABC has since denied that they sent a crew to the hearing.

Mashable | Once you’ve read this infographic about SOPA, you might become angry, too. That’s because when you see the series of technological events that has led up to the present day, you’ll start realizing that almost every innovation that came along has been seen by the motion picture industry as a threat to its existence.

Hollywood Reporter | Megaupload hasn't experienced much success thus far in pressing claims that UMG misused its copyrights by removing the video, which featured many stars purportedly endorsing Megaupload. But the lawsuit did reveal something that wasn't known -- YouTube had granted UMG the powers to remove videos from the video-sharing website at will, "based on a number of contractually specified criteria."

Business Insider | Andrew Restuccia of The Hill is reporting that Ener1, a battery company that President Obama referenced in his State of The Union Speech on Tuesday as an example of successful energy investments, has just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Atlantic | It has joined with five other businesses (Vulcan, NIKE, RealNetworks, Group Health Cooperative, and Concur) to support bills that would legalize gay marriage in Washington state, where Microsoft is based. The letter to Governor Chris Gregoire was brief. In its entirety it reads, "We write you today to show the support of our respective companies for SB 6239 and HB 2516 recognizing marriage equality for same-sex couples." But Microsoft elaborated on why it was supporting the bills on its official blog. There, Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith writes:

Reuters | Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, founder Jimmy Wales announced on Monday.  In doing so, Wikipedia joins a long list of web companies such as Reddit and Mozilla that are taking similar measures against the proposed legislation.

Russia Today | John Castle, the 76-year-old CEO of the Castle Harlan equity firm, could be facing charges after a waiter at the posh Palm Beach, Florida establishment Club Colette made claims that Castle went berserk after he brought him the check.

Slashdot.org | In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India's Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers and posted on the Net. The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices.

Press Release | Fortitude is a high concept performance video that expands reality to accommodate a crew of Ian Cooke clones as they perform the title track to Ian's new album Fortitude.  Big Blue Entertainment is the partnership of Tom Mares and Nick Walker in Denver, Colorado, specializing in all kinds of production from reality TV to high concept branding.

The Daily Beast | One of the nation’s highest-paid executives is sitting on a massive pile of stock options and enjoys a private jet wherever he goes. Gary Rivlin on John Hammergren, the 1 percenter you’ve never heard of.

Forbes.com | Consider a few key metrics.  Despite the disappearance of competitors including Circuit City, the company is losing market share. Its last earnings announcement disappointed investors.  In 2011, the company’s stock has lost 40% of its value.  Forward P/E is a mere 6.23 (industry average is 10.20).  Its market cap down to less than $9 billion.  Its average analyst rating, according to The Street.com, is a B-.

My Fox Tampa Bay | Allie Scott is a junior at Osceola High School. The 16 year old says it all started in the school parking lot last month when she parked her brother's car in another girl's spot. She was asked to move it, and when she did at the end of the day, the car had been scratched up with a key.

Don't Tread On Mike | You may have heard about the mass exodus of customers from GoDaddy due to their support of SOPA. You may have also heard that GoDaddy no longer supports SOPA. The problem is, only one of those things is true. While GoDaddy no longer publicly supports SOPA, that is just a PR move. They have not withdrawn official support for the bill, let alone actually come out in opposition to it. But it gets worse.

PR Newswire | Monsanto, a major biotech corporation responsible for genetically modifying many staple foods, has been given the Worst Company of 2011 Award for threatening both human health and the environment. The award was given by natural health information website NaturalSociety after thousands of readers voted Monsanto the worst company of 2011.

Rueters | Facebook is steamrolling forward. It now boasts 800 million active users. The company is reportedly preparting for an initial public offering. It’s laying plans to sell a Facebook phone, strengthening its presence on the mobile web. But Facebook’s plans may be hampered by a new backlash against the company’s efforts to get its users to share more of their lives online.

The Guardian | Mark Lewis, who has represented victims of phone hacking including the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, was one of the lawyers targeted.  The News of the World hired a specialist private investigator to run covert surveillance on two of the lawyers representing phone-hacking victims as part of an operation to put pressure on them to stop their work.

New York Times | The suspect, a 48-year-old man, is the sixth person to be arrested in Scotland Yard’s investigation into illegal payoffs by newspapers to police officers in the wake of the phone hacking scandal at The News of the World. He was arrested outside London “in connection with allegations of corruption,” the police said, and taken to a police station in southwest London for questioning.

Silenced No More | Boulder, Colorado passed by a 3-to-1 margin an amendment that says corporations are not people and money is not speech and 6 Senators introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Have corporations overplayed their hand – is the backlash now underway?

American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations | Go to any gathering, and you’ll find nearly every person carrying an iPhone or an iPad, despite the Apple Computer’s dismal record on labor practices. Apple executives must be laughing all the way to the bank — their Swiss bank, that is.

Mother Jones | Goldline International, the California precious metals retailer promoted by Glenn Beck and other radio hosts, was formally charged with 19 criminal counts—including grand theft by false pretenses, false advertising, and conspiracy—on Tuesday by the Santa Monica City Attorney's Office. The criminal complaint also implicates Goldline CEO Mark Albarian, along with two other company executives and two salespeople.

Courthouse News Service | AT&T Mobility faces another federal class action involving its iPhone and iPad services. This one claims that "AT&T's bills systematically overstate the amount of data used on each data transaction involving an iPhone or iPad account," and bills customers for data transactions even if they disable their phones and leave them untouched - as the plaintiff's experts did.

Janet is the de facto name for a small fleet of passenger aircraft operated by defense contractor EG&G. Their aircraft currently serve mostly the Nevada Test Site (most notably Area 51) from their terminal at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport. The origin of the word "Janet" is obscure and, while it is used as a radio callsign, it is not known whether the name is an official name, code word, or acronym.

KTVK AZFamily.com | Dr. Erin Carr-Jordan, a mother of four, started recording and posting videos of trashy playgrounds, and quickly built an international following.  Her lab tests, which revealed dangerous bacteria on the equipment, have been featured on network broadcasts and in major national newspapers.

Death and Taxes Magazine | In addition to speculation about a new Apple TV, Jobs told Barack Obama his economic policies would doom his presidency and accused Google of “grand theft” for developing an iPhone competitor, Isaacson’s tome includes Jobs’ fascinating recollection of a meeting with fellow businessman Rupert Murdoch.

LX News | Apple is threatening to sue a small, family run café in Bonn because they are of the opinion that their logo infringes on Apple’s trademark. The owner of the café Apfelkind, Christin Römer, has registered her logo as a trademark for the service and fashion industry in June in Munich. Now Apple is claiming in a cease and desist letter that there could be confusion between the small café in Bonn and their global entertainment brand.

Politico | With pay down and fewer jobs available, the Social Security Administration’s figures highlight one of the major issues of the Occupy Wall Street movement - widening income disparity, the Associated Press reported.

Tree Hugger | Who likes oil subsidies? Nobody! Nobody but the oil companies, that is. But as we know, these subsidies, which American taxpayers annually spend billions of dollars on, are extremely difficult to kill. But 35 US congressmen and women are going to try...

The New York Times | It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.

Torrent Freak | Anti-piracy outfit AiPlex Software made the news last year when their boss was quoted in the press admitting that his company launched DDoS attacks against several torrent sites. This confession resulted in an avalanche of negative PR and several retributive attacks from Anonymous. Today, a year later, AiPlex are attempting to erase these events from history by asking bloggers to take down their reports.

LA Times | Calling the phone-hacking scandal that led News Corp. to close its British News of the World tabloid and has led to government probes of the company both in England and the United States, a "failure of board stewardship," Institutional Shareholder Services said Monday that an overhaul was necessary. News Corp. is scheduled to hold its annual meeting on Oct. 21 in Los Angeles.

Courthouse News Service | The Federal Communications Commission will require all telephone service providers - including those using Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) - to provide GPS capable handsets for new subscribers, by 2018, to pinpoint the location of 911 calls.

Shown are direct links to prove Facebook is trying to track people...

Physorg | The lawsuit filed Friday in Washington's U.S. Court of Appeals contends the Federal Communications Commission overstepped its authority in setting its so-called "net neutrality" rules last year. The regulations are scheduled to go into effect in two months. They prohibit Internet service providers from discriminating against or giving special treatment to particular online services or content.

Cnet | The tracking, done with cookies on users' computers, has prompted criticism from lawmakers and now a lawsuit, while privacy groups and regulators in Ireland are concerned about a new sharing feature that automatically posts user activities to news feeds without users intentionally doing so.

CNN | Going by the name @CabinCr3w, the hackers blasted off a tweet that directed followers to the Pastebin website which lists Blankfein's age, education, recent addresses, and legal cases he has been involved in, as well as the emails and titles of more than eighty employees.

Deutsche Welle | Hugo Boss began his carrier as a simple tailor. After the First World War, he founded his own company at the age of 33 in the Swabian town of Metzingen. At that time it was just a small operation with around 30 employees, moderately successful but a long way away from the world-renowned fashion label it was to become.

Investment Watch | I find two aspects of this bill alarming.  The first is the scope and impact the new bill has, and secondly that it has all happened so quietly.  There has been VERY little media coverage, on a bill which promises to jeopardise the future food security of the country.

The Guardian | Qatar's government has replaced Wadah Khanfar, the director-general of the al-Jazeera satellite TV network, with a member of its own royal family – a sudden and dramatic move at a time of unprecedented turmoil across the Middle East.

MSNBC | A group of British phone-hacking victims plan to ask U.S. courts to look into possible "corrupt practices" at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., a lawyer said Friday. The move could broaden the scope of a scandal that has shaken the mogul's international media empire.

Torrent Freak | The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) is in the middle of a crisis after an anti-piracy company revealed that it had tracked several leaked movies on The Pirate Bay back to its servers. Desperate to deflect the accusations, today the SFI made a long statement. It turned out to be a perfect illustration that allegations of piracy based on an IP address and nothing else, simply must be backed up by something more solid.

Tech Dirt | Zacqary Adam Green points us to the rumor that Yahoo Mail, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that no one should be allowed to send any emails that merely mention the website http://OccupyWallSt.org. That's the website of the folks currently protesting in NY.

New York Times | A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday against a prominent Baltimore medical institute, accusing it of knowingly exposing black children as young as a year old to lead poisoning in the 1990s as part of a study exploring the hazards of lead paint.

BBC | Sony is preparing to ban gamers from the PlayStation Network (PSN) unless they waive the right to collectively sue it over future security breaches.  The firm has amended PSN's terms and conditions and users have to agree to them next time they log in.  The move comes months after a string of hacking attacks compromised over 100 million accounts of the PlayStation Network subscribers.

Reuters | Michael Bromwich, the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, told reporters at a congressional hearing the agency was preparing official notices for violations uncovered by a government probe of the spill.

New York Times | The Department of Justice and four states on Monday filed a multibillion-dollar fraud suit against the Education Management Corporation, the nation’s second-largest for-profit college company, charging that it was not eligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it had received from July 2003 through June 2011.

NY Daily News | "Everything was coming down all at once," Rendon told the Philadelphia television station. "I felt like the best thing that happened to me this whole entire year was that God gave me the blessing of being able to give my son the kidney."

Forbes | Five workers fired for complaining about their jobs on Facebook will go back to work after the National Labor Relations Board ruled in their favor, affirming workers can safely vent their frustrations about the workplace on social networks.

WBNG | Johnson City, NY (WBNG Binghamton) Some animals died in the flooding this week, trapped inside a pet store.  Petco admits that some animals died at the store off Harry L. Drive in Johnson City in the plaza next to Toys R Us. The area was under several feet of water.