Vadim Ponorovsky, the owner of the restaurant Paradou in trendy Park Slope Manhattan's meat-packing district, sent his employees an email in which he called them "lazy motherfuckers" because they failed to extract enough email addresses from their customers (he has a spam list and he makes it his servers' duty to get email addresses out of diners). Ponorovsky went on to call his employees "fucking lazy disrespectful assholes," "fucking children," and said, "Effective immediately, any server or host who fails to collect at least 20 emails per week, will be fined $100. Anyone failing to collect at least 20 emails for two weeks in a month will be fired immediately. No matter what. No matter who you are."

He also threatened to fire his entire staff, saying, "I have absolutely no respect for any of you," and "Go find another place to work."

And now, he's sent along a followup to the trade press, saying that this is just the way he talks, that "if you talked to anyone who ever worked for me, I could say without any sense of self-aggrandizement that they'd say I was the best boss they've worked for." In support of this he cites the fact that he's never missed payroll (e.g., he pays his employees the wages they earn), that he lets them work for him again after their vacations, and that they get to eat for free at the restaurant where they work.

He also declares himself to be a Reaganite and villifies anyone who disagrees with his treatment of his employees, who can only become wealthy if he gets rich first, through the magic of "trickle-down."

"If my staff has the ability for self-reflection and seeing the big picture, they should ask, 'Why would one of us fuck the rest of us so badly by damaging our ability to make money?" Ponorvosky says. "The first casualties of this will be the people who all of these protesters are 'defending.' No thought is given to 'the trickle-down,' to use Ronald Reagan's favorite expression." As for the people who are vowing to shut Paradou down, Ponorvsky says, "These people have no sense of rightness or goodness."

Paradou Owner Says Tirade Against Staff Was a Restaurateur's 'Howl'

Restaurant Owner's Email to Staff Belongs in Tyrant Hall of Fame

(via Making Light)

(Image: New York City - Paradou Brunch, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image)

Cal Newport, a post-doc at MIT who writes the blog Study Hacks, has an interesting method of getting important work done. He calls it "fixed-schedule productivity."

The idea, in a nutshell, is this: "Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way."

Newport works between 8:30 and 5:30 on weekdays only, yet he gets a lot done:

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich wrote about Newport and a few other people who use similar techniques to get a lot of meaningful work accomplished in 40 hours a week or less.

I think they are onto something -- ever since I had kids (which gave me fewer hours in the day to work, and also put a start and end time on my day) I've been much more productive.

Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30pm

The Big Money reports that Google has made a "minor shift in its policy that has major implications." Instead of banning scammy ads for bogus teeth whiteners and stomach flatteners, Google will now ban the advertiser itself, "effectively neutering the advertiser's ability to shift from one ad and shell site to another."

Think of it like the struggle between the police and a graffiti vandal. Up until now Google has only been erasing the tags after they've been put up. Going forward, they're going to take away his spray cans and put a GPS collar on him, making sure he never does it again. It would be a principled stand by any company, but especially by Google because of its position in the market. I worry, though, that the rest of the industry won't pay attention. On this issue, Google might be a leader without any followers.

Google Does Non-Evil Thing: Bans White Teeth, Flat Stomachs

Fred von Lohmann, the chief copyright counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been doing an amazing job of analyzing the latest draft of the Google Book Search settlement, really making the legalese clear for the rest of us. In the latest installment, Fred looks at the competition implications of the settlement, and talks about how the settlement could be structured to make the marketplace as competitive as possible.

Nobody likes this "only-for-Google" aspect of the settlement--in fact, Google has said that it would support orphan works legislation that would empower the Registry to make the same deal (or even a better deal) with others who want to use these unclaimed works. (Where the claimed books are concerned, in contrast, the Registry will likely ask the rightsholders to appoint it to license companies other than Google. But that still leaves all the unclaimed books out.) The settlement agreement even has a provision that makes it clear that the UWF can license others "to the extent permitted by applicable law"--what amounts to an "insert orphan works legislation here" invitation.

But absent some legislative supplement to the revised Settlement 2.0, it still seems that any other company would have to scan these books, get sued, and hope for a class action settlement. That, of course, is the kind of barrier to entry that any monopolist would envy.

...But we shouldn't be satisfied with antitrust law here. This is not just a simple market transaction between commercial entities. Google is building an enormously important public resource, a task it can only undertake with the blessing of a federal court. The public deserves a solution that is not "barely legal," but that instead encourages real, robust competition. As written, without some modification or legislative adjunct, Settlement 2.0 does not do that.

Google Books Settlement 2.0: Evaluating Competition

From $50 bamboo T-shirts to environmental coloring books handed out by petroleum companies, greenwashing continues to be high on my list of "Things That Make Me Want To Rip My Hair Out and Then Go Do Worse to the People Responsible." The worst part, of course, is that it's often not easy to know when your green is coming to you heavily laundered. ClimateCount is an organization that's trying to help on that front. They put together an annual scorecard of Fortune 500 companies that breaks down these firms' real record on the environment. Then they rate the company's commitment to environmental responsibility as Stuck, Starting, or Striding. Everything is separated out by sector, so you can easily find the companies you want to check up on. Granted, I'm not convinced that Airlines, as a category, are ever going to move much beyond Starting. But I'm also frankly impressed that any are even at that point. So, tradeoffs.

Couple of major downsides. First, this list is by no means comprehensive. We're talking Fortune 500 here, so that won't help you if you don't do a lot of business with those companies to begin with. For instance, the Beer category is sadly limited to Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, and SAB Miller. And what a cold, sad world that would be.

Second, this is all a little subjective. Proctor and Gamble may get a Striding rating, largely for setting up energy use reduction goals that produced some results, and that may make them more green than their competitors. But does that really make them a green company? Overall, I think this might be better for helping you figure out which companies are totally blowing smoke up your various orifices than it is at helping you know which companies are truly awesome. But even that is useful.

ClimateCount 2009 Scorecard
Interview with ClimateCount's Executive Director, from New Hampshire Public Radio

Photo: Mag3737

Michael Fricklas, Viacom's General Counsel, gave a lecture to a Yale Law class in which he confessed that suing people for copyright infringement felt "like terrorism." He says that this was bad strategy on the entertainment industry's part, as was "bad" DRM.

That's the good part -- an admission that suing customers is bad news. But lest you think that Fricklas has learned anything from this experience, consider the rest of his talk.

Click here for higher-rez image.

Anthony Citrano says,

Being an observer (and occasional shooter) of all things fashion, I was just was looking at December's "W" cover [above and left] with Demi Moore.

In the interview she says she'd rather be a "puma" than a "cougar" - but apparently, the clumsy Photoshop artist decided she was looking too strong in the cover shots - and awkwardly chopped off part of her left thigh. Note how the upper part of her left thigh/hip is basically missing (our right). Did she have some sort of weird car accident that left a wedge of meat missing from it? The fabric even magically floats above the missing thigh. Ha!

Hard to believe that made it to the cover.

Nicole sez, "Philebrity posted a haunting video of the recent demolition of the Drexel Shaft in Philadelphia. The tripped out music and slowly tumbling smoke stack aptly visualize a crumbling American economy."

He's One Bad Mutha- Shut Your Mouth! But I'm Talking About DREXEL SHAFT! (Thanks, Nicole!)

On a scorching hot June day in northeastern Kenya, an hour west of the Kenyan-Somali border, Leila Chirayath Janah arrived at the Dabaab refugee settlement in an armed convoy. She was there on a mission: to connect jobless, displaced refugees to the rest of the world through legitimate Internet-based jobs.

Leila, 27, is the founder of Samasource, a non-profit organization reminiscent of a tech startup that outsources web-based jobs to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty in third world countries. I met her last month in the tiny office space she rents out in downtown San Francisco. She is tall and well-dressed, and has credentials that include Harvard, Stanford, and a fellowship with TED India. Her obsession with Africa started in her teens — when she was a senior in high school, she left LA to teach English to a class of 60 blind people in rural Ghana; a few years later she created an African Development Studies at Harvard, and a few years after that, she started working on Samasource.

My last few trips to Canada, I've been puzzled by difficult-to-follow advocacy ads in which the broadcasters and the cable/sat operators have fought each other tooth and nail, begging Canadians to take side in a dispute over -- well, that's the problem. What was it over?

This Writers Guild of Canada YouTube clip does a great job of sorting it out. Both groups receive enormous subsidies to promote Canadian television (broadcasters get a "local programming fee" and cable/sat operators get a state-backed monopoly that keeps foreigners out). Both want more money, and both want the other guy to collect the fee, so they other guy looks like a jerk.

A pox on both their houses.

WGC: "Tv Tax?" "Save Local TV?" Here's the truth! CANADIAN tv! (Thanks, Emily!)

In my spam: boner pill fantasy art. This is a real image that adorned a spam email message from a Chinese meds site.

Joe sez, "The McDonald's franchise at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba is looking for an assistant manager. The ideal candidate will have previous restaurant management experience, a valid U.S. passport and a willingness to relocate to Cuba. Apparently, no special security clearance is required. Perks include great weather, potential tax free status for year-round residents, and half of the successful candidate's stateside rent paid by the company. The Gitmo McDonald's has been in operation since 1986, and serves the base's 6000 inhabitants, including military personnel, their families, Jamaican and Filipino guest workers. and 215 detainees, who can make take-out orders for Big Macs, fries and other items."

Guantanamo-based McDonald's seeks applicants (Thanks, Joe!)

Rebecca from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "More news about the Yes Men and the Chamber of Commerce. BoingBoing reported on the lawsuit the Chamber filed over the activists' political criticism of the Chamber's stance on climate change and the Chamber's DMCA takedown attempt. Now it's official: EFF and Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP, will defend the Yes Men and other activists involved in the action. As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry says: "The action was a brilliant piece of political theater, but it had a serious purpose: calling attention to the Chamber's political activities. This is core political speech, protected by the First Amendment." Next step in the case -- a response to the Chamber's complaint is due later this month in the U.S. District Court for District of Columbia."

"The action was a brilliant piece of political theater, but it had a serious purpose: calling attention to the Chamber's political activities," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "This is core political speech, protected by the First Amendment. We're very pleased that Davis Wright Tremaine -- with its long, successful history of protecting free speech rights of Americans -- has joined us in helping these activists battle a transparent attempt at censorship."

"U.S. courts have recognized that political parody lies at the heart of the First Amendment," said Davis Wright Tremaine LLP partner Bruce Johnson. "Even if the party parodied refuses to giggle--or even panics and sues--free speech will ultimately triumph. We look forward to a prompt dismissal of this case and a reaffirmation of the rights of all Americans to poke fun at the pompous and powerful."

The Chamber has pulled out all the stops in its effort to silence the activists. First, it sent an improper copyright takedown notice to the Yes Men's upstream provider, demanding that a parody website posted in support of the action be removed immediately and resulting in the temporary shutdown of not only the spoof site but hundreds of other sites hosted by May First/People Link. Next, the Chamber filed suit against the activists in federal court, claiming among other things the activism infringed their trademarks.

EFF to Represent Yes Men in Court Battle Over Chamber of Commerce Action (Thanks, Rebecca!)

For months (years?) Rupert Murdoch has been waving his jowls around and shouting that Google is stealing from him by not paying to index his material. And all along, we've been saying, "Pffft, right. If you don't like it, just add a robots.txt file that tells Google not to index you. Until you do, stop whining and put it back in your pants."

Now Rupert has promised to do exactly that. He claims that he's going to take all of News Corp's websites pay-only and have them removed from Google when he does.

You know what? He's lying. But I think it'd be entertaining if every reporter who interviewed him, for the rest of his life, said, "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to take all your company's websites out of Google?" It'd also be hilarious to get the CEOs of the various pieces of Rupert's empire to comment on whether they want all their company's materials invisible to search engines.

Rupert also thinks that fair use is illegal and that the right court case would result in it being "barred altogether." Again, another hilarious interview question for the rest of his career: "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to abolish fair use? How's that plan coming, pal?"

The revelation came early in the interview, after Murdoch claimed that Google and others are stealing News Corp content in response to a question about who he was talking about when he talked about plagiarists. "The people who simply pick up everything to run with, and steal our stories...they just take them..without payment. That's Google, Microsoft, Ask.com..a whole lot of people."

Murdoch claimed that readers who visit News Corp sites via search offer little value to advertisers, and that News Corp would rather have fewer people coming to their websites, but paying. Asked why News hasn't made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: "I think we will....but that's when we start charging."

Murdoch also claims that News Corp believes that the doctrine of Fair Use can be challenged in court and "barred altogether."

Epic Win: News Corp Likely To Remove Content From Google (Thanks, Dustin!)

Update: So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

On this fair use question, my guess is that some evil Richelieu in the legal department has been passing torrid whispers to Rupert about how the Berne Convention's "Three Step Test" for exceptions to copyright is overstepped by US fair use and by many countries' fair dealing rules. So Rupert thinks that he can take a case to the WTO (membership in the WTO is contingent on compliance with the Berne Convention) and get all these rules struck down.

Of course, Rupert's own media products make frequent and copious fair use of other copyrights -- you can't create without fair use. But the mustache-twirling lawyer at Newscorp probably didn't mention this to Rupert Palpatine (the lawyer probably thinks it'd be OK if every single one of those fair uses was replaced by a process in which lots of lawyers negotiated the terms of every use, probably all reporting to him).

They're wrong, of course. The WTO's rules -- and Berne -- are necessarily subservient to realpolitik, viz., the US gets $1 trillion of economic activity out of fair use, and it's not going to get rid of it because it makes some UN agency sad (if the UN mattered to the US, the US'd be paying the billions in back-fees it owes). And if the WTO imposes trade sanctions on the US, they'll just be ignored, because the world's factory-states (China, with also-rans such as India and Vietnam) can't afford to stop sending shipping containers full of Happy Meal toys to America. And if the WTO tries to embargo China, it'll quickly discover that the rest of the world isn't prepared to live without plastic tchotchkes and junkware either.

So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world's politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.

A copyeditor at the Toronto Star greeted the news that union copyeditor jobs were being eliminated in favor of freelancers by heavily editing the publisher's memo announcing same, pointing out all the ways in which the publisher could benefit from editorial aid.

This is very funny stuff, but having looked at the markup, I have to say that I would ask for a different copyeditor in future. A lot of these edits ("avoid simplistic qualifiers" for "very") fall under the heading of "creative disagreement" not "helpful suggestion" or "correction." I've generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I've had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it's been quite a struggle.

Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

As we look forward to Thanksgiving (and I already am), don't be too intimidated by the Marthas of the world. This short piece in the New York Times ends with an admission by a foodie mag editor that those too-perfect-to-be-true birds are, in fact, too perfect to be true.

"I know it seems like, hey, what could be simpler than roasting a bird? But the perfect roast bird is a challenge," Ms. Cowin said. "Turkey, as a model, is very much like a fashion magazine with fashion models. There are plump turkeys, and, I'm not kidding you, there's skinny turkeys, there are chesty turkeys, breasty turkeys, there are flat-chested turkeys." With one previous year's model, "I was like, 'I just need the breast to get a little bit higher,' " she said, then paused."We have enhanced the breasts of turkeys," she admitted.

I assume this means Photoshop enhancement, but the article doesn't say. She could easily be talking about more physical alterations. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was a subscriber to Zillions, Consumer Reports' defunct magazine for kids, which I still mourn. (And not just nostalgically. We need more publications dedicated to introducing children to critical thinking, skepticism and the reality behind the advertainment that's targeted at them.) Zillions introduced 9-year-old me to advertising photo tricks like "ice cream" that's actually lard or vegetable shortening and fast-food hamburgers made to stand tall and proud with the help of cardboard inserts. I wish the Grey Lady had gone more into specifics like that here.

The New York Times "Coming Model of the Month: A Fuller Thanksgiving Turkey", via Barfblog.

Image courtesy Flickr user tuchodi, via CC.

Jeff VanderMeer sez, "Finch, the final novel in my Ambergris series, is now out, and I'm offering online posters, slogans, icons, and other cool stuff, including the Murder by Death soundtrack for the novel on a new page just for readers. I totally believe in and love the idea of 'PR artifacts'--creations that stand on their own as works of art. Does it support the publication of the novel? Maybe, but the main point is to have fun putting out some really neat stuff. Case in point: readers can take one 'Wanted Dead' web poster that's supposedly created by the rebels in my story and add their own headshot. "

Finch (Thanks, Jeff!)

Saul Friedman, a long-standing Newsday columnist, has quit the paper over its decision to implement a paywall, pointing out that by charging $5/week for readers, they'll drastically cut his audience size (and, presumably, the present and future opportunities that having a large audience afford to a working writer). I doubt he'll be the last. Last month at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair, someone asked a representative from The Guardian newspaper (for whom I write a column) if they would consider charging for access to the site, and I pointed out that I would no longer offer The Guardian such a hefty discount off my normal word-rate if this were the case. It's worth it to me to write for lower fees in exchange for the broader reach, but if you eliminate that reach, the benefit to me as a writer starts to dry up.

I wonder if newspaper strategists grasp that they get a lot of work on the cheap in exchange for the reach they provide to their writers, and that intentionally limiting that reach will raise their costs. I also wonder at newspaper strategists who, having decided that they can't monetize fame, have opted to monetize obscurity instead, seemingly in the belief that this will somehow be easier.

That did not sit well with Mr. Friedman, a freelancer who wrote Gray Matters, a weekly column on aging. He explained his departure in a note to Jim Romenesko's media blog. In an interview, Mr. Friedman said, "My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it." That includes him; living outside Washington, he is not a subscriber to Newsday or Cablevision.

Mr. Friedman, who is 80, said he would continue to write about older people for the site timegoesby.net, but he called his decision an end to more than 50 years in newspapers. He wrote for Newsday for more than 20 years, including several years as a staff writer in its Washington bureau.

Columnist Quits After Newsday Starts Charging for Its Web Site (via /.)

You think you got problems, huh? Air India got real problems. One of them being rats on a plane. You know what I say? Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking rats on this motherfucking plane!

The struggling government-owned carrier's already uneven reputation has been further tarnished in recent months by rats on a plane, a strike by senior pilots and a midair fistfight between pilots and flight attendants. In September, a flight to Riyadh was grounded after a passenger saw sparks coming from an engine.

Hey, sounds like a party to me. At Air India, Losses, Rats and a Brawl in the Sky [NYT]

Lavie Tidhar's story "Spider's Moon" is up on Futurismic, and it's a very rewarding ten-minute read. Futurismic's short-short fiction department publishes some genuinely wonderful science fiction, bite-sized stories that contain actual characters and settings and plots in impossibly small packages.

"Spider's Moon" is no exception: a story about spacefaring South Seas Islanders who come to Earth seeking mass-produced Vietnamese technology, and of what transpires; told with an admirable lyricism and poesie.

Melkior felt a little lost at Hoi An. He had arrived three days before, taking a room in a small hotel just outside the old town. It was, in many ways, a disconcerting experience. Once, Hoi An had been a trade centre, the meeting place of Chinese and European merchants on the coast of Viet Nam, and the old town had been preserved just as it had been, full of charming little cobbled streets and charming little temples and charming old houses - "Charm," the brochure insisted, "is the defining characteristic of the town". The old town was a bubble out of time, and visiting it was a wilful act of time-travel, or so it seemed to Melkior. The Hoi An lanterns ("Famous for hundreds of years," boasted the brochure) still hung everywhere, and barges still travelled down the river, pushed on long poles - and yet it was a lie, too, for the past was not really there, only its semblance, and who could believe in the past (not less a gentle, charming past) under the full spider's moon?

Crossing from the old town into the new was a disorienting fast-forward into the future: here, beyond the bubble of preserved time, the future happened with every heartbeat, the sound of construction filling the days, houses and office towers rising higher and higher into the atmosphere, as if grasping for the moon. He was here for the new town, not the old; was here for the future, not the past. The juxtaposition of both unsettled him. It had occurred to him he should have stayed in Da Nang, a forty-five minute drive down the road, a busy, bustling, cheerful city that had nothing of the quaint or picturesque (as the brochure had put it). Hoi An was a tourist town, famed for its tailors and shoe-makers, and even Melkior had given in to that extent, having purchased a new, sombre black suit and two pairs of custom-made knock-off trainers, with the company logo hand-stitched into the thin leather. He wore them now, feeling the cobblestones beneath the thin soles.

Spider's Moon By Lavie Tidhar

Bank Notes is a site that reproduces the text of demand notes used in "successful and unsuccessful unarmed bank robberies," along with a photo of the robber who penned it:

I have a gun in my bag.
Give me $5,000 please.
Thanks a bunch.

male, 20, Metro Bank, Wyomissing Hills, PA

Bank Notes: a collection of Bank Robbery Notes (via MeFi)

I'm giving two talks in the UK this week -- the first in Cambridge, as part of the Arcadia Seminar, held at Robinson College; the second is at Sheffield, as part of the DocFest premiere of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary on copyfighting and art that features some interviews with me. Hope to see you at them!

Cambridge: 3 November 2009, 6PM
Arcadia Seminar: 3rd Nov. "Thinking Like a Dandelion: Cory Doctorow on copyright, Creative Commons and creativity"
Umney Theatre, Robinson College, Cambridge. Please email mh569@cam.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

Sheffield: 5 November 2009, 2:25PM-4:30PM
RiP! A Remix Manifesto
Showroom 1, Sheffield DocFest (tickets)

Update: CORRECTION -- I'm at Sheffield Doc/Fest from 1425h-1630h, not 1600-1800h as previously stated!

I guess commodity prices just spiked again: a gang ripped a kilometer of copper phone wire out of an English street, presumably for the scrap value. 800 homes and businesses lost phone service and it's going to cost GBP45K to repair the damage.

Sussex Police said the underground cable was cut and removed from the area near Drusilla's roundabout in Alfriston in the early hours of Wednesday... Detectives believe the thieves used a vehicle to pull the cable out of the ground and take it away.

Gang rips out 1km of phone cable

A White Plains, NY federal court eliminated a woman's $460,000 mortgage debt because the paper trail was so messy that the mortgage lender couldn't prove that it actually owned the debt.

In March, PHH Mortgage filed a proof of claim to the debt noting that it was owed $461,263, which included more than $30,000 in past-due payments. The homeowner's lawyer sought to have the loan modified, but after the bank dragged its feet, as the lawyer described PHH's actions to the [New York] Times, the lawyer asked PHH to prove its claim.

Unable to do so to his satisfaction, Judge Drain ordered the debt expunged, concluding that PHH had failed to show it had been assigned the mortgage.

The case is being appealed by PHH, but even if the homeowner remains victorious, there remains a problem for her: Without a clear title, the homeowner will likely have difficulty selling her home if she chooses to do so.

Who owns your home? Lost paper trail allows borrower to keep her house

A new augmented reality app from Layar allows Android and iPhone 3GS users to view recovery.gov contract dollars at play work in the real world.

Image above: an example of what those happy blue bailout bubbles look like, bouncing about on the thoroughly bailed-out streets of Washington, DC. My only criticism so far (I haven't tried the apps): instead of blue circles as representational icons, the designers really should have chosen taxpayers' tears. Snip:

Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for "recovery" or "sunlight" within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts.

Recovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup [Sunlight Labs, via Micah Sifry]

Layar Reality Browser [Layar]

Over at The Awl, there's a total bummer infographic showing circulation data for major American newspapers going back to 1990. Spoiler: the lines look like steep cliffs. You can almost see the shuddering clusters of journalists at the edge being pushed over to a most splattery demise by the invisible hand of the market.

A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades [The Awl]

Security expert Ben "OpenSSL" Laurie went into a Barclay's bank to transfer a large sum of money ("enough money to fund a small country") and discovered an incredibly lax, brittle security system that focused on meeting compliance requirements instead of keeping deposits safe. I'm in the process of switching from Barclay's to the Co-Op, after years of frustration, insane fees, and terrible service. The Co-Op has its own security issues (they won't let you use random passwords, instead forcing you to use much-more-easily hacked passwords that contain no repeated characters) but they're nowhere near as bad as Barclay's.

When I got there we sat down with a bank employee who asked me for my cash card. He stuck it into a PINsentry and asked me to type my PIN. On that evidence alone, we proceeded to transfer enough money to fund a small country. I find this a little scary. Anyway, when I reviewed the documentation, which I had to sign, it had a little box about ID verification, into which he'd typed "PIN xxxx + SRS" - "xxxx" was (part of?) the code from the PINsentry. I asked him what "SRS" meant and he explained it meant he'd checked my signature. In fact, he hadn't, but he proceeded to do so at that point, commenting that he already knew what my signature looked like, presumably to explain away why he hadn't done the check before...

Anyway, at this point my wife mentioned that we were rather expecting them to check ID and stuff, to which he responded in a way I feel sure was not authorised by the bank: "well, we used to be more secure but now the bank believes that PINs are the highest level of verification". I explained to him why I disagreed with the bank. He didn't argue with me.

Oh yes, the signature check? He wasn't even in the room when I signed. For all he knew I carefully copied it from a crib sheet. So, all that's standing between me and complete emptying of my bank account is my PIN. But hey, the only way anyone other than me could know that is if I told them, isn't it? So it would serve me right, obviously.

"We Used To Be More Secure"

Jon Taplin takes a close look at the small print from the gold merchants pimped on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's shows and discover a whopping 30-35 percent spread between their buy and sell rates.

Obviously all these new boiler room high pressure sales groups that used to be pushing sub-prime refinancings are now trying to convince the unsophisticated listeners of right wing talk that they better buy gold before the dollar becomes worthless because of Obama's reckless spending. But how do firms like Goldline make money? Well it's all there in the fine print of their sales agreement.

Goldline's "bid" is the price it pays to clients for a product. Goldline's "ask" is the price it charges clients for a product. Goldline has a price differential or "spread" between its bid (buy-back) and ask (selling) prices for precious metals, rare coins and rare currency...

The price of Goldline's semi-numisimatic and numismatic coins and currency include the bid/ask spread that ranges between 30% and 35%.

OMG! An average stock broker commission is 2% and these scammers are getting 35% off the top. Where is the FTC and the CFTC in investigating this fraud? Why are Limbaugh and Beck propagating this scam?

The Gold Scam Fear Merchants

Jonathan Worth is a talented commercial photographer (he shot me for a feature in Popular Science a few years back) who was recently asked for his shots by National Portrait Gallery in London, and asked if he could come and take my pic for it, offering to give me the right to use the resulting print for publicity, book jackets and so on.

The National Portrait Gallery's crazy copyright stance sparked an interesting conversation about copyright with Jonathan (who also shot some killer photos!) and in the end, he agreed to license the photos he took of me for the exhibition under a very liberal Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, one of the most liberal licenses, allowing for both commercial uses and remixes.

One of Jonathan's pictures showed me in my office, and I went a little Flickr-crazy marking up the photo with notes explaining what everything was. I tweeted the photo, and lots of people came by to see it -- several thousand, some of whom ended up offering Jonathan paying work. It was a win all around.

This got us to talking about how producers of images and other works that are well-known digitally can use that familiarity to sell physical objects (I give away my books as ebooks to sell the print books), and Jonathan decided to try an experiment, producing 111 prints of the iconic image (without the Flickr notes!). I kicked in the 111-page initial manuscript printing of my forthcoming (April 2010) young adult novel For the Win, which I had just finished a week before. I had printed ten copies of the manuscript to pass around, and I had one copy left, and so I signed every page and handed it off to Jonathan.

Jonathan is selling his prints on a sliding scale depending on which manuscript page you get with it -- high numbers are cheaper -- and the one-of-a-kind super-premium offering is page one accompanied by a 100cm x 140cm special edition print that include the contact-sheets from the shoot (proceeds from this go to a local school raising money for new buildings).

I think that this is just too cool for words. Jonathan's a professional shooter who's also an artist, and the portrait shots are fantastic enough. But he's also experimenting with new business-models for photography that leverage, rather than fight, the Internet. I don't receive any of the money from this -- Jonathan did the work and sank in the capital, so it's his reward to reap.

Etsy: Photographs by Jonathan Worth

Blog: Giving things away Pt II

Philip Greenspun explains how Wall Street makes billions -- by bilking taxpayers.

Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they’re making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they’ve already bought as collateral on additional bonds.

How Wall Street is making its billions (Via Dan Gillmor)

It sometimes feels like every time we mention a big company's products or services here, it's to shame them for doing something terrible or making something awful. But every now and again, you get something wonderful out of a big company, and it's worth celebrating, loudly.

This time, it's IBM's Global Services, who do the ThinkPad service contracts for Lenovo. I switched to ThinkPads a few years back when I went Ubuntu Linux, at the suggestion of Chris DiBona, a senior free/open source guy at Google. The ThinkPads are moderately priced, come in a wide variety of models with different characteristics, are incredibly well-built with fantastic keyboards (the mid- to high-range machines have water-proof keyboards that have special, sealed drainage channels running to the laptop's underside) and rugged frames. They run GNU/Linux really well, too. I've been happier with ThinkPads than I've been with any other make of laptop (though there have been occasional hiccups, see below).

I'm hard on my equipment, so I knew that I'd want to get the world-wide, on-site, next-day replacement service, which costs about $100/year. This is exactly what it sounds like: if you have a hardware fault (even one due to dropping or knocking the machine), they will generally have a tech show up with a replacement part the next day, anywhere in the world. When I was an Apple user, hardware failures often meant standing in line for 40 min to drop off a Powerbook at a Genius Bar, then coming back a week or two later and waiting 40 minutes again to reclaim it.

My latest ThinkPad, an ultralight X200, just experienced a hardware fault in the built-in SD card reader. I tried booting it from a couple different Ubuntu versions and then installed the original Vista HDD and tried that (the ThinkPad hard-drives can be swapped in about two minutes with a single Phillips screwdriver, which makes it easy to buy giant third-party drives and install them when the ThinkPad arrives, building Linux on them and leaving the original drive intact for easy troubleshooting). It was definitely hardware. I called the service-center, got through in about two minutes, explained my problems to a level-one tech who nevertheless understood what I meant by "Linux" and "hard-drive swap" and ordered the service call after about five minutes of my describing the problem.

GOOD's executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world's top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit's take-home pay would support.

Top 8 of 2008 CEO Compensation

(via Digg)

Private equity firms use borrowed money to buy undervalued companies, suck the cash out of the companies in the form of special dividends and other fees, and then rake in more fees when they unload the damaged and desperate company to another private equity firm, which squeezes more value out of it, repeating the cycle until the company is bankrupt.

In the short video accompanying a New York Times article about the 133-year-old Simmons Bedding Company's fatal entanglement with the private equity industry, Charles Duhigg, a financial projects reporter, remarked, "When I was in business school, there was nothing sexier in this entire world than private equity. It's exactly where you went if you wanted to one day own an island -- and one of my classmates just bought an island."

These private investors were able to buy companies like Simmons with borrowed money and put down relatively little of their own cash. Then, not long after, they often borrowed even more money, using the company’s assets as collateral — just like home buyers who took out home equity loans on top of their first mortgages. For the financiers, the rewards were enormous.

Twice after buying Simmons, THL [Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston] borrowed more. It used $375 million of that money to pay itself a dividend, thus recouping all of the cash it put down, and then some.

A result: THL was guaranteed a profit regardless of how Simmons performed. It did not matter that the company was left owing far more than it was worth, just as many people profited from the mortgage business while many homeowners found themselves underwater.

At Simmons, Bought, Drained and Sold, Then Sent to Bankruptcy

Glyn sez, "The Royal Mail has sent a 'cease and desist' letter to ErnestMarples.com, a website that provides a post code API allowing social projects to perform post code lookups [ed: due to the bonkers British law on database copyrights, the record of which post-code corresponds to which address is privately owned, though it was developed a public expense; the public can only use the database it paid for if it pays again for a license from the Royal Mail]. Amongst the many non-profit services that face closure today is Job Centre Pro Plus, which allows you to find jobs near you. Royal Mail is currently looking to reduce its workforce of 121,000 postal workers.

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group adds, "It's outrageous that Royal Mail should be sacking workers and at the same time trying to close a service that might help them find work. Post codes were created with public money, so they need to be used for the widest public benefit. Ernest Marples have been showing how this can be done. Their ideas need to be legalised for non-profit use, not shut down. Intellectual property rules need to work for society, and not the other way round. An amicable solution to allow non-commercial use of post code data would be easy to create, via a key given only to non-profit organisations. Clearly, something that allows greater use of post codes is needed right now. Better access to information means more social and democratic benefits.

On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site down (see below). One of the directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd has also been threatened personally.

We are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail's demands and therefore have closed the ErnestMarples.com API effective immediately.

We understand that this will cause harm and considerable inconvenience to the many people who are using or intend to use the API to power socially useful tools, such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com and PlanningAlerts.com. For this, we apologise unreservedly.

Ernest Marples Postcodes has been threatened by the Royal Mail

Royal Mail: closing job search over data dispute while sacking workers (Thanks, Glyn!)