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By Christopher Quinn
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sen. David Shafer, R-Duluth, got a unanimous vote Thursday to move his Senate Bill 33, a zero-based budgeting bill, out of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill will go to the Rules Committee, which will schedule it for floor debate.
Today at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, deCarta announced a set of free developer tools intended to challenge Google Maps and Places. I received a briefing last week and was impressed by the suite of products and tools, which include the following:
All the basic services are free and have larger limits than Google Maps API. There are two premium versions of the service that cost money after API limits are hit. In addition to maps and navigation, deCarta has a search engine and local POI data as part of the package.
One of deCartas big arguments is that with Google developers and publishers need to promote the Google brand, whereas theirs is totally white-labeled.
Im not a developer and so cant speak to the ease or difficulty of integrating these offerings vs. Google. But they appear to go head to head with Googles APIs and offer more generous terms. My understanding is that deCarta is also offering the option of monetization via third party local ad networks with strong eCPMs. Local CPMs are higher in mobile that generic national ad CPMs.
Local business and POI data is all but commoditized now, with a broad range of companies offering a free local database. Its not clear what the quality of these various databases are; however deCartas comes from one of the three major US providers.
Other free local data sources include SimpleGEO, Factual, Placecast. CityGrid, Google Places (limited availability) and Facebook Places (limited availability). Beyond the data however, the deCarta maps/data/search/navigation package appears unique in terms of its comprehensiveness.
* Guidelines include review, supervision and retention
* Proposal is subject to 60-day comment period
TORONTO Feb 8 (Reuters) – Canadian regulators are
proposing new guidelines to govern how investment dealers
advertise and communicate with clients on popular social media
such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada
(IIROC) set out the proposed guidelines in a draft notice this
week, asking dealers to submit comments within 60 days to help
mold the new rules.
In response to the increasing use of social media
websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, IIROC staff has
updated the content of the existing guidance notice … to
address the unique compliance and supervisory issues when using
social media websites to communicate with clients and the
public for business purposes, IIROC said.
IIROC is a self-regulatory organization that oversees all
investment dealers and trading activity on debt and equity
marketplaces in Canada.
The six-page draft rules notice updates guidelines on
advertising, sales literature and general correspondence that
were last modified in April 2004, and refer to issues ranging
from record-keeping to the secondary impact of communications
with clients.
The guidelines also touch on third-party communications,
and point at the potential pitfalls of re-tweeting a clients
post or providing a thumbs-up, both of which might be
considered an endorsement.
It said static content, like a profile, background or wall
information, is usually considered an advertisement, and must
be pre-approved.
An interactive electronic forum such as Facebook and
Twitter, on the other hand, includes real time discussions and
although it does not require prior approval, must be supervised
to ensure compliance with IIROC Dealer Member Rules and
securities legislation, the regulator said.
To read the draft of the guidance note, see:
here
(Reporting by John McCrank and Pav Jordan; editing by Peter
Galloway)
Steven Seagal is a funny guy and he doesnt even know it.
The former action film star has got plenty of run recently from his stops in to work with fighters from Blackhouse MMA. When Anderson Silva pulled another amazing move from his bag of tricks, Seagal was quick to jump on board and take credit. Silva was fine with it. He helped out Seagal by giving him a few pops during the UFC 126 postfight press conference.
Bas Rutten was watching Silvas win over Vitor Belfort and marveled on Twitter at the boot to the face delivered by the UFC middleweight champ.
When Rutten, a former UFC heavyweight champ, saw the postfight comments and Seagal trying to steal the spotlight, the legendary real fighter went off.
Check out some of the fine work put in by Seagal with Silva. Sure Seagal is 58 and slightly overweight, but you can see the athleticism and flexibility he still possesses.
If Silvas cool with Seagal, I guess we have to be too.
Tip via MMA.tv
Arthur Chong, a local software entrepreneur, recently launched Katy Tech Entrepreneurs (KTE), a new online community networking organization.
KTE has been formed specifically to assist technology-based startups in Katy and West Houston and help to enable local entrepreneurs to connect, meet and share information. It’s a resource and networking forum for local tech entrepreneurs in the software, electronics and alternative energy fields.
With its online discussion forums, KTE offers its members a choice for both virtual and face-to-face participation, providing a forum for the exchange of ideas, resources and skills.
“Those thinking of starting their own new technology venture will benefit greatly from KTE,” said Chong. “Each meeting will have a casual yet informative setting allowing each member to meet like-minded individuals comfortably. As we also provide members with online discussion forums, members are able to join and participate at their convenience. We look forward to each individual that we connect with and look forward to seeing KTE grow and benefit others.”
According to Chong, KTE is highly beneficial to technology entrepreneurs, technologists looking to join startup companies, founders looking for co-founders, marketing, sales and business development specialists, web design, graphics, video and advertising specialists, technology investors, banking, financial and accounting specialists and project managers.
For more information, contact Chong at arthur@alphacares.com or 713-966-9308, or visit www.meetup.com/katytech.
Above: 2010 Graduates from the Sydney School for Social Entrepreneurs.
A desire to make ethically grown, organic food from local farmers available to any household in Sydney has seen Julian Lee named the Sydney Social Entrepreneur of the Year.
Lee received the accolade of Sydney Social Entrepreneur of the Year from the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), as part of the Schools recent graduation ceremony.
Julian Lee and 13 other students completed the Schools year-long personal and professional development program to help them grow their social businesses.
Oakland Municipal Credit Union has become the nations first credit union failure of 2011, but officials said Tuesday that members are being served with no disruptions.
Western Federal Credit Union, a Southern California financial firm, has emerged to buy and assume the assets, liabilities and 7,800 members of Oakland Municipal Credit Union.
Things are going very nicely, said Christine Klein, an executive vice president with Western Federal Credit Union. We did a lot of legwork prior to the transaction. Its been very uneventful in the branch. Oakland Muni Credit had one branch, in downtown Oakland.
Manhattan Beach-based Western Federal also has moved quickly to enhance services for Oakland Munis former members. The new owner has increased hours and days of operations to a more consistent 9 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday schedule.
We thought it was in the better interest of the Oakland members to have greater access to their accounts, Klein said.
The purchase and assumption deal gives Western Federal its first branch in the East Bay, Klein said. Western currently has a branch in San Bruno.
Oakland Municipal is the first failure of a credit union in the country so far this year, said Greg McBride, a senior financial analyst with Bankrate.com, which tracks the financial services sector.
That rate of failure contrasts with the failure rate for banks, he said. The one
Wells Fargo unexpectedly replaced Howard Atkins, its chief financial officer on Tuesday.
The US’s second-largest bank said that Mr Atkins had retired “for personal reasons” after a decade at the San Francisco-based lender and would be replaced by Timothy Sloan, the chief administrative officer.
In a hearing today on Capitol Hill, Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee regarding EPAs ability to limit chemical contaminants in drinking water.
Especially contentious are the chemicals perchlorate and chromium 6. According to Jackson’s testimony, “EPA is evaluating the opportunity for health risk reductions from unregulated contaminants such as perchlorate, and reviewing existing standards, such as chromium, to determine if public health protections can be improved.”
Jackson announced just before the hearing that EPA will issue new federal regulations on perchlorate, reversing a George W. Bush-era decision not to regulate the chemical, which is used to make rocket fuel and explosives.
Barbara Boxer, the Chair of the Senate Committee applauded the EPA for moving forward to establish a national drinking water standard for perchlorate. According to a Government Accountability Office report cited in Boxer’s opening remarks, in the absence of a federal regulatory standard for perchlorate in drinking water, California and Massachusetts have adopted their own standards. California adopted a drinking water standard of 6 parts per billion in 2007, and Massachusetts set a drinking water standard of 2 parts per billion in 2006.
The report also points out that perchlorate has been found in water and other media at varying levels in 45 states, as well as in the food supply, and comes from a variety of sources.
According to EPA, chromium is found in over 60 cleanup sites in the state of Massachusetts alone.
Despite the important topic of safe drinking water and limiting chemical exposure that would otherwise impact public health, GOP Senators preferred to discuss their dislike for protecting the public from other pollutants, namely those that will impact the global climate. Wyoming Republican John Barrasso was quoted during the hearing as saying that “EPA has continued to move forward with job-crushing greenhouse gas regulations for greenhouse gases.”
The rhetoric spun by Barrasso and other Tools of the oil industry is part of an effort to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Barrasso, James Inhofe, the Senate’s lead contrarian to anything climate related, and Michigan Rep. Fred Upton have all introduced legislation limiting EPA’s ability to regulate these pollutants. (Upton, who now chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, will reportedly introduce legislation some time today.)
Jackson defended EPA’s action. “These efforts would halt EPA’s commonsense steps under the Clean Air Act to protect Americans from harmful air pollution that until now has not been regulated at all from any sources in this country,” Jackson told reporters after the hearing.
Discussions of chemical safety laws will continue with a senate subcommittee hearing tomorrow.
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Microsoft tonight released a security advisory for a publicly-disclosed vulnerability in all versions of Windows. Security Advisory 2501696 describes a bug in the MHTML handler in Windows which could lead to information disclosure.
MHTML (MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML) encapsulates HTML in a MIME structure. MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a data format for encapsulating more complex binary structures in a text-only format. Windows includes a pluggable protocol handler (MHTML:) that allows applications to render MHTML structures. Internet Explorer is one of these and it can be abused to exploit the bug in the context of a web page, causing script to be executed. The user would have click a link to an MHTML:// document.
The vulnerability is similar to a cross-site scripting bug on a web page, in which HTML and script from another site is executed in the web page context. In this case, script could be executed in the client-side context.
Microsoft has provided a Fix it link to disable the MHTML protocol handler. This is a rather radical move, but its probably the only thing Microsoft can do without an actual patch, which they will of course providewhen its ready. They are also working with other companies to develop server-side protections to prevent attacks.
The link above to the Fix it also includes what amounts to a proof of concept for the bug which you can use to test if you are vulnerable or if mitigating measures have worked.
