Interesting Biometric security

Call me a skeptic, but I just don't see 'ear based security' being a big hit anytime soon...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.200-our-ears-may-have-builtin-passwords.html

The idea is definitely interesting though

Charney's Theorem

"there's always a percentage of the population up to no good."

Thanks to Elinor Mills for the link - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10223686-83.html

Good eyes

Thanks to this guy's good eyes an ATM card skimmer was removed from an ATM. I honestly don't know if I would notice one.

Thanks to Chris Walters for the article- http://consumerist.com/5200818/reader-finds-card-skimmer-on-bank-atm

Time Warner backs down, for now...

After recently announcing the rollout of the tiered pricing model to more pilot cities, TW backs down.

In a statement, TWC made clear isn't giving up on the idea -- it just lost a public relations battle, saying that it was "shelving the trials while the customer education process continues." - Thanks to Ryan Singel for the article - http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/time-warner-c-1.html

I can't wait for that 'customer education'...

Digg's attempt at amends

Digg is trying to recover from the PR nightmare that the new DiggBar started.

I know I won't be signing up for Digg any time soon...

In response to the complaints, Digg plans to tweak the DiggBar to be less intrusive. Those who are not logged into Digg and click on a Digg link will not see the toolbar; they'll be directed straight to the source of content. Also, Digg claims it is ensuring that Digg URLs will not show up in search-engine results.

The DiggBar changes should start to take effect over the next week, according to Quinn.

Thanks to Brian X. Chen for the article - http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/diggbar.html

Taxes

This really motivates me to earn enough money to make it into the top 5th of earners in the US

The top fifth of households made 56% of pre-tax income in 2006 but paid 86% of all individual income tax revenue collected, according to the most recent data available from the Congressional Budget Office.

It gets even better for the top 1% of earners

The top 1% of households, which made 19% of pre-tax income, paid 39% of all individual income taxes.

Thanks for the post Jeanne Sahadi - http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/15/pf/taxes/who_pays_most_least/index.htm

Selling trademarks

I hadn't thought about it before, but I was recently looking for accounting software and did a Google search for Peachtree Accounting and saw adds for netsuite.

It turns out, Google allows auctioning of trademarked keywords to the trademark owner's competitors in the United States.

Sure, I know enough to know that netsuite is not Peachtree, but considering how Google auctions keywords, this is driving up the cost for Peachtree to advertise to customers looking specifically for their software.

I'll have to come out against Google on this one, I don't think auctioning trademarked keywords to competitors is fair practice. Especially since Google makes a hefty profit when competitors fight it out for the advertising space...

Thanks to Michael Orey for the article - http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090414_278741.htm