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Rare Atari Break­out hand­held shows up on eBay

Posted: 03 Jan 2008 04:58 PM CST

Filed under: Gam­ing

It’s cer­tainly not the first bit of super rare Atari gear to show up on eBay, but those look­ing to expand their col­lec­tion may want to take stock of their bank account right about now, as the Super Break­out hand­held pro­to­type pic­tured above (appar­ently one of only two known to exist) is now up for auc­tion with less than a day to go. As you might have guessed, it doesn’t actu­ally work, or even have the fin­ished brand­ing, but it appar­ently is the real deal — pur­chased directly from the handheld’s designer, no less. If that’s got you all nos­tal­gic for what could have been, you’ll only have to beat $385 (as of this writ­ing) to be the top bid­der, although you can be sure you’ll have to drop a good deal more than that if you actu­ally want to get your hands on it.[Via OhGizmo!]

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Plaxo Flubs It

Posted: 03 Jan 2008 12:22 PM CST

News leaked pre­ma­turely today about a new Plaxo Pulse fea­ture that allows users to match Face­book con­tacts to Pulse con­tacts, and then import con­tact data about the matches into Pulse.

Plaxo has been test­ing the fea­ture with a num­ber of jour­nal­ists and blog­gers. It involves run­ning a script against Face­book. You tell Plaxo your Face­book account cre­den­tials; Plaxo then goes in to Face­book, looks up every one of your friends, and pulls down their con­tact information.

Plaxo could have done most of the work via the Face­book API (and in fact we cov­ered a startup called Friend­CSV that does just that). But the Face­book API doesn’t allow export­ing of a cru­cial piece of data, email addresses. In fact, emails are shown as images instead of text on Face­book so that scripts can­not eas­ily down­load them.

So Plaxo avoided the API and went with screen scrap­ing. They devel­oped opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion soft­ware to rec­og­nize email addresses and add them to the export.

Face­book doesn’t like this, of course. But it isn’t Plaxo that’s pay­ing the price. It’s the jour­nal­ists and blog­gers who’ve been test­ing out the ser­vice. Robert Scoble was banned yes­ter­day from Face­book for run­ning the script. He received an email from Face­book that said “Our sys­tems indi­cate that you’ve been highly active on Face­book lately and view­ing pages at a quick enough rate that we sus­pect you may be run­ning an auto­mated script. This kind of Activ­ity would be a vio­la­tion of our Terms of Use and poten­tially of fed­eral and state laws.”

Plaxo was cer­tainly aware of the risk. In an email from the com­pany ask­ing me to try the ser­vice last week, they said “We don’t know whether Face­book will try to shut us down (despite their increas­ing ver­bal sup­port for the con­cepts of open-ness), so we want to let a few key folks have access to the func­tion­al­ity before we make it avail­able to everyone.”

Yeah, they guessed right. Plaxo started run­ning auto­mated scripts against Face­book with­out any warn­ing or dis­cus­sion with them before­hand, in vio­la­tion of their terms of ser­vice and, I’ll add, com­mon sense. Of course users were shut down. Face­book must reg­u­late this kind of behav­ior, with­out it the ser­vice would crumble.

Beyond the auto­mated script issue, Face­book also has a very good rea­son for pro­tect­ing email addresses — user pri­vacy. Robert Scoble may be per­fectly fine with hav­ing my con­tact infor­ma­tion be eas­ily down­loaded from Face­book, but I may not be. Ulti­mately it should be me that decides, not him. And if Plaxo wants to push the enve­lope on user pri­vacy issues, again, per­haps they should at least have given Face­book a heads up. And be pre­pared to take the con­se­quences them­selves instead of pass­ing them off to their users. Robert Scoble was Plaxo’s lab rat in this exper­i­ment. I’m glad I wasn’t one, too.

Update: Loren Feld­man basi­cally agrees with me.

Plaxo Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Plaxo…

Face­book Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Facebook…

Crunch Net­work: Mobile­Crunch Mobile Gad­gets and Appli­ca­tions, Deliv­ered Daily.

A fair use primer for online con­tent creators

Posted: 03 Jan 2008 11:31 AM CST

Fair use wasn’t just bolted on to copy­right law; it stems from the very pur­pose of copy­right. A new report hopes to teach cre­ators of user-generated con­tent about when using other mate­r­ial is fair and when it might not be.

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IPv6: com­ing to a root server near you

Posted: 02 Jan 2008 11:43 PM CST

On Feb­ru­ary 4, 2008, ICANN will add IPv6 addresses for four root DNS servers to the root zone file, mak­ing full IPv6 Inter­net con­nec­tions a real­ity. Time to check that DNS soft­ware and those fire­walls to avoid any pos­si­ble trouble.

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Iowa State Pres­i­den­tial Pri­mary: Online Cau­cus Coverage

Posted: 02 Jan 2008 05:40 PM CST