pornosex69.net

Here in New York, the last blowout launch party in the city was for T-Mobile’s Android phone in October. Company holiday parties have been scaled back like mad, leaving fewer opportunities for that great New York sport known as party-crashing. But socialization hasn’t stopped; it’s just changed its tune.

The Goods for Good charity event at the downtown City Winery.

• Blip.tv, a video-sharing platform that pulled in another round of financing just in time, threw its holiday party at a low-key downtown bar on Wednesday night. There was no open bar; company executives were surreptitiously handing out drink tokens instead. Within a couple of hours, the place was pretty much a mosh pit–even when the free drinks ran out.

The final Media Meshing party on Thursday night.

(Credit:
Kate Miltner (flickr.com/photos/loggedhours))

(Credit:
Goods for Good)

There were a few events of note this week. Note the trend: no more open bars!

So Thursday night was the final Media Meshing, at least for a while. There are persistent rumors that someone else with less recession sensitivity will take the reins. Or not. But in either case, the economic reality has clearly hit the after-hours scene.

• Prankster-slash-boulevardier Richard Blakeley, by day the video editor at Gawker Media, decided earlier this month to call off his series of monthly “Media Meshing” mixers. There’s never been anything lavish about Media Meshing; it’s a cash-bar event at a relatively divey bar called Sweet and Vicious. But Blakeley’s rationale was that it’s a bit gauche to be throwing a series of media parties while people continue to lose their jobs. Gawker itself has gone through rolling layoffs this season, sparing Blakeley but axing many of his cohorts.

“I haven’t had a drink all night,” one of Blakeley’s Gawker colleagues told me, shaking his head. Knowing that such behavior was uncharacteristic, I asked him why. His reply was, “Because nobody’s offered to buy me one yet.”

It wasn’t a tech event, per se, but there’s a reason I’m including it here: The organizers said that they’re not really on Silicon Valley’s radar, but would like to be. At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, we saw the emergence of SchwagginWagon, which encouraged conference attendees to donate the free stuff they got on the show floor and then didn’t want. Goods for Good’s angle is a little different, since they are interested in bulk supplies that would otherwise be thrown away and that could actually be put to use in a classroom. Check ‘em out if you’re interested.

• On Monday night, a relatively new nonprofit called Goods for Good held its annual benefit (read: everyone paid to get in) at a new downtown venue called the City Winery. (It is, in fact, Manhattan’s only winery.) Goods for Good’s mission is to gather unwanted corporate supplies en masse, from pens and notebooks to conference swag, and donate it to schools in developing countries.

NEW YORK–I hereby insist that we all stop using the “Recession? What recession?” line, which seems to be used every time any company has thrown any moderately lavish party in the last two months. Not only is it overused, but I think folks have caught onto the fact that things have legitimately changed.

The 24-inch Apple iMac.

Early reports from Black Friday, the traditional sales bump right after Thanksgiving, had indicated that Apple did relatively well–in part because of modest discounts–even among consumer worries about tough economic conditions.

Pricing of Macs versus other computers were likely a key factor in the November decline seen by NPD. The Journal cites Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, and others on “price sensitivity” among consumers:

Apple has been something of a golden child among makers of computers and consumer electronics. But now it, too, is showing at least a hint that the good times can’t last forever.

Apple rivals like (Hewlett-Packard) and Dell offered discounts weeks earlier than usual this holiday season, dropping some prices by as much as 50 percent. Mr. Munster said since last December, the average Windows PC price is down 35 percent to 45 percent; in contrast, Apple has offered only modest discounts of 5 percent to 10 percent on its PCs, analysts said.

Still, the analysts cited seemed generally upbeat about Apple’s sales prospects overall.

In November, says market researcher NPD Group, sales of the company’s
Mac products slipped 1 percent from the same month a year ago, even as industrywide PC sales were up 2 percent, according to a report in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Apple has been the pacesetter amid overall PC sales for some time. And it does continue to hold those honors, at least in laptop sales during November, the Journal reported. But NPD’s numbers showed the company taking a serious hit with its desktop Macs, sales of which fell 35 percent.

While searching for a possible alternative to the M4 carbine, the Army had also been looking at a new “personal defense weapon” to give drivers and crews a little more punch than the currently issued Beretta M9 9mm pistol. But that plan has followed the economy, and the military budget, down the drain, according to the industry press.

Knight’s Armament submitted a 6×35mm PDW–a streamlined, 4.5 pound weapon that can fire 700 rounds per minute. But there’s less than “a 50-50 chance” of anything getting adopted, Knight said. “The government still doesn’t know what it wants.”

The Army’s position: don’t rush us. “The subcompact has to serve a lot of different people…it’s much too early to say this is what we are looking for,” Jim Stone, the head of the Soldier Requirement’s Division at Fort Benning, Ga., told Military.com.

There are plenty of other contenders on the shelf, including the LWRC International PSD, which sports an 8-inch barrel and comes in both 5.56mm and a punchy 6.8mm, and the Adams Arms at 7.5 inches.

“I see this as an uphill battle,” C. Reed Knight Jr., owner of Knight’s Armament Company told Military.Com in an interview. “I think it will probably die a slow death.”

(Credit:
Knight's Armament Company)

There’s been no shortage of candidates; the market has been flooded with new grease gun wannabes. The challenge has been to come up with something both more powerful than the pistol ammunition now used by many PDWs, yet lighter than the 5.56mm round used in assault rifles.

Crews hoping for more personal fire power when scrambling from a tank hatch or other confined conveyance will be disappointed to learn that the U.S. Army is putting the search for a “subcompact” carbine on hold, according to industry reports.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

If you’re a regular reader you know I’m a sucker for deals sites. Enterprising
iPhone developer Joseph Kiok is too–enough of one to write an app called FreshDeals that keeps tabs on 15 different deals sites to help you find and track the latest bargains.

There’s currently no way to bookmark deals you like, or search any of these sites based on product or keyword, however you can send any item you’re interested in as an e-mail–either to yourself, or someone who you think would find it useful. There’s also an integrated browser, so you can look at the details of each deal without leaving the app.

FreshDeals lets you see the latest deals on more than a dozen popular deal-finding sites.

In future versions of the app I’d love to see a search tool and, when Apple pulls the trigger on the notifications service, a way to get notifications when a keyword or product you bookmarked goes on sale. You can do this with a customized Google alert and some special e-mail handling rules, but it would be great to get it in a package like this.

While something like this would have probably been a better idea pre-economic downturn, one thing it excels at is weeding out the old deals from the new. The sites are refreshed every couple of minutes, and in turn each deal is given a time stamp and a rating from “fresh” to “freshest.” The newer a deal the better a chance you have at nabbing it before it expires or the retailer runs out of stock.

FreshDeals is 99 cents and can be found in the app store (iTunes link)

This serial entrepreneur wasn’t as fortunate with his next venture: the construction of a satellite-based broadband communications system. Before it flopped, though, McCaw received financial backing from Bill Gates and a bunch of other well-heeled backers, who invested more than $292 million into the venture.

Until now, Craig McCaw was most famous for starting the eponymous cellular company that he sold to AT&T in 1994 for $12.6 billion.

But now, McCaw and Clearwire face a potentially huge headache. Bloomberg is quoting Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff acknowledging the impact of the recession on credit (and investors.) The upshot: Clearwire may be forced to put its network expansion plans on hold if it can’t raise another $2 billion.

That’s not the news Clearwire wanted to hear. But given current events, where so many companies are pushing the reset button, Intel’s message only restates what’s now obvious to everyone. It really is a new world order.

Wolff declined to say whether Clearwire would have to delay the project, but he nonetheless did acknowledge the obvious:

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland, CNET News)

After the dot-com bust, McCaw set out to offer portable wireless high-speed Internet service. His company, Clearwire, clearly qualified as one of those BIG IDEAS: WiMax is said to allow for wireless Internet service that’s five times faster than 3G networks.

Craig McCaw

So far, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks have ponied up $3.2 billion in Clearwire and its operating subsidiary (for about 22 percent of the company.) Each of those investors has an obvious interest in facilitating a wireless Internet outside of the phone companies, which are adopting Long Term Evolution format, a rival technology expected to become available in 2010.

“It’s clear that capital markets are closed for either borrowers or companies that are trying to raise capital, regardless of what kind of company it is,” Wolff said. “We’ve seen challenges across the board.”

“They’ve got enough money to keep going for quite a while,” Sean Maloney, the company’s sales and marketing head, said during a conference call. “They’ve got a pretty fat piece of capital to go out and build the network.”

So it was that a senior Intel executive today shot down any suggestion it was planning to bail out Clearwire.

That’s putting it mildly. In the last year, Clearwire’s investors have watched their shares lose more than 75 percent of their value. Clearwire’s management needs to sell its partners on sticking around, let alone putting more money into the pot. McCaw knows how to sell an idea-but even he’s running into a brick wall called the recession.

As a side note, it was the Justice Department’s ongoing defense of COPA in 2006 that led to its subpoena to Google asking for a “random sampling” of 1 million Internet addresses accessible through Google’s popular search engine and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to Google over a one-week period.

It was Breyer’s dissent that had some free-speech advocates worried. It said COPA places “minor burdens on some protected material–burdens that adults wishing to view the material may overcome at modest cost. At the same time, it significantly helps to achieve a compelling congressional goal, protecting children from exposure to commercial pornography. There is no serious, practically available ‘less restrictive’ way similarly to further this compelling interest. Hence the Act is constitutional.” Scalia went even further.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the law in Philadelphia, saying the prohibition was so broad and vague that even traditional publishers could face fines and imprisonment. Plaintiffs included Salon.com, which occasionally publishes racy material, the California-based lesbian-gay A Different Light Bookstore, PlanetOut, and a now-defunct coalition that included CNET Networks (publisher of CNET News), The New York Times Co., and Reuters. (A CNET executive testified against the law in January 1999.)

But the court didn’t seem to want to revisit COPA a third time. Wednesday’s ruling was a mere refusal to even hear the case, issued without explanation.

Another reason for the erosion of support may be that because the law was written so long ago, it’s surprisingly limited. It applies only to material delivered “by means of the World Wide Web”–meaning that it doesn’t cover peer-to-peer file sharing, the Usenet newsgroups that alarm New York’s attorney general, games like Virtual Hottie 2, those naughty things happening in Second Life, videos watched via a third-party
iPhone application, or streaming porn viewed through the VideoLAN Client, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player desktop applications.

COPA was enacted during the anti-Internet porn scares of the late 1990s, in part as a narrower answer to a previous Net censorship law that also met its demise in the courts. Any commercial Web site operator that posts “material that is harmful to minors” faces six months in prison and a fine of up to $50,000.

Caption: ACLU attorney Ann Beeson speaks to reporters after Supreme Court oral arguments on Web porn law in this 2001 file photograph.

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh)

The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, upheld a temporary injunction barring prosecutors from enforcing COPA.

No longer. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected prosecutors’ last-ditch defense of the Child Online Protection Act, meaning that the law will not be enforced.

Even among antiporn groups, support for COPA waned as the years progressed, and federal prosecutors focused on obscenity and child pornography.

“It is not the role of the government to decide what people can see and do on the Internet,” ACLU staff attorney Chris Hansen said in a statement on Wednesday. “Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families.”

The Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling against the Justice Department and in favor of the ACLU commanded a narrow 5-4 majority, with justices Stephen Breyer, William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, and (separately) Antonin Scalia dissenting.

Since the initial proceedings, the case has bounced around the court system without reaching a resolution. During that time, the Supreme Court handed down two preliminary rulings, once in 2002 and again in 2004.

The U.S. Department of Justice has been trying since 1998 to convince courts that a federal antiporn law targeting sexually explicit Web sites was constitutional.

The first time, it sent the case back to an appeals court with instructions to broaden its legal analysis beyond the law’s interaction with community standards; the second time, it wanted a review of whether “technological developments” have affected the law’s constitutionality.

After logging into mobile.copernic.com from any Internet-equipped cell phone and entering your credentials, you’ll be able to launch a search (clink the proffered link to enter a secure server.) The search return interface works on the spectrum of mobile phones and browsers (I tested it on three), with a more stylized look for
iPhone. Depending on your phone’s capability, you’ll be able to view, download, and e-mail a result. The search function worked flawlessly during our tests, and navigating the app was fast and easy on Wi-Fi, 3G, and Verizon’s regular, old data network on a BlackBerry Curve, iPhone, and Samsung Omnia. While other remote access apps like the mobile-specific Sugar Sync, the Internet-portal LogMeIn Free, and others do remote access equally well, the seamless search function makes Copernic Mobile my current favorite.

It works by downloading Copernic Mobile’s remote access application to your desktop and registering for a free account. If you’re using Copernic Desktop Search in the free or pro version, or Windows Desktop Search, the app will connect up with the desktop search tool’s index of your computer’s contents to let you search for files, e-mails, music, photos, videos, contacts, favorites, Web history, and anything else the search app keeps tabs on. It doesn’t yet play nice with Yahoo or Google’s desktop search apps, which is a missed opportunity to engage some stalwart users before either company begins marketing a similar solution.

(Credit:
CNET)

Copernic Mobile–for XP and Vista–simplifies remote access from your phone's mobile browser.

Applications that let you access the files on your desktop from anywhere else are wonderful things, but the traditional remote-desktop app has one annoying flaw–you must browser for an e-mail, photo, or document in often tall, brambly file trees. Copernic Mobile (see slide show), in a sturdy prerelease build for Windows XP and Vista, offers the thorough indexing of a remote-access tool, but with a search component that makes finding those individuals files as simple as using a desktop search tool like Google Desktop–or Copernic Desktop Search.

Copernic Mobile: View Windows files from your phone–photos