Man Gets Escorted Off of Plane for Making VoIP Call

This stinks, but the publicity for this guy’s ap is awesome.

Marco, 39, was en route from New Orleans to New York when he decided to call an associate using the airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi and the very app offered by his company.

He was approached by a flight attendant and told he needed to turn off his phone, Marco recalled in a phone conversation with msnbc.com. He ended the call right away and then explained that his phone was in fact switched to in-flight mode. He told the flight attendant he made the call using the Wi-Fi service with the VoIP application.

The flight attendant told Marco that the FAA forbids the use of these applications, he said.

“She said this was a flight safety issue. That makes absolutely no sense because there’s no difference between using Skype, Viber or watching a movie on YouTube,” Marco said.

Indeed, FAA notes that airlines block the use of in-flight calling using Skype and similar applications not because of an FAA restriction, but because the carriers are “simply responding to the overwhelming majority of their customers, who prefer silent communications to the public nature of Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) calls.”

TV Stations Forced to Put Politicial Advertisement Info Online

The stations have a point. If I were going to advertise on TV, I’d check the rates given to politicians and push for those rates too.

The Federal Communications Commission voted late last month to require local TV stations to put detailed information about political advertising on their websites. Such material is already required to be available to the public, but must be requested in-person at TV stations, where files are often stored on paper and fees charged for copies.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski pushed hard for the requirement calling it a “common sense” move, which had failed to pass the first time it was proposed several years ago. Broadcasters fought against certain parts of the new rule, balking at having to include specific rates for individual advertisements.

They fear including the rates will make confidential information available to commercial advertisers as well as rival stations. Don Carmichael, general manager at Green Bay’s ABC affiliate WBAY, Channel 2, called it “anticompetitive.”

“It’s also a lot of work and we’re a small station without a lot of people around to do it,” Carmichael said. “We’ll be forced to publically post our best rates, which I’m by law required to give politicians. It gives everybody else some rates to shoot at.”

Gannett Broadcasting, a division of Gannett Co. Inc., which owns this newspaper and nine others around the state, lobbied against the rule change. Broadcasters are also peeved that the new rules won’t apply to cable or other media platforms.

Facebook Acquires Glancee

Interesting.

Facebook has scooped up another startup in its path toward mobile dominance. This time, it’s Glancee, an ambient location-based service that competes with Highlight.

Court Orders Google to Stop Autocomplete

OK, now I REALLY want to know the guy’s name.

A Tokyo court has ordered that Google suspend its autocomplete search function after a Japanese man claimed it violated his privacy and cost him his job.

The case is a first involving the search function, which instantly suggests words or phrases a person may want to look for before the user has finished typing.

So far, Google, headquartered in California, has refused to halt the feature, saying it will not be regulated by Japanese law and did not violate any privacy policies, according to the Kyodo news agency.

The man at the center of the legal case has not come out publicly, but his lawyer, Hiroyuki Tomita, says his client decided to seek a court injunction after he lost his job and failed at several attempts to land a new one. Tomita said Google searches of his client’s name suggested words involving criminal acts, and included 10,000 items that defamed or disparaged him. The man, whose name was not made public, believes that’s what led to his firing and derailed his efforts to find new opportunities.

Facebook Warns About Sharing Passwords

Does anyone else think it’s funny that Facebook is nagging other companies about privacy?

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is warning employers not to demand the passwords of job applicants, saying that it’s an invasion of privacy that opens companies to legal liabilities.

The social networking company is also threatening legal action against those who violate its long-standing policy against sharing passwords.

An Associated Press story this week documented cases of job applicants who are being asked, at the interview table, to reveal their Facebook passwords so their prospective employers can check their backgrounds.

In a post on Friday, Facebook’s chief privacy of policy officer cautioned that if an employer discovers that a job applicant is a member of a protected group, the employer may open itself up to claims of discrimination if it doesn’t hire that person.

Deleted Voicemails

Give me a break.

For 51-year-old Faron Butler, the thing he cherished most after his daughter’s death was being able to hear her voice.

“Every time I had a bad day or just wanted to listen to her I’d go through my old voicemails,” Butler told ABCNews.com through tears. “I had one that I’d play over and over again. She’d be saying ‘Daddy, I love you and I miss you.’”

He said he was shocked when a few weeks ago he went to hear that familiar voice, only to find out the voicemail had been erased.

“I was going through my messages after a friend called me and was stunned when it said ‘no saved messages.’ I mean, my heart just stopped. It tears me up,” Butler said.

Butler’s daughter Rhema was 12 years old when she was diagnosed with desmoplastic cancer. She died two years later, on June 6, 2011.

Butler, who lives in Elma, Washington and has two other children, says he was offered a free trial of T-Mobile’s “voice-to-text” service when Rehema’s messages were deleted without warning. He says he called the company, asking them to recover the voicemails.

T-Mobile told Butler there was no way to get them back.

“They should have warned me, or I would have never ever done it,” Butler said. “Just complete negligence on their part.”

The voicemails were being held by the company. They don’t have any obligation to hold them indefinately. I appreciate the dad’s angst, but he should have taken the time to offload those voicemails to a personal device if they were so important to him.

Who to Follow

What is Twitter trying to tell me?

Gyroscopic Self-Leveling Pool Table

This is slick.

The Death Star’s Shoddy Trash Compactor

Indeed.

The Death Star clearly has a garbage-disposal problem. Given its size and massive personnel, the amount of waste it generates — discarded food, broken equipment, excrement, and the like — boggles the imagination. That said, I just cannot fathom how an organization as ruthless and efficiently-run as the Empire would have signed off on such a dangerous, unsanitary, and shoddy garbage-disposal system as the one depicted in the movie.

He makes a quality argument, including this:

Furthermore, why has the Empire gone to the trouble of acquiring a frightening parasitic worm-creature and having it eat all organic trash, especially given the aforementioned flaws in the design of the compactor and overall maintenance hassles?

New Nuclear Reactor Approved For First Time In 34 Years

Great. Let’s hope for more.

It’s been 34 years—and several nuclear accidents later—but a divided federal panel on Thursday licensed a utility to build nuclear reactors in the U.S. for the first time since 1978.

Waterproof your Phone

This is cool, I hope it works. Courtesy of Wisconsin’s own Bill Weir.

The camera phone age

My column for the Daily News is online. It’s called, “The camera phone age.”

Congress must not pass SOPA

My column for the Daily News is online. It’s called, “Congress must not pass SOPA.”

“Lady Chinky Eyes”

Good for Papa John’s for responding so quickly. Oh, the power of social media…

Customer Minhee Cho posted a message on Twitter along with an image of the receipt from a Manhattan location describing her as “lady chinky eyes.”

Several hours later after the message had gone viral, the Louisville, Ky.-based company formally apologized on its Facebook and Twitter pages for Cho’s experience.

The company says the employee was dismissed.

Spokeswoman Tish Muddon told the Louisville Courier-Journal ( http://cjky.it/ADcaKs ) that the company was attempting to reach Cho to apologize.

Verizon Reverses Course

Never mind.

NEW YORK (AP) — After a customer backlash, Verizon Wireless on Friday dropped a plan to start charging $2 for every payment subscribers make over the phone or online with their credit or debit cards.

In a statement on its website Friday, the company said “customer feedback” prompted the decision to drop the “convenience fee” it wanted to introduce on Jan. 15.