Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are trying to stop competitors from offering lower e-book prices.

Middle school students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.

Still, wherever there is a low-income household unboxing the family’s very first personal computer, there is an automatic inclination to think of

SAN FRANCISCO–Twitter’s roadmap will include locations, user streams, and annotations, Ryan Sarver, head of Twitter’s platform development, said Thursday at the Chirp conference here.

The company did not announce a formal roadmap, choosing instead to disclose a few additions that the company will be building in the next few months. One of the first was the addition of “places,” a more fine-grained version of location that was announced earlier by Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive.

Microblogging sensation Twitter. which has now signed up more than 100 million users, outlined on Wednesday several revenue-generating initiatives, declaring that making money was now a primary goal.

The popular Internet service hopes to snag hundreds of millions more users in coming years by making the service easier, integrating Twitter directly into Web sites and focusing more on customizing the service for mobile devices.

At the company’s first conference for Twitter developers on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams said generating revenue was among the key priorities going forward — a change of tone for a firm that had previously said it focused mainly on improving the user experience.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous plays gets a 21st century makeover in a new version of “Romeo and Juliet” which will unfold through Twitter messages and on the Youtube video website.

Entitled “Such Tweet Sorrow,” the experiment is a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Mudlark, which produces entertainment on mobile telephones.

Organizers have already outlined a contemporary “narrative arc” loosely based on the original tragedy, and the cast will improvise the rest through Tweets which have already begun to appear on the website www.suchtweetsorrow.com.

The production will take place over five weeks and allows for the characters to interact not only among themselves but also with members of the “audience.”

Each character writes their own tweets, guided by an existing storyline and diary which outlines where they are at any moment in the adventure.

A new website is betting you’re willing to dish about your co-worker’s job performance just as you would a Netflix movie or an Amazon purchase. The site, dubbed Unvarnished, came out of private beta testing last week and aims to create an open forum to rate professionals in the workplace — for better or for worse.

It’s a concept that has caused some controversy, particularly since Unvarnished allows employees to be reviewed anonymously and with no way of removing a negative review. But the co-founders, veterans of sites like LinkedIn and eBay, think there’s a market for honest, unfiltered feedback about how individuals perform in their jobs and say their site will ultimately be more useful than the carefully selected job references or curated blurbs on someone’s LinkedIn profile. “We’re trying to take how professional reputation works in the offline world and port that online,” says co-founder Peter Kazanjy.

We’ve definitely entered an era of experiment when it comes to online content, as a number of publications with a tradition in the print world are testing out approaches like building paywalls, mixing free and paid content, and limiting the amount of content that’s indexed by search engines.

But Japan’s Nikkei newspaper has taken its attempts to control access to an entirely different level: it now requires a formal request for any inbound links to its site.

The New York Times, which reported on the new policy on Thursday, notes that the newspaper market in Japan is radically different from that in the US. Although some smaller outlets are experimenting with new ways of reaching readers, most papers require subscriptions to access online content, and the barriers have kept circulation of print editions quite high compared to the US.

Who knew that the Paperwork Reduction Act could prevent government agencies from launching social media apps on their websites, but the worry was sufficient to prompt the Obama administration to clarify the matter. No need to fear the PRA, declared White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator Cass Sunstein in a memo published on Wednesday.

“Agencies and members of the public have asked whether uses of social media and Web-based interactive technologies are information collections subject to the PRA,” Sunstein noted. “Although certain uses of such media and technologies unquestionably count as information collections, many do not.” The advisory was released as a slew of federal departments are disclosing plans to make their websites more accessible and useful.

The UK’s Labour government, partnering with the Conservatives, yesterday pushed through the controversial Digital Economy bill over opposition from Liberal Democrats and some in its own party. The bill allows the UK courts to order complete blocks on websites, it requires ISPs to start sending P2P warning letters from copyright holders, and it opens the door to throttling and Internet disconnection for repeat infringement.

As we discussed yesterday, the bill was moved quickly through the “wash-up” process that occurs at the end of a Parliamentary session. Opponents and critics of the bill argued that such changes to the UK’s Internet were too important to head through Commons after a couple hours of debate; surely they could wait until after the election?

In a startling revelation, the open-source Mozilla project says that its flagship Firefox browser contains a root certificate authority that doesn’t seem to have a known owner.

It’s quite possible that this could be a legitimate root certificate that changed hands during a merger or some other transaction but the fact that Mozilla’s folks can’t seem to figure out the owner is disconcerting on many levels.

Here’s the disclosure by Kathleen Wilson, who serves as a peer for the “CA certificates module” within the Mozilla project:

“…I have not been able to find the current owner of this root. Both RSA and VeriSign have stated in email that they do not own this root.

Therefore, to my knowledge this root has no current owner and no current audit, and should be removed from NSS.”

A separate bug report identifies the root certificate authority as “RSA Security 1024 V3.”

Interestingly, that root certificate authority is shown as valid in Apple’s System Roots but not in Microsoft’s.

The risk of a root certificate authority without a valid owner can lead to all kinds of trust security issues on the fast-growing browser platform.