Earlier this month I had the chance to visit Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto. I spent my time there talking to a number of senior engineers and scientists about the exciting technology they’re working on, much of it related to the Internet of Things (a trend I’ve paid particularly close attention to over the past 18 months).





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Countries negotiating a deal to curb trade in fake and pirated goods are close to reaching an agreement in talks that have raised concerns among digital rights advocates, U.S. trade officials said on Friday.

“The agreement can be concluded soon if other participants make it a priority to achieve such progress now,” Nefeterius McPherson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, said in a statement.

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.

The Internet secured itself a prevailing role in news media on Monday, reeling in one of journalism’s most coveted prizes for the very first time.

ProPublica, an independent, non-profit online newsroom, was the first online organization to win a Pulitzer Prize, which was announced at Columbia’s Journalism School on Monday afternoon at a ceremony for the 94th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama, and Music.

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?

Facebook’s lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company’s threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook — where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.

You should read the full story, but basically, he built a simple crawler for public Facebook info, initially for his own purposes. He made sure that Facebook’s robots.txt didn’t block such crawlers — and he also emailed someone at Facebook (who he had dealt with before), but didn’t hear back from anyone. As his crawler worked, it started collecting a bunch of interesting data, and so he set up a website to let people explore some of this (again, public) data.

After playing with some of the data himself, he started making some interesting maps and charts with the data, and did a simple analysis of geographic locations of Facebook friend connections to show people what you could do with the data. He noted that if others (such as professional researchers) wanted to dig into the data, he would let them access a version of the data set (with identifying info stripped). The chart he released got picked up by a variety of sites and quickly got passed around.