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Okay, if you're just catching up with this story, go read this first -- Netflix's announcement that it was canceling its second Netflix Prize challenge over privacy concerns.

Next, head over to 33bits.org, blog of one of the co-authors of the paper on de-anonymizing Netflix users from the first Netflix Prize challenge data, to read the authors' open letter to Netflix about the canceled second challenge.

Data privacy researchers will be happy to work with you rather than against you. We believe that this c...

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1. A German Library for the 21st Century (Der Spiegel) -- But browsing in Europeana is just not very pleasurable. The results are displayed in thumbnail images the size of postage stamps. And if you click through for a closer look, you're taken to the corresponding institute. Soon you're wandering helplessly around a dozen different museum and library Web sites -- and you end up lost somewhere between the "Vlaamse Kunstcollectie" and the "Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa." Would it not be preferable to incorp...

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Acadia Pharmaceuticals of San Diego and its Canadian partner Biovail are continuing to move ahead with pimavanserin. The experimental drug, you might recall, failed last September in a trial testing it as a treatment for Parkinsons disease-related psychosis.

Pimavanserin is Acadias lead drug candidate, which may help explain why Acadia (NASDAQ: ACAD) and its partner arent willing to give up on it.

The companies now say they expect to meet with the ...

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Amid considerable speculation about a potential merger, San Diegos Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: LEAP) has trimmed about 4 percent of its workforce and closed or transferred 38 of its Cricket Communications storefronts.

Leap spokesman Greg Lund confirms that the flat-rate wireless service provider laid off a total of 180 employees nationwide on March 1 as part of a cost-cutting review, which the company did not announce. The cutbacks occurred after Leap rep...

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San Diegos Helix Wind (NASDAQ OTC Bulletin Board: HLXW), which makes vertical-axis wind turbines, today named Scott Weinbrandt, the president and board chairman, to replace co-founder Ian Gardner as CEO. Gardner also resigned from the companys board, along with another director, Gene Hoffman. In its statement, Helix Wind also says it also has been in discussions with an investor to complete a financing of up to $1 million to be used for general w...

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Next week, O'Reilly's Research Director Roger Magoulas, will lead an exciting panel discussion on Big Data. The focus will be on the piles of data that companies have been collecting, and are just beginning to analyze:

The internet and social media create a mountain of random, unstructured, and at times ephemeral data by-products, which may appear to be trash. Yet, one persons trash is anothers treasure. From FaceBook to Netflix, people are spending more time sharing their thoughts, opinions, plans and pe...

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New Radar contributor Mac Slocum will be joining O'Reilly as Managing Editor, Online on February 1st.

Google's decision to lift censorship on its
href="http://www.google.cn/">Chinese search results, and perhaps
shutter operations in China altogether, initially looked like
straightforward action-reaction: you hack me, I'll retaliate. But
there's more going on here. Google's
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html">public
revelation was the first sign. Elevating the matter ...

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1. Four Possible Explanations for Google's Big China Move (Ethan Zuckerman) -- I'm staying out of the public commentary on this one, but Ethan's fourth point was wonderfully thought provoking: a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers whove targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today. It's deliciously provocative to ask what the world's strongest tec...

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The 8th Ignite Seattle is this Tuesday, 12/1. We've got an amazing set of speakers and fun opening activity. We are once again at the King Cat Theatre in Downtown Seattle.

Doors open at 7PM. The contest will start at 7:30 and the talks will begin at 8:30. You can track Ignite Seattle updates at http://igniteseattle.com.

Here is our list of awesome speakers:

Benjamin Franklin Intellect: without an outlet in the world

Do we remain in awe of Ben Franklins capacity and accomplishments or do we take on ...

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After the recent Web 2.0 Expo NY--a sprawling, week-long conference and exhibition--I ducked into the Morgan Library to catch "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy." A one-room show about an 18th century novelist seemed like the perfect antidote to a week of tech talk in the Death Star Javits Center.

As I'd hoped, the Morgan focuses on a handful of objects from Austen's life, and the commentary is thoughtful. I was surprised, though, to find myself thinking that had Twitter been around in Austen's...

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1. Paywall Performance for News -- the National Business Review (NBR) in New Zealand went to a paywall in mid-July, and Foo Camper Lance Wiggs says their visitor numbers reveal a grim picture. As a commenter says, of course, visitor numbers go down but NBR makes money directly from the visitors that stay. I'm curious to see the effect on advertisers now the site's incentives are not to spray their load far and wide to land on as many eyeballs as possible. An interesting canary in the mine for Rupert's paywa...

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1. A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor (MIT Tech Review) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Uses RFID's induction technology which means the power source can be up to a meter away. Proof of concept was implanted in a moth to sense central nervous system activity.
2. New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future o...

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Brian McConnell's latest coding effort, World Wide Lexicon Toolbar,
meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two
days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any
browser that doesn't have it installed.

Brian is a highly adaptive programmer. With roots in the telecom
industry and several start-ups on his resume, he also wrote

Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations
for O'Reilly. The

World Wide Lexicon project
he's been workin...

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1. Tineye -- reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used. Check out their cool searches.
2. PDF Pirate -- upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc.
3. Flare -- an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. BSD-licensed, modelled on Prefuse. When there's a visualisation library for every platform, will we start to get people who know how to make t...

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1. The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of the...

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Guest blogger Carl Hewitt, Emeritus at MIT in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, is known for his research on strongly paraconsistent logic, privacy-friendly client cloud computing, norms and commitments for organizational computing, and concurrent programming languages, models, and theories.

Aggregators (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) tend to believe that personal information is a valuable asset for several reasons. It is valuable to advertisers because it enables gre...

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