This week’s entry comes from the U.K. where two British tourists were arrested for jokingly tweeting that they were going to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe” according to the Daily Mail.

Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting were handcuffed and kept under armed guard for 12 hours after being arrested in Los Angeles upon their landing.

The Department of Homeland Security flagged Van Bryan as a potential threat after tweeting about his upcoming trip to Hollywood: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”

Despite the obvious knowledge that the term “destroy” is British slang for “party,” the officers weren’t buying their explanation for the offending tweet.

Absurdly enough, Van Bryan was also questioned about a previous tweet that said he was going to dig up Marilyn Monroe. The tweet was apparently quoting Family Guy.

It’s reported that the officers looked through Bryan’s suitcase looking for spades and shovels convinced that Bunting was his “look out” while he raided the dead star’s tomb.

They were held for 12 hours overnight in separate cells. It’s reported that Mexican drug criminals kept them company throughout the evening.

The next morning, the friends were driven to the airport and put on a plane home via Paris.

Bunting was quoted as saying that they were not allowed in the country because of Bryan’s tweet. She apparently burst out laughing when she was accused of being the “look out” while Bryan raided Monroe’s tomb.

The most humorous part of all of this is Leigh’s charge sheet where federal officials said that Bryan had posted his intention to commit crimes on his “Tweeter Web site account.” The federal government arrests somebody for using social media and can’t even get the name right.

The friends were told that they must apply for visas from the U.S. embassy in London before traveling to the U.S. again.

It’s not surprising that Bryan’s twitter account is now locked down to only confirmed followers.

Take this a lesson, friends. The feds don’t appreciate you taking to your “Tweeter” to announce the upcoming party you are going to have in the U.S. They apparently don’t watch Family Guy either so they’re not going to get your joke.

The research, which polled 3000 adults, revealed that while the average adult freely divulges a string of personal details on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, most would not give friends or colleagues their PIN number.

Despite 86 per cent of adults saying they would never hand over their PIN to someone they know, one in twenty people have their home address visible on a social networking sites.

Similarly, whilst only five per cent of people would let their best mate have access to their PIN number, 50 per cent of respondents have their relationship status visible online. 28 per cent also have their partner’s name visible and 20 per cent have the name of their employer visible online.

Unbelievably nearly two thirds of people also have their date of birth on networking sites which is always a security question when telephoning banks or building societies.

Speaking on the findings Paul Wooding, Head of UK Public Sector for NetApp comments: “It’s ironic that so many people are cautious with friends and family when it comes to security details, yet include really personal data on social networking sites.”

“It’s really alarming that people have so much confidential information like a home address available on their Facebook profile. As soon as you update your profile saying you are off on holiday all your hundreds of friends and now potentially anyone searching on Google, will know your home is empty for the next few weeks.”

The poll also revealed that a blasé seven per cent of people said that the whole point of social networking sites was so people can keep track of you and know what you’re up to.

Although a quarter of people did admit that the amount of information they had freely available on the World Wide Web did sometimes worry them.

But when it comes to our nearest and dearest it’s a different story, with less than half of people trusting their partner with their PIN number for their main cash card.

But it’s not just our friends who we don’t trust – three quarters of people said they do not trust the government with their personal data and more than two thirds also said that they feel that the government acts like Big Brother, and knows far too much about them.

For more than half of Brits (52 per cent) the biggest bone of contention is the government having access to our medical details.

The next big issue for respondents was data records on salaries, which 20 per cent objected to being held by the powers that be. One in twenty British adults were also sensitive about the government holding information on the amount of benefits we receive.

These issues were reflected in the concern around the security of government data shown by the poll. 78 per cent of those polled advised that incidents of public sector workers losing laptops containing personal data on members of the public worried them, with medical information and then salary information being the items they are most worried about being leaked.

A spokesman for NetApp added: “The risks of the government data being leaked or lost is minimal to the risks of security lapses on social networking sites. People need to look after themselves and really think about the information they make visible.”

“Technology today means that organisations are well equipped to be able to store and manage data effectively. The fear is perhaps heightened because of high profile cases of data breaches but in reality many of us are sharing very personal and sometimes sensitive information with the whole world without giving it much thought.”

INFORMATION PEOPLE DIVULGE ON NETWORKING SITES
 
Full name: 92 per cent
Hometown: 62 per cent
Date of Birth: 59 per cent
Relationship status: 49 per cent
Secondary school: 40 per cent
Marital status: 33 per cent
University/College: 30 per cent
Partners name: 28 per cent
Employer: 20 per cent
Job title: 18 per cent
Parental status: 17 per cent
Primary school: 16 per cent
Children’s names: 9 per cent
Full address: 5 per cent

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Unfortunately, the subject of this article isn’t a new line of power tools (wouldn’t that be interesting?).  Instead, “Taylor Woodrow Construction has adopted the Google Search Appliance as the enterprise search technology to improve the efficiency of the company Intranet,” according to IT Backbones.

“[I]n the area of affordable enterprise search, the Google Search Appliance is largely unrivalled,” said Sean McAndrew, a business systems analyst at Taylor Woodrow.  “Google has the added benefit of users familiarity with Google.com so the learning curve for implementation was really simple.  Users noticed the benefits of the improved search immediately, and there was no requirement to develop and rollout an extensive training course as is usually needed with a new system.”

If you’re feeling a need to see quantitative information, then according to ComputerWeekly’s Warwick Ashford, “McAndrew said the clearest indication of a return on investment has been the 25% reduction in calls to the support department from users who were unable to find the information they needed.”  So the Google Search Appliance saved time and money; maybe it’s not as nifty as a nail gun, but it’s having some of the same effects.

Also, it’s worth considering that the Appliances used by Taylor Woodrow may be some of the very first ones manufactured by Dell and distributed by Ingram Micro.  No one expected a drop-off in quality, and, well, their lack of suspicions have been confirmed.

A British youngster ordered a PlayStation 2 off of eBay for 95 pounds, or around $193 in US currency, a ridiculous price, considering I saw a dozen of them at the local pawn shop for $80 a year and a half ago.

Regardless, it wasn’t exactly a rip-off in this case, considering the yonker received a package with over 65,000 Euros stacked inside, or the equivalent of $90,000.

And the fool told his parents. And those fools told the cops, who are holding the money while eBay and the government investigate.

The 16-year-old can apply for the money’s return after September 22, if the cops don’t find (and they’ll sure look, mind you) a reason to hold it further.

Like I said, not the safest plan I have in mind, considering goons can most certainly track the youngster down and reclaim their money. But, with that kind of money, you can buy a new house and hide out until the coast is clear.

Golden Rule of Found Money: Unless it’s obvious it belongs to a crippled old lady who lost it by some unfortunate twist of fate, it’s your money and nobody needs to know about it until they need to know about it.

But I wouldn’t follow my advice if I were you.  

The more-bandwidth argument has been made most convincingly (read: most unemotionally) by British Telecommunications, when the company’s CTO Matt Beal opined that with enough bandwidth, there would be no need for traffic shaping, or prioritizing traffic, a goal that is exactly what has gotten the pro-Net Neutrality movement up in arms.

Let me put that simpler: Increase bandwidth capacity and the argument that traffic prioritization is necessary is moot.

With that in mind, it seems rather convenient that three of the five authors of a study comparing the costs of "differentiated" and "undifferentiated" networks are employed by AT&T.

This type of thing isn’t rare, companies commission studies all the time. Just when everybody was down on AOL’s enlistment of Goodmail’s services, Time Inc. released a study about the benefits of CertifiedEmail. Last month, Pitney Bowes, a company that bases its business around snail mail, played an interesting numbers game with a survey about email.

And who could forget Senator Ted Stevens’ Verizon-funded Net Neutrality poll disguised to be a poll about TV?

The point is, words and numbers can be put together to say anything you want. But for the remainder of this article, we’ll assume an AT&T-sponsored study on one of the core technical issues of the Net Neutrality debate hasn’t been doctored up.

“The study makes clear that there are substantial additional costs for the extra capacity required to operate networks in which all traffic is treated alike, and carrying traffic that needs to still be assured performance as specified in service level agreements (SLAs),” said principal investigator Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the institution AT&T made out the check to.

About 60 to 100 percent more costly in terms of extra capacity, according to the press release about the study.

“Clearly, an undifferentiated network in this context is less efficient and more expensive,” said coauthor K.K. Ramakrishnan of AT&T Labs. “We believe understanding the real impacts of the alternative strategies is important as the debate about network architecture unfolds.”

However, TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick, who’s been keeping track of exaggerations on both sides of the issue, notes:

It also doesn’t consider all the costs associated with a non-neutral network.… requiring 60% more bandwidth does not mean 60% additional cost. Furthermore… the cost of bandwidth keeps dropping, so it actually gets cheaper and cheaper over time. However, the cost of labor associated with setting up and maintaining a non-neutral network is likely to increase over time.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the limitless capacity fiber will offer once available everywhere (in the US, most likely 10-15 years later than the rest of the world), which the incumbents will own…

British Man Pushes Google On Defamation

If this case were in the US, where search engines and other websites generally can claim no responsibility over third party content, Retkin’s case probably wouldn’t make it out of a lawyer’s office. British law works a little differently.

A report in The Independent said that in Britain, the same legal protection is conditional. If a company does not have notice of a complaint and time to act upon it, they have some insulation from these claims.

Retkin has complained about online postings accusing him of running a fraudulent business appearing in Google’s search results. Though the report said Google claimed to have removed material and blacklisted links to it, a query for ‘Dotworlds registrar’ at press time turned up a mailing list post with those accusations as the top result.

Google’s response made the usual claim that the company is not responsible for the results of a query. "Google has absolutely no connection, control or ability to direct or influence the content of web pages which may be shown as links within any given set of search results," Google’s legal counsel Harjinder Obhi said in the report.

UPDATE: For commentary from Retkin, see our chat with him here.

Google: The British Are Coming For GMail!

Late last month, IIIR filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel Google’s ownership of the GMail trademark, alleging the company had improperly acquired their application for it in 2004.

When Google noticed their application for GMail was submitted four days after IIIR’s, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company bought an earlier application, dating back to the late Nineties, from Precision Research, Inc. Based on that earlier application, the USPTO granted GMail to Google.

But Shane Smith, Chairman and CEO of IIIR, claims that application was "worthless," as Precision Research’s GMail product had been abandoned at the time the application was filed. Smith says that one of the requirements to obtain the rights to a trademark is to prove that the mark is currently in use. IIIR is prepared to argue that it wasn’t.

"We have some quite serious doubts as to whether the trademark was in use at the time," Smith told WebProNews. "We suspect it wasn’t. We think it was quietly dropped before the application was made."

If so, says Smith, Google bought something knowingly or unknowingly that was not legitimate. In the complaint itself, IIIR alleges Precision Research knew it was not legitimate when they sold the application. Smith says the ball is now in Google’s court to prove they acquired the application properly.

"Google have made a monstrous mess of their intellectual property requirements around their GMail product," said Smith, citing trademark troubles in several countries, including the one involving his own company in the UK. "They must have given absolutely no thought at all to their product."

IIIR launched their GMail product in the US in 2002. The "G" stood for "Graphiti," a combination of "graphics with integrated text intelligence." A subscription service offered through the their website, it was intended to allow stock brokers to incorporate IIIR’s equity and currency data for investment banks.

"Our product was stopped in its tracks in 2004," said Smith, referring to when Google launched GMail. "We’ve had to completely drop a product line."

Smith confirmed that if the USPTO granted IIIR the GMail trademark, the company would seek monetary damages from Google based upon the value of the mark. According to a press release on the company’s website, the GMail mark is valued between $48 and $64 million. IIIR will not, however ask for transfer of the gmail.com domain, only that Google change the name of its email service.

Smith says Google has refused to negotiate with IIR since 2004, and cites the recent dispute between Apple and Cisco over the term "iPhone" as an example of how "responsible companies" handle situations like these. That dispute was settled in a matter of weeks. Instead, he says, Google has been "flexing financial muscle" by tying up the case in court.

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Among the documents seized were satellite photographs taken from Google Earth, according to the Telegraph, detailing tented barracks for about 1000 soldiers, lavatories, and parking areas of lightly armored vehicles. On the back, the insurgents had written latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.

An intelligence officer expressed concern that information gleaned from Google Earth was being used to plan terrorist attacks, focusing on their most vulnerable areas.

The discovery hearkens back to worries expressed by the US military in August of 2005. Though photos are often up to two years old, US base Camp Anaconda was easily located using Google’s popular tool. Upon request, Google has often blocked out sensitive government locations, like buildings surrounding the White House.

But even blocking out locations may not be satisfactory for British soldiers in harm’s way. Members of the Royal Green Jackets, who are based in Basra, said if they are injured by insurgent attacks aided by Google Earth, Google could be facing lawsuits.

The Telegraph quotes an unidentified soldier:

The US and England aren’t the only countries who’ve expressed security concerns about Google Earth. In fact, it’s become a quite regular complaint from governments around the world.

Also in August 2005, Australian officials asked Google to remove or censor images of a nuclear reactor.

In October the same year, Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam worried that Google Earth could increase threats to developing nations, which are already danger of, and more vulnerable to, terrorist attacks.

In August last year, a full-scale replica of the Chinese-Indian border was spotted via Google Earth further into the mainland of China – an apparent military training area.

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YouTube Case File #1: Encouraging Reckless Driving

The experiment is not exactly proof that marijuana has no ill effects on driving, or that driving is actually improved by it. It is a video of just one stoner, after all, who drove more precisely while baked than he did clear-eyed. It’s also doubtful that the producers of the British video meant to encourage driving under the influence of any drug, though that may be the indirect effect, but only to illustrate the issue may need to be revisited.

If they’re lucky, the authorities won’t track them down the way Norwegian police did a 20-something speedster who videoed himself topping speeds of 150 mph on the highway. Boast-posting that video on YouTube ultimately got him a fine of $1,300.

YouTube Case File #2: How To Break Into Somebody’s House

Or, depending on how you look at it, “How To Get Into Your Own House If Your Key’s Inside On The Table.”

A nearly 300-part instructional video series demonstrating how to pick various locks made international news this week. Shocked homeowners and parents shouted in unison, “that looks like my house!”

Locksmiths, according to this article, either agreed with parents that information shouldn’t be publicly accessible because it was dangerous to have teenagers running around knowing how to pick their neighbors’ locks, or because that knowledge could put them out of a job, or because of both.

But then, it’s not like you can’t google that information for a number of sources.

YouTube Case File #3: All’s Viewable In Love and War

You may not condone donkey love, even if obscured by night-vision, but that doesn’t stop it from being posted on YouTube alongside blurry ragtop scroggin’ or the felling of Iraqi and American soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.

Jeff Diehl, at 10ZenMonkeys.com has rounded up a bevy of raw footage from the Iraq War, complete with Apache helicopter footage and dash-mounted video from the streets. You know you want to see it; the sublime is irresistible, even if (or especially if) a potential violation of YouTube terms of service.

So maybe killing, carnal exploits, how to burgle your neighbor, and going 0-420 in under four minutes on public highways aren’t the most edifying pursuits for the impressionable. But you know you’ve clicked, or plan to click, on all the aforementioned links in this article, too.

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The study was conducted by Simply Business, which, as “the UK’s leading online commercial and business finance intermediary and facilitate appropriate solutions for small and medium-sized businesses,” is in a position to be an authority on such matters. It surveyed 200 of its small business customers to arrive at these figures.

David Walmsley, the head of marketing at Simply Business, spoke to Business Credit Management about the findings. “Small business owners are hands-on and like to compare business products and services,” he said. “However, business products and especially business services can be far more complex.”

Walmsley then gave his explanation for why so many of the British small business owners have turned away from Google. “While Google is the dominant force on the Internet, our survey shows how much more determined business owners are to thoroughly research, compare and buy online than the average consumer.”

Google is still doing quite well in the Britain, though. As Business Credit Management reported, “the latest statistics for the UK’s search market indicate that Google has a 75% share of the market.”

The Simply Business survey found that the “Recruitment & Construction / Tradesmen industries use Google the most, 70% & 65% respectively,” and that “Retail is the most search intensive’ industry with 45% searching multiple times a day.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.