Google, Facebook, and Skype, oh my!

A big corporate PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, tried to entice USA Today to lambaste a Google feature called Social Circle, on privacy grounds. It also encouraged a security blogger to write an op-ed attacking Google on the product. Burson would not say the name of its client. But instead of taking the bait, USA Today did due diligence and consulted experts who said that Social Circle was small potatoes compared to more pressing privacy stories. Instead it published a story about the Burston “whisper campaign” against Google on behalf of a secret client.

Facebook has leaked access to millions of users’ photographs, profiles and other personal information because of a years-old bug that overrides individual privacy settings, researchers from Symantec said.

Just days after reports that Google and Facebook were interested in partnering with, and possibly buying VoIP company Skype, Microsoft announced that it was buying the company for $8.56 billion in cash.

Lighting Science creates wireless-controlled lighting compatible with Android devices.

Google announced a new generation of Chrome OS–based laptops at the company’s I/O developer conference here Wednesday.

The new device will be called the Chromebook, and its interface will be based entirely on Google’s Chrome browser. In other words, everything you do with a Chromebook will be on and through the web.

Summary of items covered at Google Android I/O conference.

“Does Sen. James Inhofe’s heave-inducing description of the postmortem pic of Osama bin Laden have you more anxious than ever to eyeball the photo President Barack Obama won’t let you see? (At least until Julian Assange gets his grabby paws on it.)”

“So it happened again today. A totally different aim bot started bothering me to look at it’s webcam or something or other. My second round with an aim bot took a couple more tries, but in the end, it too ceased conversing with me. Was it something I said? Oh, yes, it was, it was ‘) drop table logs; –. Perhaps I need to be a better conversationalist, I keep driving these web cam girls away.”

“The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is trying to identify where highly radioactive water from the No.1 reactor’s containment vessel is flowing to, as the reactor is believed to have suffered a meltdown.”

“Federal regulators ordered in-depth inspections Tuesday at a nuclear power plant run by the Tennessee Valley Authority in northern Alabama after deciding the failure of an emergency cooling system there could have been a serious safety problem.”

“Google, a pioneer of self-driving cars, is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state where they could be legally operated on public roads.”