May I Take Your Trident? Links for Friday, 1/20/2012 January 20, 2012
Webmonkey - Google Abandons Anonymous Accounts With New Signup Form:
In addition to the Google+ integration, signing up for a Google account now means getting a profile page and a Gmail account; gone are the days when you could use an outside email address with your Google account. It is still possible to go in and delete the Google+, Google profile and Gmail portions of your new Google account after it’s been created, but given that few people ever change their default settings it’s safe to assume that most people won’t. It should come as no surprise that Google is working hard to get more users signed up for Google+, after all, despite marginal momentum, Google+ is far behind Facebook when it comes to signing up new users.
The Atlantic – Microsoft Calls for Gay Marriage in Washington State:
At Microsoft, we pride ourselves on our products and services, our brand, and our global reach. But unquestionably, our employees are our greatest asset. As other states recognize marriage equality, Washington's employers are at a disadvantage if we cannot offer a similar, inclusive environment to our talented employees, our top recruits and their families. Employers in the technology sector face an unprecedented national and global competition for top talent. Despite progress made in recent years with domestic partnership rights, same-sex couples in Washington still hold a different status from their neighbors. Marriage equality in Washington would put employers here on an equal footing with employers in the six other states that already recognize the committed relationships of same-sex couples - Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. This in turn will help us continue to compete for talent.
Vintage Girlie Mags - Cavalier Vol. 14, No. 131 (May 1964):
Today, in a huge victory for women’s health, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that most employers will be required to cover contraception in their health plans, along with other preventive services, with no cost-sharing such as co-pays or deductibles. This means that after years of trying to get birth control covered to the same extent that health plans cover Viagra, our country will finally have nearly universal coverage of contraception.
Fast Company – The Return of LiveJournal:
According to LiveJournal general manager Anjelika Petrochenko, LiveJournal's planning a major 2012 push based around attracting new users to community sites. Petrochenko told Fast Company that the blogging service was planning between 10-50 new community sites by the end of 2012. These new community sites will offer organizers and admins highly detailed metrics and statistics on user activity that appear to be more detailed than Facebook. Petrochenko also stressed that LiveJournal accounts do not have to be tied to a real name/identity and offered greater anonymity than other social networks.
LiveJournal's leadership has made it clear that their future American business strategy lies in generating new traffic rather than catering to the service's current small-but-loyal membership. The challenge for Petrochenko and other executives at LiveJournal will be redefining the brand's identity in a crowded media marketplace.
MedicalXpress.com - Study: Quebec ban on fast-food ads reduced consumption of junk food:
"The advertising lobby is very fond of saying bans don't work, that regulations don't work. There's been a huge policy debate as to whether advertising bans work, and that's why we decided to study the Quebec example, because it was brought up a lot by advertisers as proving their point. And what we discovered is, if you're just averaging overall kids, if you don't control for anything, you're just throwing in enough noise so that it's not statistically significant. When we started controlling for things, we realized that there was something else going on."
The Guardian - Iran confirms death sentence for 'porn site' web programmer:
A year after his arrest, the 35-year-old appeared in a state television programme confessing to a series of crimes in connection with a porn website. On the basis of his TV confessions, he was convicted of designing and moderating adult materials online by a court in Tehran, which handed down death penalty. Malekpour later retracted his confessions in a letter sent from prison, in which he said they had been made under duress. According to Malekpour's family, he is a permanent resident of Canada and is a programmer who wrote photo-uploading software that was used by a porn website without his knowledge
Found via Violet Blue’s Pulp Tech.