Humane working conditions across seas ... now that's innovative

​Last week, we told readers about the massive protest of Apple products, with hundreds of thousands of consumers turning in petitions to retail shops, including downtown San Francisco, amid reports over inhumane working conditions at Apple's suppliers.

But today, Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, tried his best to diffuse those reports by telling reporters his company is "the best" at keeping its suppliers in line.

Here's exactly what Cook said:

"I would tell you that no one in our industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple. We are constantly audition facilities, going deep into the supply chain, looking for problems, finding problems, and fixing problems. And we report everything, because we believe that transparency is so very important in this area."

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​Happy FuckCIAFriday!

Anonymous, the Internet hacking group, may or may not have have achieved one of its biggest hits to date if in fact it is responsible for taking down the CIA website today.

But it seems not even Anon members know for sure whether the shadowy Internet hacktivists is responsible for the all-day take-down.

Initially, at about 3:10 p.m. EST, a Twitter account speaking on behalf of the shadowy group claimed "cia.gov DOWN. #UMAD?#Anonymous." By 4 p.m., the CIA site was still down, and whether it could be traced to Anoymous didn't seem to matter anymore -- Mission accomplished! As one of the Twitter accounts affiliated with Anonymous stated, "We do it for the lulz," referring to the popular online abbreviation "for laughs."

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Josh Lowensohn, CNET

Change.org petitioners call for an "ethical iPhone" at S.F. Apple store.

Concerned Apple customers will be descending on the downtown Apple store today, where they will deliver petitions from local consumers demanding for a more "ethical iPhone."

iPhone activists across the nation have been criticizing Apple for its "appalling" working conditions in factories overseas, including death from explosions and maiming.

San Francisco's effort is part of a larger, national movement to pressure Apple and its suppliers for safer, healthier working conditions offshore. To show they are serious, consumers are delivering more than 255,000 signatures to major Apple retail stores across the nation.

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​Over the years, whenever Facebook has made changes, people have inevitably complained --  on Facebook -- about the changes Facebook made to Facebook. "I'm leaving Facebook," those people would declare, on Facebook. Of course, few of them ever actually left Facebook.

Until recently, I have usually found this amusing. I've been working on the Web for a long time, and I know that whenever changes are made, people complain for a day or two, but they always get used to the newly tweaked site and often ultimately decide that it's better after all.

Such has been the case with Facebook. People freaked out a few years ago when real-time status updates were implemented (you no longer had to reload the page to see new stuff). I assume that if this feature were removed today, people would freak out even more over its absence -- and they'd be right to do so since the change was an improvement. (Of course, none of this stuff is actually worth freaking out over. All of it comes under the heading of First World Problems.)

So I have a high bar for deciding that a change is actually bad. Facebook has lately been leaping over that bar. First came the Ticker, which after months I'm still unable to totally ignore as it pushes the most mundane of my friends' activities into my face. Ameliorating the problem is possible, but arduous -- you have to opt out of it one friend at a time.

That, though, was just a sign of things to come.
 
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Follow this guy, and be sure to miss the sobriety checkpoints

​Last week, Twitter users were outraged by the company's new policy to allow censorship country-by-country -- not that this will have any influence in places like China or Iran, where tweeting is entirely blocked.

In any event, the new policy is getting its first real test after Brazil filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco company. The Brazilian government is less than pleased with Twitter for allowing users to tweet locations of upcoming sobriety checkpoints, giving drunk drivers a chance to elude the cops. 

According to Gizmodo, more than 300,000 users are following the Twitter account that posted the locations of the DUI checkpoints as well as locations of police radars, and Brazil says that's essentially promoting drinking and driving.
 
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Grow up, Facebook!

​You don't want to piss-off nursing mothers, who are already sleep-deprived. But Facebook is braving a fight with breastfeeding women who are joining a worldwide protest this morning, calling on the Bay Area company to stop deleting their nursing photos on Facebook. As we write, Bay Area mothers are congregating outside the company's headquarters in Menlo Park for a massive nurse-in. (We can't wait to see those photos on Facebook!)

Women are sick and tired of Facebook suspending accounts and removing posted photos of mothers nursing their infants, said Emma Kwasnica, a Canadian mom who traveled to California for the breastfeeding protest.

After her account was -- again -- suspended over her nursing photos, Kwasnica spoke with Facebook staff who told her they had no plans to stop the deletions of these baby-nursing photos. To make matters worse, Facebook removed some 250,000 supporters from the "Hey Facebook! Breastfeeding is Not Obscene" official petition group, which has been active since 2007, she said.

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​Given how Silicon Valley moguls flee from the term "media company," you'd almost think it was as bad as "child-porn merchant." But whether they like it or not, companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are media companies. They don't have precisely the same business models as News Corp., Disney, or Viacom, but that doesn't matter a bit.

Sorry, folks, but if you present information to the public and sell ads against it, you're a media company.

Google has long eschewed the term. It makes sense if you consider the stock-market valuations of tech companies vs. media companies. Wall Street loves tech. With media, investors tend to be fair-weather fans at best.

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​A Lativan man is being accused of a massive online hijacking scheme where he manipulated stock prices, making more than $850,000 in illegal profits from trading firms, including one in San Mateo.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit in San Francisco this week, claiming Igors Nagaicevs' clever but illegal scheme was a violation of the Securities Exchange Act, and cost his victims more than $2 million in losses.

According to the claim, Nagaicevs, 34, hijacked online accounts at least 159 times over the course of a year, and then traded secure stocks as an authorized trader as a way to manipulate the prices.

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​Last week, just as two ill-conceived anti-piracy bills were disintegrating in Congress in the face of a massive online protest, the FBI, with help from foreign governments, was busting Megaupload, one of the biggest sources of pirated digital goods.

The timing was interesting, though the feds say it was unrelated to the debate over SOPA and PIPA, the bills that, among their many other problems, would have held innocent third parties like search engines and payments processors responsible for the actions of pirates.

The bust, which involved not only the arrests of several of Megaupload's officers, but also the seizures of domain names, equipment, and other assets, proved that there are already mechanisms in place to target pirates. Even if new legislation is needed to strengthen enforcement or patch holes in existing laws, that legislation need not be insane and need not transparently pander to the loopy desires of the media industry.

The people who ran Megaupload were alleged criminals, and they got busted. That's how it's supposed to work.

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Courtesy of Virgin America Airlines

​It's not quite on par with Hungary's idea to erect a statue of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, but Virgin America Airlines -- based in Silicon Valley -- came up with its own creative way of honoring Jobs' memory.

According to MacRumors.com, Virgin Airlines -- perhaps best known for flying homeless chihuahuas across country -- has dedicated an entire jet plane to Jobs. To be sure we know which plane is his, the airline has painted one of Jobs' famous sayings, "Stay hungry, stay foolish," on the side of the Airbus A320, just below the cockpit window.

The quote came from Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, where he noted that it was originally used in The Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s.

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