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Domain: onlineathens.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to onlineathens.com.
Stories · 3
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Rental Business Aaron's Admits Role In Spying On Customers
New submitter bhv writes "After firmly denying that it used software on its rent-to-own computers to spy on customers, including capturing passwords, sensitive financial information and images of private intimate moments, Atlanta-based Aaron's has owned up to the practice in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission." -
Restrictions On Social Sites Proposed In Georgia
A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents' permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as MySpace and Facebook, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting: "[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of a company failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both." The recently offered MySpace parental tools fall short of the bill's requirements. This coverage from the Athens Banner-Herald quotes Facebook's CPO saying that federal law forbids the company to allow anyone but the account creator to access it..
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Student Creates On-Line Poker Playing Program
Psyber Samurai writes "Online-Athens has this story about Paul Apostolik, a cognitive science and computer science student at the University of Georgia that has created a program that plays the risk-free online video poker sites. The program takes over the screen and actually reads the cards off the screen then determines which cards to hold and which cards to discard. I've run it, and it is extremely fun to watch it play. Yes, it does win over the long term as it collects many, many tokens."