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MashupCamp.com has released videos of mashup classes that were held this past July. We have Ted Patrick from Adobe on Macromedia Flex 2.0, Chris Thomas with Intel on mobile mashups, and Clay Loveless giving a glimpse of Mashery.com; just to name a few of the mashup speakers.

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Via Threadwatch.org, today Valleywag publishes an article from journalist student Trent Lapinski (digest version), critizing MySpace. Lapinski argues these five points:

1. MySpace is NOT a viral success.
2. MySpace.com is Spam 2.0.
3. Tom Anderson did NOT create MySpace.
4. MySpace's CEO Chris DeWolfe is connected to a past of spam.
5. MySpace was a direct assault on Friendster.com.

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The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been went in effect since April 21, 2000 and reported yesterday by MSNBC, the FTC fined Xanga $1 million for violating that federal law.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, children who wanted to open a Xanga account didn't even have to show that level of ingenuity. Children merely had to check a box confirming they were over 13, according to FTC lawyer Mary Engle -- even if they'd previously entered a birth date indicating they were under 13.

Engle would not reveal what Xanga's explanation was for the lack of obvious fact-checking.

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With the August 4th AOL data leak and now Google releasing search data to the Brazilian government, many web surfers are up in arms.

Poisoning the Data Stream via Firefox Plugin", brought back to my attention a Firefox extension that I saw a while back that is being developed by Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum. The extension is called TrackMeNot, and currently it works by periodically making random search queries to the popular search engines. From the site:

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