Well, that didn't last long. Gmail's handy new Quote Selected Text has received a serious demotion, getting knocked back down to Labs, due to negative user feedback. According to its creators, the addition was causing too much accidental quotation -- and no one wants that, right? If you find yourself missing the feature, you can still enable it with a little help from Labs. No word on plans to move the feature back up to the bigs.
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New guidelines will see less prosecutions New CPS guidelines will seek to cut the number of people who face prosecution over offensive social networking posts.
The new mandate, set out by the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions Kier Starmer said only those whose Twitter and Facebook posts that go beyond offensive will be brought to trial.
The CPS still wants people who make threats of violence, send out and retweet malicious messages, or breach court orders to face prosecution.
However, under the new interim guidelines, drunk social networkers who post offensive comments, but apologise and delete the comments after sobering up are likely to avoid action.
The new guidelines, Mr Starmer said, aim to strike the right balance between free speech and ensuring posts stay within the law.
He said: "These interim guidelines are intended to strike the right balance between freedom of expression and the need to uphold the criminal law.
"The interim guidelines thus protect the individual from threats or targeted harassment while protecting the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humour, even if distasteful to some and painful to those subjected to it."
The new guidelines follow a number of recent high profile cases, including the arrest of a Twitter troll who mocked Olympic diver Tom Daley over the death of his father.
There was also the row over the picture of a burning poppy posted on Facebook.
Via BBCTech. is the essential new weekly iPad magazine from the makers of TechRadar.
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Following a year-and-a-half long anti-trust investigation, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is expected to escape a final determination by the Federal Trade Commission thanks to the enactment of a number of "voluntary" measures -- a consent decree which the FTC believes will address original anti-trust concerns.
The deal's details are largely unknown, but the WSJ speculates that making it easier for companies to advertise on its website and increasing ad portability may be just two of the actions planned by the search giant. FTC Chairman
Originally, Jon Leibowitz has said he expected the probe to be wrapped up by the end of 2012, Politico reports. A final jugement has not yet been made.
Google, like many enormous enterprises, shares a long and entangled history with both the FTC and the Department of Justice. In addition to its home-grown market dominance, acquisitions like DoubleClick, AdMob and ITA have placed Google squarely in the sights of government trust-busters on more than one occasion. Google has periodically been scrutinized for potentially leveraging its search dominance to unfairly push its own services, like Google Maps and Google Places. Whether it does or not has remained a pivotal question, however.
Another anti-trust probe is investigating Google for possibly mishandling its Motorola patent portfolio by not properly licensing patents and pursuing court-issued injunctions to block competitors' products.
Incidentally, Google was smacked with a $22.5 million fine earlier this year -- the largest fine of its kind ever imposed by the FTC -- over a cookie-based debacle where Safari users were misled into falsely believing they had opted out of certain types of advertising.
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