Adobe has rejiggered its DRM software for the Flash platform, combining a number of access control features under the rubric of Flash Access 2.0. The new platform can give content providers all sorts of ways to offer media content securely, including controlling what type of output devices can display the content—in effect, Adobe it enabling HDCP and broadcast control flags for Flash content.

Adobe is touting the revised Flash Access platform as a way for content providers to reach the widest possible audience (assuming those content providers don't want to provide content for the 86 million iPhone OS devices out in the wild) and serving as an easy add-on to its Flash Media Server product. With a new SDK, it can also be integrated with secure downloads and what Adobe is calling HTTP Dynamic Streaming, which is essentially Apple's proposed HTTP Live Streaming standard with an XML-based manifest file (instead of a plain-text playlist file) and which so far only works with Flash Player or Adobe AIR.

If serving secure content to Flash clients only seems like a good business model, however, then you'll probably be glad to know that Adobe has also baked selectable output control right in to Flash Access 2.0. This allows content providers to "specify whether output protection technologies are required to output to external devices." A variety of digital and analog output protection technologies are currently supported, including HDCP, CGMS-A, and Rovi (aka Macrovision) ACP. While Adobe plans to bring support to all platforms, currently the output controls are only available on Windows. However, such controls could limit your ability to connect your connect your computer to a projector or other external display to view secure Flash content.

If there was anything that could possibly make Flash less desirable from a user's perspective, the addition of the worst of draconian DRM capabilities would have to be it. Output control is purely optional, but we suspect that some content providers won't be able to resist the temptation to use it now that it's available. Adobe and/or content providers will likely face some serious blowback if secure Flash content—which probably had to be paid for—suddenly won't play on the numerous non-HDCP displays currently in use.

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The next time you're low on cash and need to get a quick read on the public's feeling on politics or current events, consider sampling Twitter. According to a new report out of Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, sentiments expressed via the millions of daily tweets strongly correlate with well-established public opinion polls, such as the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and Gallup polls. The data analysis methodology still needs some tweaking, but the researchers still believe that Twitter posts could act as a "cheap, rapid means of gauging public opinion."

Assistant professor Noah Smith and his team collected 1 billion Twitter messages posted in 2008 and 2009 and analyzed them for topic (politics versus economy) and sentiment (positive or negative). They compared the consumer confidence tweets against ICS data from the same period as well as Gallup's Economic Confidence Index. Tweets about President Obama were compared against Gallup's daily tracking polls from that time period, and tweets about the election were compared against 46 polls created by Pollster.

Libraries that choose to filter Internet access are not engaging in censorship, according to the Washington Supreme Court. The court made its decision late last week on 6-3 vote, with the majority noting that libraries are not obligated to provide universal access to all constitutionally protected speech just because it exists. Still, the dissenting justices feel that filters should be removed at the request of an adult, and that the decision is "draconian."

The case was originally brought against the North Central Regional Library (NCRL) by three patrons who found that they were unable to access certain sites on the library's computers. NCRL had implemented a use policy—as well as FortiGate filtering software across all its branches—that barred access to certain kinds of content, such as porn, gambling sites, Web chat services, proxy avoidance tools, and other "adult" content. According to NCRL's policy, sites that were erroneously blocked could be unblocked at the request of an adult patron, but otherwise, the filter remained in place even if an adult were to request immediate access to certain forbidden sites.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is taking its beef with Facebook's privacy policies to the Federal Trade Commission once again. A new complaint comes in the wake of Facebook's latest updates to its privacy policy. According to EPIC and 14 other consumer groups, Facebook's decision to open up even more personal information as "public" is a violation of user expectations, it diminishes privacy, and it contradicts Facebook's own representations about how the service works.

In the complaint, which was filed on Wednesday, the groups accused Facebook of engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices and violating consumer protection laws. In addition to the 38-page document (PDF) submitted to the FTC, EPIC also sent a letter (PDF) to Congress, asking members of the Senate and House to keep a close eye on the Commission's investigation into Facebook.

"Facebook continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for commercial purposes," reads the letter. "The company has done this repeatedly and users are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated."

This new complaint will be stacked on top of a previous complaint from EPIC filed in December, along with numerous others filed by other organizations (such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation). The groups have expressed their frustration over the FTC's inability to move quickly on these issues, but indicated that they still hold out hope that the Commission can take steps to protect user privacy on behalf of Facebook's userbase.

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Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) has introduced a bill that aims to put all government documents online—or at least the public ones, anyway. As part of the "Public Online Information Act," the documents would be submitted to a free, searchable database, and an advisory committee would be established in order to oversee the process.

The text of the bill acknowledges that the federal government has made past efforts to make documents available to the public, but that government information remains "too often hard to find, difficult to understand, expensive to obtain in useful formats, and available in only a few locations." What it boils down to is this: finding government documents is often a huge pain in the butt.

Browser maker Opera has long been a vocal proponent of standards-based Web technologies, so it comes as no surprise that the company doesn't think that Adobe's proprietary Flash plugin is good for Internet video playback. In a recent interview, Opera's product analyst Phillip Grønvold told TechRadar that using Flash for video just doesn't make sense.

"Flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage et cetera—you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there's a reason for that," he said.

Grønvold is alluding to Flash's known performance problems and high resource use, two of the issues that Steve Jobs also cited in a recent missive about the deficiencies of Adobe's technology. Adobe contends that the upcoming release of Flash 10.1 will resolve many of the failings that have historically precluded Flash from operating properly on mobile devices. The 10.1 release, however, is facing delays and won't arrive until the second half of the year.

Although Grønvold doesn't see a reason to use Flash for video, he says that the relative ubiquity of Flash content makes the plugin a necessity in order to have a complete Internet experience. As such, he says that Opera still needs the plugin.

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Google released a Chrome 5 beta build this week that brings a significant boost to the browser's JavaScript performance, improved support for emerging Web standards, and a number of noteworthy enhancements to the browser's cloud synchronization framework. After running the beta for most of the day, I'm convinced that Chrome is reaching a sweet spot of feature richness and leading performance that will make it a real winner.

Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine benefits from a particularly profound advancement in the new beta. A major optimization effort by the V8 team in Denmark has increased the browser's JavaScript performance by roughly 30 percent. When we conducted benchmarks to see how it compares to competing browsers, we discovered that it has taken the lead, edging in slightly ahead of the swift Safari nightly builds. The test was conducted with the SunSpider benchmark suite on a quad-core Mac Pro. The new Chrome 5 beta completed the benchmark in 338.4ms, the Safari nightly completed it in 373.4ms, Opera 10.53 came in third place with 389.6ms, and Firefox crawled in last with 741.8ms.

Google is revamping its search results page in order to offer easier and clearer access to the different kinds of content searches turn up. Don't worry: it looks as if Google will remain clean and easy to navigate, but the tweaks will spruce up the look and feel while helping users find what they're looking for.

Gone are the easy-to-miss links across the top of the page that point you to images, videos, maps, news, and more when you perform a search query. Google has made over those options and stuck them in an eye-pleasing column on the left side. "Over the past three years, we've launched Universal Search, the Search Options panel and Google Squared, and it’s those three technologies that power the left-hand panel," Google wrote in a blog post.

What does this mean, exactly? Universal Search figures out the most relevant "genre" of content that you're looking for and builds the left-hand column based on what might be of most use to you. Obviously the "Everything" tab would show you all search results, but (for example) if you're searching for a band, you might get more media-heavy suggestions in the left column. Thanks to Search Options, you can also rearrange the options displayed to you—helpful if you want to prioritize something like images, or only the newest results.

The column on the left isn't the only change to Google's results page, but it's the most significant. According to Google, the color palette and logo also got some tweaks, but they're nothing significant. "These changes are slight, keeping our page minimalist and whimsical, but make our overall look more modern," wrote the company.

If you haven't seen the updated site just yet, it's because Google is slowly rolling it out to all users across 37 languages. On top of the regular site, Google is also updating its mobile site for the US, so keep checking back if you want to see what the new changes are all about.

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