Compliantly

Social networking aficionados can friend their grandma's third cousin twice removed.

GeneTree, a company that runs a social networking website based on DNA tests, is now out of beta.
Since launching in 2007, the site has grown to include about 100,000 users and 1.5 million profiles of family members, Matt Cupal, the president of GeneTree told The Industry Standard.

The Web site itself is free, and users can sign-up to create a family tree, upload pictures and link to family members. For an additional $149 to $179, users can submit a mouthwash sample for mitochondrial DNA analysis that can help them link to distant, unknown relatives.

"We can compare you to people inside our database and sort of map you in the world," Cupal said. "We literally traveled to 170 different countries, places like Mongolia, and collected DNA samples. 

Another company, Ancestry.com, runs a similar service based on DNA samples. Both GeneTree and Ancestry.com let users share profiles, photos, videos and ancestry documents.

A third online service operated by the National Geographic Genographic Project lets participants take a cheek swab DNA test to trace maternal or paternal ancestry. Its service costs $99. 

All of these endeavors aim to let users create links that transcend national boundaries.

"Our goal is to map the world's DNA and extend the concept of family," Cupal said. "It's a little bit of an audacious goal."

While the focus of GeneTree is genealogy, Cupal indicated that other applications might be developed down the road, Cupal added.

Want to know what the feds have been up to? Anyone with Internet access can now search through thousands of once-classified documents that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has "has pried loose from secretive government agencies" through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Monday, the EFF announced a new search engine specifically designed for these documents.

The EFF FOIA Search Engine allows browsers to search for keywords, and narrow the search by topic and the government department that issued the paper. There are sorting options and a checkbox to search only "significant" documents.

But the search engine, at least in its current beta form, doesn't handle phrases particularly well. I searched for "Automated Targeting System" (an example used in the announcement, but I added the quotes) and got no results. But when I searched for Automated Targeting System (no quotes), I got 18 hits. Some of them had the phrase, but others just had the separate words.

The documents themselves are scanned hard copies, which isn't the most readable format. However, the text can be searched and somewhat clumsily copied. This is true even when a page didn't go through the scanner properly, resulting in a slanted image (see below).

The announcement was timed for the start of Sunshine Week, a "national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information."

Pity poor Sumner Redstone. The 85-year-old majority owner of CBS, Viacom, MTV, BET, Paramount and Dreamworks is down to his last billion. A year ago, he had nearly $7 billion.

Redstone is one of the biggest losers on a Forbes-derived table of tech and tech-related billionaires that details how much they lost in the past year. According to TechCrunch, the forty fat cats are now worth a total of $203 billion. That's nearly a 30 percent drop from their combined net worth of $284.9 billion last year.

Microsoft mogul Bill Gates is still the world's richest man. So it's not surprising that he lost the highest dollar volume on the list, down $18 billion from a year ago. There's another $40 billion where that came from, though.

Oracle strongman Larry Ellison did surprisingly well, giving up less than three billion of his $22.5B fortune. He was number 14 on the list last year. Now he's at number 4. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin lost money, but rose higher in rank by not losing as much as others.

As TechCrunch writer Leena Rao notes, the most telling stat is that Forbes can only find 793 billionaires this year, as opposed to 1,125 in 2008. Well over a trillion dollars in worth has evaporated from Forbes' list.  

One of the biggest draws of the iPhone and iPod Touch is the Apple App Store, which allows users to download applications from a single location.

The App Store opened for business in early July. Within five months, the Apple App Store reached 10,000 applications. The App Store needed only another three months to hit 20,000 apps.

As of March 4, there are 25,979 apps, according to Mobclix, which tracks stats for the Apple App Store. 

Prediction: Will Apple App Store break 30,000 application by May 1, 2009? Judgment will be made based on the metrics reported by Mobclix. Let the community decide. Place your bets!

MichaelBuckbee posted a photo:

It's my own belief that a great deal of the current financial crisis is due to a lack of understanding of advanced financial instruments (pure unfettered, staggering greed probably paid a part as well).

That being said, there's probably not a better, more visual way to get your mind wrapped around the mess that we are in than Jonathan Jarvis's visualization of the Credit Crisis Part 1.

Almost exactly a year ago, I asked all interested web professionals to let the CSS Working Group know what they want from CSS.

Fantasai, an invited expert in the working group has published her feedback on our requests with information on what the Working Group has done about them. It’s unclear to me what will happen next, but presumably they will be considered further now that Fantasai’s report is complete.

She has also published information on the working group’s new charter and an overview of the high priority work that they expect to complete in the next two years.

It’s not often that Web folk are asked to give money to support Web Standards, so when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) asks, we ought to listen up.

The W3C has launched the W3C Validator Donation Program to give Web people and organizations the opportunity to support what must be one of the most commonly used tools by those in our profession.

Think about it — how many times a week do you ping one of the validators to check your HTML, CSS, or feeds? Don’t you occasionally run the link checker on your site to find broken links? If you’re like me or any of the designers or developers I know, you probably rely on these services a fair bit.

As explained by Olivier Théreaux in his recent blog post, the donation program isn’t about paying for bandwidth or servers, it’s about continuing to improve the validators to support new languages, to fix bugs, and to add new features.

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