The Live Indian Entertainment Blog

A recent New York Times expose cast a dark shadow over Foxconn, one of Apple's key suppliers, for issues with worker rights and safety and violations of Apple's own policies. You might assume that the jobs, therefore, are not all that desirable.

You would be wrong.

Despite the fact that numerous suicides occurred at Foxconn in 2010 over horrible working conditions and because the families of those who took their lives received compensation for the deaths, there are huge lines when Foxconn has openings.

Embedded below is a local news story (in Chinese) detailing how thousands of applicants stood for hours outside a labor agency in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, which is the largest city of Henan province in north-central China.

In late December, it was reported that Foxconn was working with the city in order to double the size of the workforce there. The company wants to hire an additional 100,000 employees, the same number it employed in 2011.

The fact that thousands wait for jobs that have been said to be horrible in terms of worker treatment shows the sad state of affairs in the job market in China. The lines stretched more than 200m down the road.

The job posting by the Zhengzhou city government said salary for the positions would be 1650 yuan (US$261) monthly, with an increase to 2400 – 3200 yuan (US$379 - $506) after an appraisal. Food and dormitory living are included in that figure.

Reports from Chinese media noted that many of the applicants had prior work experience, with some of them already working for Foxconn. These current Foxconn workers were looking to transfer from Foxconn's other facilities in southern China to a site closer to home.

Apple's position as the world's No. 1 ranked firm in terms of market cap (trading off and on with Exxon Mobil) makes it an obvious target of criticism over worker treatment and profits made therein. It's true, though, that although Apple was central in the New York Times article about workers at Foxconn plants, Foxconn has many other clients, including HP, Dell, Nokia, and more, and also true that harsh worker conditions are not isolated to electronics manufacturing.

While Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the issue in an internal email to employees, stating that the company cares about "about every worker in our worldwide supply chain," and while it's true the issue is really Foxconn's, not Apple's, this quote in the New York Times article from former Apple exec made it clear Apple could force Foxconn --- and others --- to make real change happen.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice. If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?”

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the installation of and tracking with a GPS device requires a search warrant. It was a unanimous decision.

The entire panel of nine justices agreed that GPS monitoring without a search warrant violates the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

With that, the Supreme Court threw out the death sentence of a District of Columbia drug dealer, Antoine Jones, who was the subject of 28 day of warrantless GPS surveillance.

The court had agreed to take up the case due to numerous conflicting federal and appeals court decisions, including one from August of 2010, in which dissenting judge Alex Kozinski said that "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last."

There was some nuance to the decision. Five justices said physically attaching a GPS device to the underside of a car amounted to trespassing and was a search requiring a warrant. However, four justices said the prolonged length of time in the Jones case amounted to a search requiring a warrant, but did not affirm whether or not GPS monitoring for shorter periods would require a warrant.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote “We hold that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a 'search,' and added in a footnote, that, "Whatever new methods of investigation may be devised, our task, at a minimum, is to decide whether the action in question would have constituted a 'search' within the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred."

Scalia's majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote, in the other concurring opinion, the one that took the length of time of the monitoring into account, "The use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the four-week mark." Alito was joined in his opinion by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Sotomayor wrote a third concurring opinion, in which she specifically said she agreed with Alito on this conclusion.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. had overturned Jones' drug conspiracy conviction because police did not have a warrant for the GPS device installed on his vehicle. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court, but although the decision focused on that one case, the decision will obviously have sweeping ramifications.

Target has confirmed plans we reported on earlier: it's teaming with Apple to open 25 "store-within-store" outlets in locations that won't support a standalone Apple store.

25 locations is a small start, as Target has more than 1,760 U.S. locations. It's also still unclear if the locations will expand the availability of Apple products. Target sells iPads, iPods and iPhones, but no Mac hardware. It's still unclear if the retailer will begin to sell that, as well, or how the "store-within-store" outlets will be laid out.

The announcement followed up another unrelated announcement by the retailer, "The Shops at Target" concept. Items from boutiques will be sold in Target on its its website starting in May. The first collection will be from The Webster, The Candy Store, PolkaDogBakery, Cos Bar and Privet House.

A new collection will then be sold in the fall.

Both of these announcements come on the heels of somewhat disappointing holiday sales figures.

Target's December sales at stores open at least a year rose just 1.6 percent, which compared poorly to expectations of a 3.1 percent increase among analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters. Last week, Target also warned that its fourth-quarter profit would be lower than it had previously estimated.

The big target in SOPA's bulls-eye has been said to be The Pirate Bay, which is one of the world's largest BitTorrent sites. What's wrong with that picture? The SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) bill, as currently written, would not cover The Pirate Bay.

SOPA backers say the bill is required to take down The Pirate Bay. However, as pointed out by TechDirt, that's not really the case.

As you might already know, SOPA focuses on foreign websites. It defines that, though, as a website on a top-level domain (TLD) that is not run by a U.S. registry. Guess what: .org is run by Public Interest Registry, a US non-profit organization based in Virginia. Similarly, both .com and .net are also run by U.S.-based registries.

So, even though The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website, because its TLD is .org, as defined by SOPA, it's not a foreign website and not addressable by SOPA.

Sites with TLDs that are controlled by American companies can be dealt with by existing laws, which is how ICE seizes websites. With that, there doesn't seem to be a real reason to keep talking about SOPA or PIPA, the two bills in the House and Senate, respectively.

Those bills, mostly SOPA, have drawn criticism, boycotts, and even apps as measures that could lead to eventual Web censorship.

The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically).

The Pirate Bay calls itself "the world's most resilient BitTorrent site;" it is currently ranked as the 76th most visited website in the world and 13th in Sweden by Alexa Internet, has over 5 million registered users and, as of 2011, hosted more than 3.5 million torrent files.

Other sites that have been pointed to as high on the list of pirates are MegaUpload and Rapidshare. Those are both excluded from the current version of SOPA based on their TLDs (both are .com).

Apple has 359 of its own retail stores globally, 245 of which are in the U.S. There are some areas of the country that simply won't support an Apple Store, though, and for at least 25 of those, the answer will be an Apple Store within a store, a Target store.

The report comes via the typically named "source familiar with Apple's plans." Apple currently also operates "store within a store" outlets at over 600 Best Buy locations with "Apple Shops." Best Buy has over 1,000 total stores in the U.S.

Some of the Apple Shops are staffed by Apple Solution Consultants.

Target, meanwhile, as the second-largest discount retail chain in the U.S., behind Walmart, operates 1,752 stores in the country. While 25 is obviously a small start, there's every reason to believe that if it proves successful it will expand to many more Target outlets.

Apple and Target go way back, to 2002, when all Target stores began selling Apple's iconic music player, the iPod. In October of 2010, Target became the first retailer outside of Apple and Best Buy to begin selling the iPad. Just one month later, in November of 2010, the retailer announced that it would begin selling Apple's iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 in just about half of its stores, its close to 850 locations with Target Mobile sales centers.

With Apple "stores within stores" coming, it's possible that Target might start selling more than just iDevices, at least at the 25 retail outlets with the Apple stores. We could imagine Target adding MacBooks, iMacs, and even Airport accessories.

GoDaddy.com can't win for losing. Even as it loses thousands of customers to other domain name registrars, it was accused of stalling domain name transfers on Monday morning, by rival service NameCheap.

GoDaddy.com has been the target of the anger of many customers after it came out with strong support of the Stop Internet Piracy Act, or SOPA, which many consider to be the first step to Internet censorship. Since then, the company has backed down, but too late: it's losing customers and desperately making attempts to keep them. NameCheap said:

“As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them. Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.“

With the incomplete WhoIs information, Namecheap said that it's only recourse was to manually process the requests, which it said was doing.

GoDaddy, on the other hand, responded to Namecheap's accusations, though only to TechCrunch. They sent the tech blog an email, that said:

"Namecheap posted their accusations in a blog, but to the best our of knowledge, has yet to contact Go Daddy directly, which would be common practice for situations like this. Normally, the fellow registrar would make a request for us to remove the normal rate limiting block which is a standard practice used by Go Daddy, and many other registrars, to rate limit Whois queries to combat WhoIs abuse.

"Because some registrars (and other data gathering, analyzing and reporting entities) have legitimate need for heavy port 43 access, we routinely grant requests for expanded access per an SOP we've had in place for many years. Should we make contact with Namecheap, and learn they need similar access, we would treat that request similarly.

"As a side note, we have seen some nefarious activity this weekend which came from non-registrar sources. But, that is not unusual for a holiday weekend, nor would it cause legitimate requests to be rejected. Nevertheless, we have now proactively removed the rate limit for Namecheap, as a courtesy, but it is important to point out, there still may be back-end IP addresses affiliated with Namecheap of which we are unaware. For complete resolution, we should be talking to each other -- an effort we are initiating since they have not done so themselves.

-Rich Merdinger
Sr. Director of Product Development - Domains
Go Daddy"

GoDaddy.com's response, therefore, is that the "block" is / was standard operating procedure. In any case, it says it has removed the blockage and that things should be moving swiftly, but only if Namecheap it the registrar to which the domain name is being moved.

Despite all the bad press, it would seem that things are not all that dire for GoDaddy.com; according to The Verge, while GoDaddy.com lost 21,054 domains on Dec. 23, 2011, but had gained 20,034 domains in return on that same day.

Still, reddit has suggested that Dec. 29 should be a "move your domain away from GoDaddy day." We'll see if things really take shape on that day, which is Thursday.