New York Times

Amazon has been trying to put the screws on Hachette, the smallest of the Big Five publishers, by discouraging people from buying its printed books. Amazon’s goal: force Hachette to give it better terms on e-books.

Two things make Amazon’s confrontational stance toward Hachette unusual. First, there is the overwhelming power Amazon has in the marketplace. Second is Amazon’s multifaceted approach. Most of the time, it has all sorts of ways to encourage you to buy a book: faster shipping, cheaper shipping, a discount, a cheap copy from a third party who was cleaning out his closet.

Now, like a river reversing its flow, it is using all sorts of ways to get people not to buy Hachette titles: more expensive, slower shipping, pitching something else instead. The worry for Hachette is that its authors will rise up in anger at the publisher, forcing it to surrender to Amazon’s terms. The worry for Amazon is that it will be perceived of as a thug.

Google will announce by the end of the month a mechanism for consumers to request that links to information about them be removed from the company’s search engine, a leading European regulator said.

It was one of the first signs that Google was working through how to operate after a court ruling said consumers could make such requests.

Ulrich Kühn, ​head of the technical department at Hamburg’s data protection regulator, one of Germany’s leading data protection agencies, said that the details of the mechanism still had to be finalized. But a basic online tool for people to ask Google to take down potentially harmful links would be in place in about two weeks, he said.

“They are trying to come up with something that users can use to lodge complaints about specific links,” Kühn said. “It will be rolled out across Europe for all citizens.”

[Commentary] Some parents are already busy planning their kids’ online presence -- registering their babies for things like Facebook, web URLs, About.me pages, Instagram feeds, Twitter handles, Tumblr accounts and email accounts on Yahoo and Gmail, all within hours of their birth. It might be too early to call these behaviors a growing trend, but they’re certainly fueling a debate about how to handle children and their online lives. But there could be a risk here. Should you post photos of your children on sites that can be seen by anyone, or even on private profiles? If you give them Facebook accounts or email addresses, are you starting a data record for them before they’re old enough to know any better? Are you signing your child up for targeted advertising at age zero? If anything, a child today who grows up and discovers he has no photos on Facebook or Instagram might think of himself as an unloved anomaly. In an age of obsessive digital detailing, if a child grows up unrecorded, what is his identity at all?

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D-NY) appointed a three-person commission to offer thoughts on the use of technology in schools. The group, the governor’s office said in a statement, will be “charged with advising the state on how to best invest” the $2 billion the governor plans to raise in a “Smart Schools” bond issue in the fall.

Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, is one of the three, but his appointment raised some eyebrows. Schmidt’s company has a commercial interest in seeing more Chromebook computers, which run Google’s Chrome web software, and the company’s productivity applications, Google Apps, being used in schools.

And Schmidt’s appointment struck Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group with a history of pursuing Google, mostly on privacy issues, as a conflict of interest.

Last month, it sent a letter of protest to Cuomo’s office, and got no reply. On May 12, the watchdog group, based in California, filed a complaint with the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, saying that Schmidt has “serious, troubling and unlawful conflicts of interest” that should preclude him from serving on the commission.

[Commentary] Lawmakers on the Hill, usually eager to score points and yell about imaginary scandals, have been surprisingly thoughtful about Comcast’s $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a pressing antitrust issue.

At a four-hour hearing, several lawmakers focused on the crux of the matter: Will the deal give Comcast substantially too much power over how and what Americans watch on television and how they access the Internet?

Congress has no formal role in deciding whether the government should challenge the deal -- the Department of Justice’s antitrust division and the Federal Communications Commission will do that. But lawmakers can still raise questions and give opponents and supporters of the deal a chance to debate its merits publicly.

Eighteen years ago, there was no certainty that we would be watching sports and movies on little mobile screens or that outfits like Netflix would engage us by streaming series a season at a time.

How, then, can anyone predict how we will consume video in 18 years with the rapid evolution -- alongside the occasional revolution -- occurring in technology? The answer is -- if you’re NBC Universal and the International Olympic Committee -- you don’t.

Not when you’re making a deal for NBC to carry in the United States the six Olympic Games from 2022 to 2032 on its television and digital platforms, and whatever new technology develops in the next two decades. Their $7.75 billion deal, with a $100 million signing bonus, was announced.

“Basically, what you do, is you say that if circumstances changes, then various things can happen,” Jim Clark, a partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel and the lead lawyer representing NBC at the talks with the International Olympic Committee, said by telephone. “You know things can change. And the agreement takes into account that new technologies might have to be taken into account.”

So let’s say that an amazing technology, with enormous profit potential, breaks through in 2027 or 2028. Would the IOC reopen talks and seek additional money from NBC? No, said Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBC Universal.

“If the way the world changes and the way you make money changes,” Burke said in an email, “we are allowed to change and there will never be an added fee.” That is a great benefit of agreeing in 2014 to put down a huge sum of money from 2022 to 2032, and the fruit of two decades of trust between NBC and the IOC, which relies heavily on the network’s cash.

Kenneth Tomlinson, a conservative journalist who used his leadership role in federal communications agencies to counter what he regarded as liberal bias, died on May 1 at a hospital in Winchester (VA).

He was 69.

Tomlinson, a former top editor of Reader’s Digest, was director of Voice of America in the early 1980s and, from 2002 to 2007, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the federal government’s international broadcasting. His most prominent role was as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for two years during the administration of President George W Bush.

Tomlinson was appointed to the corporation board in 2000 by President Bill Clinton to fill a Republican seat. Tomlinson immediately campaigned to eliminate what he perceived as the corporation’s leftward tilt. His biggest target was the PBS program “Now With Bill Moyers,” which he believed had veered into blatant liberal partisanship. To add what he considered needed objectivity to PBS, Tomlinson introduced conservative programming, including “The Journal Editorial Report,” a weekly talk show featuring columnists from The Wall Street Journal. Another was hosted by the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, titled “Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered.”

In 2005, at the end of his mandatory two-year term as chairman, Tomlinson successfully pushed for the appointment of Patricia S Harrison, a former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, as the corporation’s president. Tomlinson left the board after the corporation’s inspector general questioned his authority to order the study of Moyers’s show and to hire two lobbyists without the board’s knowledge.

In 2006, the State Department investigated his chairmanship of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. It found that Tomlinson had put a friend on the payroll and had run a “horse-racing operation” with government resources, specifically that he had bought and sold thoroughbreds from his office.

Eight weather broadcasters were invited to interview President Barack Obama and spend the day at the White House.

From Al Roker of the “Today” show to local weathermen and women from Chicago, Miami, Seattle and other cities, the handpicked guests were there, the Administration hoped, to spread the word contained in a landmark new report, the National Climate Assessment, that the warming climate is causing sweeping change across the United States.

Polls show that local television weathercasters are among the most trusted media figures, but there is a deep divide between those who accept the link between human activities and global warming and extreme weather and those who do not.

The largest technology stock offering in history is looming, but few in Silicon Valley seem to care. The initial public offering expected soon in the United States by Alibaba Group Holding, China’s largest e-commerce company, could surpass the amount raised in the initial public offering (IPO) of Facebook.

It would not even be surprising if it surpassed the combined amounts raised in the IPO’s of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, AOL and Yahoo.

But unlike the flurry of attention that accompanies high-profile floats by American tech stars, Alibaba’s stock offering has barely registered among the valley’s tech set. San Francisco’s artisanal toast bars have not been abuzz with commentary on Jack Ma, Alibaba’s chairman, and Palo Alto’s Tesla dealerships aren’t bracing for a surge in new buyers.

In interviews, a few Silicon Valley investors said they didn’t expect the offering to be a big deal in the markets they follow, though they declined to speak on the record about their apathy. The issue isn’t that the valley is ignorant of the rise of Chinese Internet giants. It’s more that American tech firms have long been spurned and surprised by China’s tech market, and many here aren’t sure how to gauge the ambitions of the giants like Alibaba now bent on crossing the Pacific.

Admit it: Sometimes you just want to punch your PC, or slap your smartphone, or knock your notebook. We all get riled by technology once in a while, with all those feeble batteries, endless updates and spinning wheels of death. But what if our devices could see it coming?

What if they could pick up the tics and tells of our brewing anger -- or, for that matter, any other emotion -- and respond accordingly?

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. To hear experts tell it, this is where technology is going.

Researchers and companies are already starting to employ sensors that try to read and respond to our feelings. While this sort of technology is still in its early days, the possibilities seem many.

One day, your PC might sense your frustration when a program keeps crashing and politely suggest that you take a walk while it contacts tech support. Or your smartphone could sense that passions -- of one sort or another -- are running high and, in response, disable messaging. Or your car might discern an early case of road rage and soften the car’s lighting and stiffen its steering. A new generation of sensors can judge emotion through people’s skin and breath.