sportingbet.com's chairman was arrested!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chairman of online bookmaker Sportingbet.com, Peter Dicks, was arrested on a warrant from Louisiana at John F. Kennedy International Airport late on Wednesday, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said on Thursday.

"He was picked up at 11:30 p.m. (EDT) at JFK Airport on an active out-of-state warrant," Pasquale DiFulco, a spokesman for the agency, said. "He's being held by Port Authority police awaiting extradition."

DiFulco would not reveal the nature of the charges and a call to the Louisiana State Police was not immediately returned.

Earlier, Sportingbet.com said Dicks had been detained by U.S. authorities.

More at Reuters UK

Xanga got fined by FTC

FTC fines Xanga for violating kids' privacy

$1 million penalty against social networking site is largest under 1998 law
Social networking Web site Xanga.com will pay $1 million — the largest penalty ever issued for violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act — for repeatedly allowing children under 13 to sign up for the service without getting their parent's consent, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14718350/

Manipulatively promoting news might undermine Digg

Many people have complained lately that Digg’s system is being either corrupted or heavily manipulated by savvy users in order to promote stories to the home page gaining more visibility…

Two place to read more on the issue:

“Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, wrote that the Digg.com algorithm for ranking top stories on the home page and other category pages will be changing. Why? Because of other bloggers beginning to publicize that digg is rigged or at least favors the top 30 or so users (diggers). This notice of an algorithmic change to come to Digg.com has encouraged the top user, p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 to leave Digg with a comment he left here.
To be honest, I feel that this may be a good thing. Changing up the algorithm is a good idea. I know many people in the search community that know the tricks to 'gaming' the Digg system. Kevin Ross, in my opinion, is right in making a change to the system. Of course, this will upset the top Diggers, heck, if my name was removed from one of the fastest growing sites on the web, I may be upset too.”

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060907-085023

“The incredibly successful news site Digg has hit a few speed bumps recently. Digg is a news site that promotes news stories, submitted by users, to its home page based on votes by other Digg users. If a story is “dugg” by enough users, it goes to the home page and a lot of traffic is directed to the link in the news story.
In addition to the recent targeting of Digg’s business by AOL when they turned the massive netscape.com property into a digg clone, a number of people have recently complained, loudly, about the ability for groups of users on Digg to get a story to the home page, or removed from the home page, by acting as a group.
Political blogger Michelle Malkin was one of the first to complain that groups of conservative or liberal Digg users were acting to remove posts from pundits on the other side. More recently, another blogger analyzed Digg home page stories and concluded that a small group of powerful Digg users, acting together, control a large percentage of total“

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/troubles-in-diggville/