Under the radar: week ending May 22nd

Today SamKnows is kicking off a weekly round-up of all the tech and Internet news stories that didn’t warrant their own post but we just can’t let slip under the radar. This week’s mainly about Craigslist and Google, both of which have been racking up more than their fair share of headlines.

A week after it agreed to get rid of all the sexy stuff on its site, Craigslist has been bleating about how it’s being targeted by US prosecutors. Five days later and it’s suing South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, seeking declaratory relief (which sounds like something that might previously have been found in its Erotic Services category) as well as a restraining order (see previous parentheses).

Meanwhile, over in Mountain View, California, Google’s been having a mixed week. As well as adopting lo-fi solutions for Street View (this is how its cameras work, by the way), they’ve added automatic translation to Gmail, feeling Twitter-envy and even those crazy algorithms they excel at to stop their employees jumping ship. You almost feel sorry for them, don’t you? Well, maybe the money they’re hoping to rake in by sneaking adverts onto the Google mainpage will lessen their pain.

In other news: a sixteen-year-old girl put herself in mortal danger to save her iPod. She dove in front of a moving pick-up truck and ended up with a broken leg – but her little Apple music hive is alright, and that’s obviously the main thing.

Boing Boing-er Cory Doctorow weighed in on the ISP debate with an impassioned plea not to let what he sees as censorship from the ISPs get in the way of a free internet.

And after the Beeb managed to escape David Cameron’s evil plot to use his freeze ray on the licence fee, a suit at the Beeb is now calling for the licence fee to be extended to cover its iPlayer. Told you it wasn’t far away.

Tags: apple, BBC, Craigslist, Google, iPod, licence fee