Tech Week in Review 9-4-09

Bill Collectors Can Now Catch You On Facebook

According to this WSJ article, It looks like State revenue agents are using social media to hunt you down and make you pay what you owe.

Meanwhile, agents in Nebraska collected $2,000 from a deejay after he advertised on his MySpace page that he would be working at a big public party.

Collections agents are already pretty bold, so it won’t be long before their @’ing you on Twitter demanding that you pay up. (h/t RWW)

BMW Hybrid Concept Car

BMW’s always look pretty hot to me, but this hybrid concept car takes it to another level.

To be unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show in a couple of weeks the Vision EfficientDynamics Concept displays all the BMW qualities. The heart of the concept car is an advanced diesel-electric system. It is based on a compact turbocharged 1.5-liter, three-cylinder diesel engine. BMW says that the combined diesel-electric powertrain is good for 356 hp and 590 lb-ft torque. Maximum range in pure electric mode is 31 miles, with the diesel engine offering another 400 miles. (via Inquisitr)

Gmail Went Down. So?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Google products, but I don’t see why Gmail going down for a few hours caused tech bloggers to create post after post about it. This either means that Google has been doing an excellent job at being reliable and people just couldn’t believe it had gone down, or that it was a really slow news day (probably because Gmail was down). To top it all off, it wasn’t even really a failure on their part. They took some servers down on purpose.

Obama as Joker Debacle Changes Flickr’s Takedown Policy

We recently talked about the controversial photo of Obama as Joker and the turmoil surrounding it’s removal from Flickr. Many argued that it fell under political satire and shouldn’t be affected by any copyright infringement claims. One of the sore points in the discourse was that Flickr completely deleted the entire photo page, discussion and all. Based on suggestions from their users, they’ve decided to modify this policy so that users can still interact with the metadata and conversation, but the offending image won’t be visible. (via RWW)

Chris Brown’s Bowtie?

I didn’t see Chris Brown’s appearance on Larry King, but I do know he wore yet another outrageous outfit. I say “another” because he was dressed like a Chef at Benihana when he made his first video regarding the incident. Now, on Larry King, Chris Brown decided to wear a powder blue bowtie. I’m no fashion expert and I only know so much about PR, but I’m pretty positive that was a bad move. #chrisbrownsbowtie was the top trending topic on Twitter for most of the night, resulting in a plethora of hilarious tweets (and a bunch of spam).