The author of the post, Adrian Chen, Long Island University senior Chelsea Kate Isaacs emailed Jobs on Thursday complaining that Apple’s PR department wasn’t replying to any of her e-mails asking about the use of iPads in academic settings:

Mr. Jobs, I humbly ask why Apple is so wonderfully attentive to the needs of students, whether it be with the latest, greatest invention or the company’s helpful customer service line, and yet, ironically, the Media Relations Department fails to answer any of my questions which are, as I have repeatedly told them, essential to my academic performance.”

Jobs allegedly shot back a terse reply:

Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry

Incensed, Isaacs shot off another e-mail to the CEO, saying it was a common courtesy to respond to people’s questions. After a few more back-and-forths, Jobs attempted to wrap up the conversation with a deathblow:

Please leave us alone.

Cold. But just about what you’d expect from the world’s most famous ninja.

Apple did not immediately respond to my e-mail requesting comment on the e-mail exchange. Maybe I’ll send a note to Jobs myself whining about the potential impact on my salary. I have cats to feed and a gym membership to pay, you know.

Joking aside, this is especially hilarious for anyone who covers tech, because we all know that Apple’s PR team usually doesn’t respond to professional media outlets — so the thought of them responding to a student puts a toothy grin on my face. But congrats, Isaacs: If your story is real, you got a response from the legend himself, which is more than most of us tech journalists can say.

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Fujifilm’s retro-fantastic X100 is probably the hottest-looking camera you’ll see this year. Announced at this year’s Photokina tradeshow, the magnesium-clad compact makes it look like Fujifilm took the wish-list of many photographers and made it real.

The first thing you’ll notice is the styling, which looks almost exactly like the rangefinder cameras of the past, right down to the flash being placed where the little bright-line illuminator window would go on, say, a Leica, and the giant viewfinder being placed over to the left (from the user’s point of view).

In fact, the whole camera is laid out like an old-style rangefinder. The shutter-speed is set by turning a dial on the top plate (as it the exposure compensation). The aperture is set by twisting a dial around the lens itself and the on-off switch is a collar a round the shutter-release. In fact, from the product-shots, it appears that the shutter-release is drilled and threaded for a manual cable-release.

Then we get to the lens. The ƒ2 lens is a fixed 23mm, which equates to 35mm on a full-frame camera. This is the classic focal-length for a rangefinder, and coupled with the 12.3MP SLR-sized APS-C sensor, means that you’ll be able to throw backgrounds out of focus, as well as shoot in very low light (the maximum ISO of 6400 will help there, too).

But the real “holy shit” moment comes with the viewfinder. It works just like a normal optical viewfinder, but has a prism stuck in the middle. Light from the scene in front passes straight through to your eye, but off to the side is a tiny 1,440,000 dot LCD screen. When on, the panel can either superimpose camera-info onto the image or – get this – function as a super high-res optical finder. You can switch between modes with a hardware button (it’s the lever on the front) Here’s the picture:

To be clear, this means that you can use this like an old-style camera, with distraction-free framing but also with the parallax errors of a non-through-the-lens finder, or you can swap to see what you’d see in an SLR. I’m guessing that you’d also get the focus points shown, and maybe even an in-finder histogram? [Update: The histogram is in there].

The X100 will also shoot 720p video, and has a regular 460,000 dot screen on the back, along with the usual host of digicam buttons, and there is even a built-in 3-stop neutral density filter so you can cut out some light and still use the lens wide-open in bright sunlight.

I’m ridiculously excited by this camera. It’s coming out in March of next year, and, at $1000, I predict that Fujifilm won’t be able to make them fast enough. This, you probably already know, is the camera Leica should be making.

Finepix X100 [Fujifilm]

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It’s hard to say exactly why the TechCrunch piece on Facebook developing a branded phone caught so much fire and ire. It might, however, be because Facebook took the somewhat unusual step of denying it (or … did it?) rather than ignoring it.

We don’t know what Facebook is up to, or if the sources TechCrunch still has faith in are wrong or right or — if the latter — such a project is much more than a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

But would a Facebook phone make sense? I don’t think so. Facebook integration in Google Android phones is very deep, so much so that it is arguably better to use than Gmail contacts. Ironies aside, this is exactly the sort of advantage one would presume that building the delivery mechanism would get you, and they have an amenable platform to do pretty much whatever they want in software.

On the iPhone, the Facebook app seems to be a better embodiment of what social networking is all about, without all the bells and lights and noise that get you all distracted on the pinball machine that is Facebook.com.

Can the experience be improved on mobile? Sure. And it will be, of course. We know this without sources telling us, because that is the way of the world. The question is, how. The answer, I think, is not hardware.

Mobile phones are the No. 1 accessory for most people, especially the core demographic that uses a social network like Facebook. Are these customers going to pick a phone to just to perfect their Facebook experience? Would you pass on an iPhone or an Evo or the next fantastic Android handset that comes out, just to bathe in mobile-Facebook goodness?

Even if the phone is free? Even if they pay you to get one? Even if it only had to be the second, single-purposed phone in your life and you kept it in your office drawer because your enterprise network blocks out the site? Even if it really isn’t a phone but an internet appliance that depends on available Wi-Fi … you get the idea.

This seems like the tail wagging the dog. For example, there have been plenty of internet watches from companies run by smart people who hired smart people to make them — just ask Microsoft, which introduced one in the internet’s Triassic age (seven years ago.) Or LG, which unveiled one at CES 2009.

These wonders of technology do things that Dick Tracy could only have imagined. How many have you seen at SXSW? Anywhere in the wild?

Right. Because watches, like your mobile phone, are a statement.

Smartphone buyers won’t sacrifice substance for style — and they don’t have have to. Even Google doesn’t like its Android-powered phones being called Google Phones because, as powerful as the brand is, it sounds like all they do is Google stuff. The backlash on a “Facebook Phone” — that is what it would be called, make no mistake — would be tremendous.

Facebook may have ambitions outside its comfort zone, and heaven knows it has the money to entertain any fantasies it may have. But if one of them actually is sponsoring a branded handset, the company should be asking itself what we’re asking: Who needs it?

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A teenage child trafficking victim has filed a lawsuit against Village Voice Media, for knowingly allowing her pimp to post ads for her “services” on the popular backpage.com. The pimp, Latasha Jewell McFarland, has already pleaded guilty to prostitution charges, but the victim (going by M.A. in the complaint, as she is still a minor) says that Village Voice knew that the photos being posted of her were illegal but “failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn.”

M.A. says she was 14 when she was found as a runaway by McFarland, who began pimping out M.A. for $100 per sex act (McFarland took half the earnings). In order to advertise M.A.’s services, McFarland took pornographic photos of M.A. and posted them on backpage.com in the personals section for those seeking sex. McFarland pleaded guilty earlier this month to photographing M.A. in pornographic poses, posting child porn on backpage, paying the site for the postings, transporting M.A. for the purpose of pimping her out for sex, and collecting money for M.A.’s sexual services.

In the complaint (.pdf), however, M.A. accuses Village Voice of having knowledge that the explicit photos were 1) of a minor, and 2) for prostitution services. No evidence is outlined in the complaint that explicitly points to Village Voice having this knowledge, but M.A. says the company aided and abetted her pimp in facilitating prostitution and child pornography. She also argues that Village Voice should not be granted immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—a law that has historically protected websites from being held liable for the content posted by users.

“Defendant had a strong suspicion that the aforementioned crimes were being committed,” reads the complaint. “Defendant had a desire that these posters accomplished their nefarious illegal prostitution activities so that the posters would return to the website and pay for more posting.”

The lawsuit comes just days after Craigslist testified to members of Congress about the company’s decision to close its own adult services section. Craigslist reiterated that it did more than almost any other site to help authorities catch child traffickers and other illegal activity, but that didn’t stop politicians and critics from continuing to hammer on the site for the mere existence of the adult services section. With the section (and its strict manual review process) gone, the company warned that advertising for prostitution would ooze over to other parts of the site and go elsewhere on the Internet.

“With the removal of adult services and its manual review, Craigslist fears that its utility to help combat child exploitation has been grossly diminished,” Craigslist attorney Elizabeth McDougall said.

Indeed, backpage is one of those sites that has an “anything goes” reputation; it’s not at all surprising to discover that minors were being advertised through the site. Whether or not Village Voice actually knew that the photos were of a minor and that the advertised services were illegal is another story, however, and M.A. will likely have to produce some real evidence of such if she wants the site’s Section 230 immunity waved.

Previously on Wired.com:

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“David, you’re sounding like an old dude!” Matt Flannery, who runs social-lending website Kiva, couldn’t understand when I explained that, no, I wouldn’t be keeping in touch with him via Facebook. “What are you worried about?” he teased in a break at the PINC conference in Holland. “Only old guys get worked up about privacy.”

Well, Matt, I admit I’m the wrong side of 30, and that I still avoid using emoticons in formal correspondence. But let me explain why I’m not active on Facebook, nor sharing my credit-card purchases on Blippy, nor allowing Google Buzz to mine my contacts list, nor even publishing my DNA on 23andMe.com. My cautious use of the social networks has nothing to do with paranoia about privacy; and yes, I celebrate the unprecedented transparency and connectivity that these services can empower. But what’s increasingly bothering me is the wider social and political cost of our ever-greater enmeshment in these proprietary networks. Here are half a dozen reasons why.

1) Private companies aren’t motivated by your best interests
Facebook and Google exist to make money, by selling advertisers the means to target you with ever greater precision. That explains the endless series of “privacy” headlines, as these unregulated businesses push boundaries to make it easier for paying third parties to access your likes, interests, photos, social connections and purchasing intentions. That’s why Facebook has made it harder for users to understand exactly what they’re giving away — why, for instance, its privacy policy has grown from 1,004 words in 2005 to 5,830 words today (by comparison, as the New York Times has pointed out, the U.S. Constitution is 4,543). Founder Mark Zuckerberg once joked dismissively about the “dumb fucks” who “trust me”. I admire the business Zuckerberg’s built; but I don’t trust him.

2) They make it harder to reinvent yourself
“When you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff,” President Obama warned high-school students in Virginia last September. “Be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do will be pulled up later somewhere in your life.” He’s right: anything posted online might come to haunt you permanently, yet all of us need space to grow. As the writer Jaron Lanier said in a recent lecture, if Robert Zimmerman, of small-town Hibbing, Minnesota, had had a Facebook profile, could he really have re-created himself as the New York beatnik Bob Dylan

3) Information you supply for one purpose will invariably be used for another …
Phone up to buy a pizza, and the order-taker’s computer gives her access to your voting record, employment history, library loans — all “just wired into the system” for your convenience. She’ll suggest a tofu pizza as she knows about your 42-inch waist, she’ll add a delivery surcharge because a nearby robbery yesterday puts you in “an orange zone” — and she’ll be on her guard because you’ve checked out the library book Dealing With Depression. This is where the American Council for Civil Liberties sees consumerism going — watch its pizza video online — and it’s not to hard to believe. Already surveys suggest that 35 percent of firms are rejecting applicants because of information found on social networks. What makes you think you can control what happens to your personal data?

4) … and there’s a good chance it will be used against you
Mark Zuckerberg would like to suggest that, in an ever more transparent world, “you have one identity — the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” That suits his purpose — but in our multi-layered lives it’s just not true. A vindictive ex-partner, or a workplace rival, or a health insurer, or a political opponent, may selectively expose information to your detriment – powerfully re-framing your identity in a way you would consider dishonest.

5) People screw up, and give away more than they realise
To understand how much personal information Facebook users are inadvertently sharing, visit youropenbook.org and search for phrases such as “cheated on my wife” or “my new mobile number is” or “feeling horny“. I’ll bet that most of the people whose intimate details you’ll get to read are unaware that their updates are being shared quite so openly. Have they genuinely given Zuckerberg their informed consent?

6) And besides, why should we let businesses privatize our social discourse?
Some day you should take time to read those 5,830 words: it’s Facebook that owns the rights to do as it pleases with your data, and to sell access to it to whoever is willing to pay. Yes, it’s free to join — but with half a billion of us now using it to connect, it’s worth asking ourselves how far this “social utility” (its own term) is really acting in the best interests of society.

Don’t take my word, Matt — young internet users themselves are increasingly wary of the social networks’ use of their private data. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project — a decent sample of some 2,253 Americans — found that 44 percent of Generation Y (aged 18 to 29) now limit their online personal information, compared with 33 percent of internet users between ages 30 to 49. And three-quarters of younger social-networkers have adjusted their privacy settings to limit what they share.

Call me uncool — but that’s a trend I’m happy to share with my friends. In person.

David Rowan is the editor of Wired UK magazine. He also writes The Digital Life, a monthly tech column in our sister Conde Nast magazine, GQ. This column originally appeared in CG’s September issue.

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Twitter has no plans to launch its own official desktop client, but it is looking into adding a conversational view on its newly announced New Twitter web platform to help make sense of back-and-forth tweet exchanges.

No, the company won’t increase the number of characters allowed in a post.

And yes, you will get to see the New Twitter in Sweden, and just about everywhere, as soon as the company can roll out the highly coveted upgrade to all of its estimated 160 million users.

So tweeted Twitter CEO Evan Willams in an hour-long exchange with users Friday, on the heels of a major overhaul of its service announced this week.

The new site, which features two panes and rich media such as embedded photos and video, was available immediately to only a small set of users. A worldwide roll-out is scheduled to follow incrementally. That decision apparently left legions of Twitter fans desperate to know just when they’ll get into the New Twitter club.

(Note: The following excerpts come courtesy of Danny Sullivan, who posted a transcript of the entire #askev Q&A at Search Engine Land, organized by topic.)

When’s the new Twitter rolling out to everyone?

We’re still only at small (but increasing!) % of people. Could be a few weeks for everyone. The account selection for #newTwitter is random and worldwide

How is the new Twitter being rolled out to users? Is it based on a random timeline, or by date of signup?

It’s random.

What’s the date that all users will have the #NEWTWITTER?

No specific date. Will be weeks, but we’re testing carefully to make sure it goes smoothly. Thanks.

Ashamed about promoting the new Twitter when not everyone can see it?

Not ashamed, no. Think about it like “coming to a theater near you.”

When will Boston area be getting #NewTwitter !!!

Depends on how the Patriots do this year. KIDDING! Soon.

When do we Swedes get the new awesome Twitter?

Some Swedes have it! It’s being rolled out worldwide randomly.

Fans also batted around suggestions to raise the number of characters allowed from 140 to 160, which is the standard in SMS, or even more (“Where would we put the username?” countered Williams. “Nope, sticking to good ol’ 140 for now. Thanks.)

Williams said the new Twitter will ultimately replace Twitter “classic” and fans will not have the option to roll back once the roll out is complete.

An Android app is in the works, he said, and the company is considering enabling SSL (an internet security protocol) and is looking at adding a tool to allow on the fly language translation.

Read the full transcript for more details, and don’t overlook this gem:

What’s the best website ever?

http://emergencytrammell.com

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Facebook is making a play to become the dominant player in virtual currency — the funny money you use to everything from digital magazines to Farmville turnips. It’s already a billion-dollar business in which Facebook, the world’s largest social network, will face stiff competition from other behemoths like Apple, Google and PayPal.

Facebook already has a big advantage over those companies: a virtual currency, Facebook Credits, that works across different apps rather than being tied to one specific app or another.

Virtual currencies are a promising way to sell because users buy them in pre-paid chunks, rather than plunking down a credit card for each individual purchase, which increases transaction costs. Skype credits are a classic example: Users don’t add just enough credits for each call, as they did with payphones; they re-up periodically with payments of $10 or so.

Right now, most virtual goods are acquired within games, but music, movies, and other forms of content could follow suit, increasing the stakes in the race to reduce the friction affecting in-app transactions.

Sales of virtual goods are projected to reach $1.6 billion this year in the United States alone, according to an Inside Network report. About half of that will be spent on social games, and the majority of that in Facebook games such as Farmville.

Facebook claims 30 percent of revenue when people buy these credits — the same cut Apple and Google slice off when users buy virtual goods within their apps — but is already the number one app across all smartphone platforms according to Nielsen.

Because they are accepted by a number of companies, Facebook Credits are are more liquid than those credits within iOS and Android apps can be. And even though they are significantly less liquid than real dollars processed by PayPal (or Visa and Mastercard, for that matter) they are often handed out in unorthodox ways — for instance, when you sign up for a Netflix subscription, view a video ad, or the like. Facebook itself gives every user 10-25 free credits when they join the social network.

Farmville owner Zynga (like Facebook, the subject of increasing scrutiny for putative idea theft), recently made the switch to Facebook Credits, and had already been selling over $1 million-worth of virtual credits per day as early as April. Now, all of the other major Facebook game publishers are planning to adopt Facebook Credits to create a new standard for in-app currency — according to TrialPay co-founder Terry Angelos, who says they didn’t exactly have a choice.

TrialPay, Facebook’s “de facto exclusive free payment partner” for Facebook Credits, specializes in bundling offers for one thing when consumers are buying something else. They’ve already done on campaigns for McAfee, Netflix, Domino’s Pizza, TrendMicro, Corel, Winzip, The Wall Street Journal, and CNET. Now, it’s awarding Facebook Credits to users who watch video advertisements or register for services.

“When [Facebook can] take a player like Zynga and force them – and Playdom, Playfish, Crowdstar, RockYou, which are all moving over to Facebook Credits — you have a platform that’s going to go from zero to, I think, a billion-dollar run rate in the next six months,” Angelos told Wired.com. “And that’s unprecedented, and unheard of. It’s very, very rare that a payment platform gets to that much traction so quickly… Because of the relationship that Facebook has with publishers, it’s able to have every single major publisher switch to Facebook Credits.”

Facebook a strong hand, but not a perfect one. Apple currently bars developers of  iOS apps from accepting Facebook Credits, which competes with its own budding in-app payment model. A developer who made the popular Aki-Aki iPhone app, which integrates with Facebook in many other ways, told Wired.com his app could not accept Facebook Credits due to Apple’s ban on the practice.

Apple has yet to create a cross-app virtual currency, but offers other virtual goods — iTunes songs, for instance — through pre-paid gift cards. Users may start wondering why they can’t use iTunes credits to purchase goods within iPhone apps like Farmville — and vice versa. And because so much money will be spent in this way, this problem could become a source of annoyance for users and app developers alike.

The U.S. has strict laws against creating new forms of currency, but there’s enough wiggle room for Apple (iTunes), Google (Checkout, Android), Paypal, individual developers, and others to join Facebook in creating virtual currencies that work in apps across their respective platforms, even those beyond games — music, movies, productivity apps, and so on. And that’s when things could get tricky, in the huge and expanding market for virtual goods.

Developers don’t have to embrace Facebook Credits or any other virtual currency. But once a critical mass of other apps adopt one, to ignore them would be to leave money on the table. Will app users and gamers have to maintain stockpiles of multiple virtual currencies, one for each platform on which they wish to access the same cloud-based app or game?

It’s impossible to predict what might happen if Apple and Google create their own versions of Facebook Credits, though it certainly seems likely that some sort of showdown would eventually occur. I wouldn’t be surprised if a squabble over micro-payments weren’t partially responsible for the failure of Apple and Facebook to come to terms over Ping, as an early salvo in this war.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

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Yahoo responded by calling reporters to its headquarters in Sunnyvale and laying out hundreds of yards of purple carpet leading to a demo room where their new head of products told the media that Yahoo has lots of cool things coming up soon.

Yahoo, it seems, wanted to remind reporters, the world, and maybe even its own employees that it’s still a relevant tech company, building cool products. Certainly, there’s no denying that it has a huge user base for its homepage, news, sports, finance and entertainment sites. Six hundred million people a month visit Yahoo.com. Yahoo also runs the world’s most popular webmail service, with 281 million users, and makes billions from display advertising.

But it’s simultaneously got a Rodney Dangerfield-esque chip on its shoulder and an identity complex. Even though it’s farmed out its search crawler to Microsoft, the company has been working on how it presents results — which for common terms are often far better than on other search engines — try the queries “Toy Story 3? or “Tom Waits” comparatively, and Yahoo looks pretty good.

Yet, the tech press has mostly dismissed Yahoo as a player in search, despite having 17 percent of the very lucrative search market, placing it firmly in second place. Touting its webmail, the company says users see 55 percent less spam than Gmail users, which doesn’t change the perception that a Yahoo e-mail address seems dated.

Adding to its woes, Yahoo seems perpetually trying to figure out if it is a media company, a tech company, an advertising company or some odd hybrid.

That confusion and frustration led to today, where Yahoo’s new head of products Blake Irving, a Microsoft veteran just 100 days into his tenure at Yahoo, tried to explain to reporters what Yahoo is, what products it plans to release this fall, and how it plans to release changes faster.

The line-up includes a re-vamp of its e-mail client, a very pretty iPad app that will tie in with your Yahoo account to customize information for you, continuing improvement of its mobile plug-ins for mobile phones, and an integration with Twitter coming in June (!).

When questioned about what Yahoo needed to do to keep people from ditching the service over perceptions that it’s just not at the forefront, Irving responded, “We have to put the cool back in Yahoo.”

Perhaps most convincing was chief technical officer Raymie Stata, who was the chief architect of search and advertising. Without going too heavily into detail, he explained that now all of Yahoo’s many properties, including comments and clicks from users, were now all being poured into the same information pile.

That, he says, will let Yahoo use the same content optimization it uses on its front page (a pretty amazing piece of science work) on all of the sites.

While Irving called for faster iteration and change, Yahoo engineers and product managers will have to handle a Yahoo user base that doesn’t like change. When now-departed executive Tapan Bhat was in charge of the Yahoo home page, he told Wired.com that users would track down his number to complain about links moving different places on the homepage.

Yahoo Groups is experiencing similar problems now as it works on re-vamping the popular, but stale e-mail list service.

That means that Yahoo’s got to be willing to anger some of its user base in order to make its services feel new, while not driving users to quit in droves.

Meanwhile, it’s got to make outstanding add-ons for other companies’ mobile platforms, because unlike Google, Apple and Microsoft, it does not own one. In particular, Google services are so closely integrated into most Android phones that Yahoo has to scramble to work with carriers around the world to be added as a default app to keep from bleeding users. Yahoo argues its platform independence is an asset, especially in regions where phones are sold direct to consumers — not through carriers.

Yahoo’s strength has always been in being an editor for the web experience, which goes back to its roots as a hand-crafted directory of the internet. Now to stay relevant it needs to figure out how to pair its original content, its partnerships with Facebook, publishers and soon Twitter, the picks from its human editors and a sophisticated recommendation engine.

Given the immense amount of information on the web, the ever-increasing velocity of the news cycle, and our growing hunger to stay connected and informed, Yahoo has a chance to be increasingly useful, even if no one can actually define what Yahoo is.

That seems to be what Yahoo was trying to tell the press and the world it is striving to become, but the proof online is in the doing, not the describing.

Photo: Ryan Singel/Wired.com

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Craigslist told Congress Wednesday that it had permanently terminated its Adult Services section in response to criticism that it was facilitating child exploitation and prostitution. And it was criticized by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a group with whom it had worked, which characterized the shutdown as “progress” and said the classifieds site hadn’t provided it many leads.

In written testimony (.pdf), Clint Powell, Craigslist’s head of customer service and law enforcement initiatives, listed a number of actions the company had taken to weed out and deter ads. They required people who took out Adult Services ads to provide a working phone number and valid credit card information, he said. The company also manually screened all ads in Adult Services and reported abuses to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

As for members of Congress, they made it clear they were happy that Craigslist shuttered its services, and wondered if there wasn’t a way to pass a law to criminalize running an online classifieds service, given that the current federal law protects online services from civil liability for what users post online.

“If there is no law on the books, is there any law we could put on the books that would pass constitutional muster,” asked Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Virginia), who as chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security presided over the meeting.

Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee said that as a progressive and a backer of the First Amendment, she was in a philosophical dilemma about sites like Craigslist that allow prostitution ads, adding, “My position is, ‘Shut them down.’”

Since Craigslist’s Adult Services section was shut down Sept. 3, Powell said, ads that used to show up there have migrated to other sites online which, he asserted, may create a law enforcement nightmare.

“Those who formerly posted adult-services ads on Craigslist will now advertise at countless other venues,” Powell wrote. “It is our sincere hope that law enforcement and advocacy groups will find helpful partners there.”

In separate written testimony, Craigslist’s outside attorney Elizabeth McDougall (.pdf) said Craigslist is using “proprietary” technical measures to push adult-services ads off its site to other online ad sites. “Migration of the relatively small percentage of total U.S. adult-services advertising that had been posted on Craigslist to less socially responsible venues uninterested in best practices is an unfortunate step backward in the fight against trafficking and exploitation,” McDougall wrote.

And she echoed Powell’s “Good luck with that” testimony.

“In Craigslist, law enforcement and NGO advocates had a highly responsive partner that listened to and was willing to meet with all concerned parties, and worked collaboratively to develop and implement best practices for minimizing such harms in the context of adult-services advertising,” wrote McDougall. “As a legal counselor with a strong personal interest in combating human trafficking and child exploitation, it has been my sincere privilege to assist this exceptionally conscientious company, and it is sadly dismaying to see Craigslist’s good deeds in this regard be unduly punished.”

But in his testimony, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CEO Ernie Allen applauded the closing of Craigslist’s adult-services section, saying that while the company had rejected 700,000 ads since coming to an agreement with the center, it had only reported 137 cases.

“If indeed [the shutdown] occurred, we think this is a positive and encouraging step,” Allen said, while simultaneously saying that ending child sex-trafficking requires “engaging with companies at the center of the problem.”

“We recognize if we crack down in one area, it will migrate to another place,” Allen said. “But that is progress.”

Allen later added that the government ought to find a way to criminally prosecute Craigslist or other services, since the immunity under the law is only for civil matter.

Tina Frundt, who heads Courtney’s House — a Washington, D.C., shelter for exploited children — said that the kids she helps were all sold on Craigslist and that other sites were involved as well.

“Every pimp has a MySpace page,” Frundt testified, adding that ads also show up on Backpages.com. “Every john uses a john board and posts information on where to buy children.”

“This has been going on for many years. We must do something about our children being sold on the internet.”

Jackson Lee and McDougall sparred over Craigslist leaving the Adult Services section up outside the United States, including in Canada.

Jackson suggested that’s not too far to travel for prostitution.

But McDougall countered that it’s not the U.S. government’s business to tell Canada how to run its country and that many advocates think it’s better to have ads in an environment that is monitored and responsive to law enforcement.

“Many have the idealistic approach that if you eliminate “adult services,” you will eliminate child trafficking,” McDougall said. “Craigslist’s approach is practical. It has been to control, educate, and work with law enforcement.”

Read about more Craigslist tips.

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The video demonstration for ABC’s new iPad app is hokey, derivative, a bit cheesy, and doesn’t stop playing when you want it to — as one might expect from a big television network strutting its online stuff — so we’re not embedding it here. But the television-syncing iPad app it advertises is nothing short of genius.

The secret sauce is unexpected: analog air compressions, otherwise known as “sound.”

ABC’s iPad app for the television show My Generation creates a seamless, two-screen, interactive television experience by bridging a cable/satellite connection and an iPad, two digital devices, by measuring decidedly analog sound waves using the iPad’s microphone. The app looks for certain contours in the audio signal that the Neilsen television ratings firm uses to monitor broadcasts, so that it knows when to display a particular poll or other item linking up with a precise moment in the show.

Though television companion apps exist for the iPad, this automatic syncing feature represents a big step forward. And while ABC is only rolling this out for a single program, it’s such a clever, obvious-in-retrospect idea — not to mention far easier than writing digital code to keep the devices synced wirelessly even if the user watches at someone else’s house or later, using on-demand or a DVR — that it could easily become widespread across many shows.

TV/computer convergence has largely failed so far because neither platform really does the other well enough. But smartphones, and now tablets, are setting the stage for complementary collaboration between these mediums, creating an inexorable link between the primary (television) and secondary (whatever else we’re also looking at while the show is on) screen.

Many viewers these days already monitor a second screen as they watch television, so the only way for networks to close the loop and engage viewers only with their content is to extend that content to that second screen. If users are looking at a tablet, cellphone and laptop as they watch television, from a network’s point of view, that screen might as well be filled by content from the same network.

And if users are engaged on two screens, not only might they be drawn deeper into the show, but they can be advertised to on that second screen, even if they’re fast-forwarding ads on the big screen. Or, they if they do watch televised ads, they will be able, finally, to “click” on them using their iPads, as Nielsen hinted in a joint statement with ABC.

“We believe [the Media-Sync Platform] paves the way to fundamentally change the way consumers interact with television programs and television advertisements,” said Nielsen’s head of strategy and business development Sid Gorham. “We are thrilled to collaborate with the innovative team at Disney/ABC to develop the first Media-Sync app and look forward to a broader industry wide launch in early 2011.”

From the user’s point of view, this technology moves the promise of interactive television way past mere dial-in poll shows such as American Idol, due to the design possibilities of a big-screen, couch-friendly device like the iPad vs. a standard, screen-less phone keypad. And, hey, if we have to put up with some more ads on these secondary screens, maybe that’s fair. Many of the same people who want interactive television probably fast-forward through the ads on the first screen these days, and if you don’t want to see the ads, you can always keep looking at the big, primary screen — no fast-forwarding required.

Interactive television has faced many roadblocks: Televisions are too far away to touch, remote controls are not capable or standardized enough, and cable-satellite set-top boxes are not yet capable of providing the level of interactivity afforded by ABC’s app, which, as simple as it is, executes a nifty end-run around all three problems with the cleverest of analog kluges. (Side note: The whole thing might be possible even without Neilsen’s help, too, because a network could use its own fingerprint of a show’s normal audio track to set up the cues rather than relying on Neilsen’s digital watermarks.)

Again, be forewarned: The video demo is a bit over the top, with the same sort of over-earnest soundtrack that Apple’s ads encouraged so many other marketers to rely on, but it does have the benefit of showing this groundbreaking app in action.

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