In the course of releasing boatloads of data to contestants in its "Beat Netflix's Recommendation Algorithm" contest, they may not have disguised where that data came from as well as they should. The plaintiff, known here as Jane Doe to preserve privacy, alleges that her identity could be divined from the data, and thus threatens her civil right to privacy. Apparently, two researchers compared Netflix reviews to IMDB reviews and figured out some identities that way.

The suit seeks a cash settlement for each of the 2 million Netflix customers involved, and also seeks to stop the upcoming sequel to the original Netflix contest. We'll keep you updated on the suit—it's a pretty interesting one, for sure. [Wired]

This chart from Fierce Developer shows that while Apple and RIM have been booming, and Symbian and Android have shown decent growth for smaller players, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile have been largely stagnant. Microsoft even managed to lose market share between May and July. At the rate this is going, the two carriers will need some drastic changes to stay in the game. For Palm, the answer could be as simple as an expanded or refreshed product line. For Microsoft, though, it looks like a fix won't be coming any time soon. [Comscore via Fierce Developer via Electronista]

AndroLib's been tracking new submissions stats since the Market opened—stats which don't just show us when Android apps pass arbitrary milestones, but how quickly it's happening. And to answer the implied question: very.

There were more that twice as many new apps approved in the month of November than in July, and the rate of increase is only getting higher. Of course, raw app numbers don't guarantee that there will be anything worth downloading, but they do help. Even if just one in every 100 apps it worth downloading, the good stuff starts to add up pretty quickly. It's a sad formula! But it works out. [AndroidLib via MobileCrunch]

This chart breaks down each activity by hours, bytes, and words for the total population, average per user, and average per American in 2008. There's a lot to process here, but my first reaction is: that many people still watch TV in standard def?

*A 1 with 21 zeros after it [UC-San Diego]

But! It's "going to get fixed." He promises. (As AT&T has for over a year.) Besides, part of it's in your head—AT&T says they have a national dropped call rate of 1.32 percent, which is within two-tenths of one percent below the "highest-scoring provider." (Though it's, um, higher in NY on some phones, according to some people.)

Disconcertingly, he made reference to AT&T's favorite stat, that 3 percent of smartphone customers push 40 percent of data, and that they're looking at incentives—as the WSJ put it—that'll get those people to cut back, "in a way that's consistent with net-neutrality and FCC regulations." These FCC regulations. Meaning pay-per-byte data.

But you know what? If I could get data 100 percent of the time, sure, I'll pay more for it, Ralphie. [WSJ]

[Online Education]

The five here considered are MRAM (using two thin layers of magnetic material), FeRAM (which creates polarization through ferroelectrics), PCRAM (using lasers, sort of like with CDs and DVDs), RRAM (a variation on PCRAM that uses electrochemical reactions instead of heat-induced changes), and Racetrack (which, frankly, I understand even less than the other four, hard as that is to believe). If you're not a sciencey type, descriptions of these technologies may sound like adults in Charlie Brown's world, but they could be the next revolution in data storage—so read up. [New Scientist]

In this map, which takes into account all the documented nuclear tests since 1945, two things really stand out. The few days in 1945 that saw the only use of nuclear weapons on humans register, when measured on the unfeeling scale of kilotons, as two small blips, aberrant in their location but unremarkable in their size. Then you see the key: The scale is not linear. If it was, the larger explosions would cover most of the map. That's the thing with nuclear weapons: It's easy to lose your sense of scale when it comes to how powerful they are, or what havoc they can wreak.

It paints (or visualizes) an unflattering portrait of the fifties and sixties not as golden years of postwar recovery and American prosperity, but as the years that the US and the Soviet Union, in blind competition with one another, spent all their time and untold amounts of their money blowing their own countries up. History! [DataVis]

UPDATE: Swapped image for original infographic, from Radial Cartography—Thanks, Adam!

What do you think the future will hold (i.e.will Google end up creating sentient robots hell bent on destroying mankind)? [Image via BustedTees]

iSuppli's quarterly report on computer shipments is a little dry, but today's report that Dell's shipments declined 5.9% caught our eye. It's easy enough to blame the economy, but not when your major competitors are all growing, and especially not when Acer knocks you out of the number two spot. It's true that netbooks and pricing are big factors in Acer's success, and that Dell's still second—barely—to HP in total shipments. But someone in Round Rock needs to realize that what's true for plants and populations is also true for computer companies: if you don't grow, you die. [iSuppli via Electronista]

Reader Drew just noticed that the artist updated the graphic. I've replaced the image. Looks like the guide inconsistencies you all noticed have been fixed, at least for the most part.

Update 2: Curtiss just wrote to tell me that version 4.0 is up, and that he's taken your feedback into account. The new image is above. [Curtiss Spontelli via fellow Gizmodian Kyle. Thanks dude!]

This from TiVo's SEC filing for last quarter, which shows the company losing 314,000 subscribers in the period, capping more than year an a half of fairly steady decline. They lay claim to just 8% of the roughly 38m active DVRs in the US right now. This is not great.

The TiVo name is so common that most people don't have the sense of the turmoil behind it, but it's very, very real. TiVo's boxes, even if they are some of the best DVRs around, have started to feel stale in the past year, and for most people, cable-co-supplied boxes are simply Good Enough. Basically, they need something exciting, to customers and to TV providers, and they need it soon—that cascading cash river from Dish isn't going to flow forever. [TV By The Numbers via Crunchgear]

That the iPhone is a massive source of online traffic isn't a surprise—that's been apparent since the week it launched. What's interesting here is Android's rise, which is dramatically quickening, already accounting for a fifth of mobile traffic in the US, when the real marketing push for the OS, starting with the MyTouch ads and the massive Droid launch, is only recently starting in earnest. What is a surprise, or at the very least a Sad Thing, is how poorly Palm is faring. Their tiny sliver of market share might seem understandable since they really only had one new phone for the duration of the survey, but this phone was supposed to be their savior; in the year since it was introduced, their mobile traffic actually fell.
Google and Apple's stark gain in the stats, collected by mobile advertising firm AdMob, is a little less spectacular worldwide, mainly because Symbian's established, but waning, 40% smartphone market share helps it snatch about 25% of mobile web traffic. Still though, two things are clear: Android and the iPhone are who mobile web developers are going to have to cater to, and WebKit, which Symbian uses in its browser too, is basically it.

Anyway, how about a bonus chart! Ever wondered how common the different Android handsets are, which is most popular, and which don't register? Well hello, extra pie:

The G1 is the predictable star here, but the Droid is exploding. [AdMob via Techcrunch]

You can get a day pass of 75MB for $15, a week pass of 250MB for $30, and a month pass of 500MB for $50. The prices aren't absurd if you only use the thing occasionally, but those data caps are something awful. For example, just loading a website will get you to burn a couple megabytes, and a heavy email session with attachments will kill half the day's quota. Better to save this for emergencies at the rates AT&T is offering. [AT&T

But Mike notes that AT&T is already ok with setting up Windows and Blackberry phones with data only plans (but not iPhones) and that a data/voip-only phone is what Google proposed to the FCC when bidding on wireless spectrum back in the day.

The initial post that there would be a Google phone—an in-house, top-to-bottom Google developed handset running android—was met with skepticism by the press. Most people quoted previous statements from Google's Andy Rubin stating that they would not "compete with their own customers" by releasing a handset of their own. That mimes microsoft's strategy with PCs and Phones, versus their in house designed Xbox and Zune hardware. But there is a difference here, despite the quote from Rubin: Google does not charge for Android, so are these people customers or beneficiaries of the only real modern mobile operating system that they can license. And Free. I mean, Win Mo is currently terrible and costs money and symbian is a joke. Blackberry isn't up for grabs. And does Google care if they lose a few points of market share? I don't think so. This isn't even close to their core business, except that whenever someone gets on the internet, Google stands to make money. In this case, Google wins not by licensing more OSes to be used on phones, but in the very act of getting more phones in the world, no matter what the OS or platform. Now that's scary power. [Techcrunch]