Google's latest transparency report included some interesting notes on the company's YouTube video policy.

Google complied with more than 100 content removal requests from law enforcement groups, but also denied several requests, including a number of videos that allegedly exposed police brutality and defamed the police.

Conflict between police and the public is nothing new, but the issue could become a hot topic as the Occupy protests drag on and police around the country commence crackdown efforts.

Encounters between law enforcement and protesters are all but inevitible and, with video recording now a common feature on mobile handsets, much of the crackdown will find its way onto YouTube.

This could raise an interesting conflict between Google, YouTube and law enforcement groups. Police will be in no mood to have video of officers clashing with citizens circling the web, particularly with tension between protestors and police already high.

Google, meanwhile, could have a delicate balancing act to perform. The company doesn't want to be seen as party to incitement to violence against police, but has a core set of principles to uphold, particularly empowering free speech and the rights of individuals.

If YouTube is going to pride itself on helping citizens spread word of protests and police actions in other parts of the world, Google is obliged to allow the same freedom here.

We know that the UK is firmly entrenched in iPhone mania, but in the US consumers don't seem to be nearly as excited about getting their hands on the latest Apple handset.

V3 paid a visit to Apple's famous Union Square retail location to check out the crowd and there wasn't a single iPhone camper to be found outside the store by mid-day on Thursday.

With the handset slated to arrive at 8am on Friday, it is entirely possible that customers could show up in the evening and through the night, but to see nobody parked in front of the store with less than 20 hours before the release is something of a departure.

It's a big difference to what was seen in London, where Apple fans have been queueing for days to get their hands on the new smartphone. You can't use weather as an excuse, it was a beautiful 28 degrees and sunny today in the city by the bay.

It does seem that the novelty of waiting in line these days has worn off a bit. New iPhone releases come every year and with Apple's improved manufacturing chain, shortages rarely last more than a few days.

On top of that, pre-orders of the iPhone 4S have shattered records, particularly here in the US, where carriers such as AT&T moved hundreds of thousands of units in the first day of pre-orders alone.

Whatever the reason, the iPhone queues in San Francisco just ain't what they used to be...

Bankruptcies and takeovers are becoming increasingly common as many of the world's economies struggle to emerge from recession, raising privacy concerns about customer databases when a company is bought out.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued an advisory this week to customers of Borders bookstore, which went into bankruptcy earlier this year and sold some of its operation to rival Barnes & Noble.

It seems part of that sale included the Borders customer database which contained names, contact information and purchase history.

If you are a Borders customer and do not want your details sold off to another company, the FTC suggests you contact Barnes & Noble to opt out of the customer data transfer. Those who opt out before 29 October will not have their information handed over.

Barnes & Noble has sent emails notifying customers of the opt-out process, but if you've deleted or lost the email you can optout of the data transfer here.

The opt-out operation raises an interesting issue. With so many companies collecting data, people will have to keep track of not only who they hand their data over to, but where the people who collect that data may eventually end up placing it.

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff pulled off a glorious public relations coup today when he side-stepped an attempt by Oracle to cancel his planned keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

According to Benioff, Oracle contacted Salesforce at 3:30pm Wednesday to cancel the speech, which Benioff believes was due to disparaging remarks he made about Ellison on Facebook.

Salesforce staff scrambled to enact a Plan B and they were very successful, booking an alternative event at the St Regis Hotel.

Benioff was his usual dynamic self, railing on about the virtues of cloud computing and the bright future for software-as-a-service. He energised the audience and made some excellent points about the future of enterprise IT.

Unfortunately, he also made one very big mistake. Midway through the speech, Benioff was talking about Oracle's ignoring the virtues of cloud computing and the risk the company runs of being left behind, when he made a rather ill-advised comparison.

"It is these very forces that you can be Mubarak and say: 'This doesn't exist,' but the reality is that people have an alternative way of communicating," he said.

It is one thing to use historical examples to back up your business, and in many cases you can find events that indeed parallel current situations quite nicely.

Benioff later clarified this position to some extent, telling reporters: "CEOs today need to understand something. You might think you have command and control, but there is always a way around it.

"We saw that in the Middle East, we're seeing that on Wall Street. Command and control only goes so far."

But Benioff is the head of a enterprise software hosting company. Ellison is the head of an enterprise hardware and software company.

Ellison is not the military dictator of a sovereign nation, and Benioff is not an impoverished and oppressed citizen risking his life in the hope of obtaining basic freedom for his people.

When you're in an insulated position, such as the penthouse office of a successful internet firm, it can be easy to lose touch with the real world. In this case, Benioff was out of line in comparing his own situation to those who have put the rights of their countrymen ahead of their own lives.

To be fair, Benioff had an excellent point. Oracle and Ellison made a big mistake in cancelling the keynote. Benioff's presentation would have been a minor story among a stream of news from OpenWorld. In trying to shut down the presentation, Oracle displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the way social networking operates.

But Benioff has now taken away from his own argument by drawing the ill-advised comparison. He is certainly a master marketer and a visionary when it comes to cloud computing and software-as-a-service.

But if this quote is any indication, he also has some serious problems understanding the significance of what is happening in much of the world right now, and the risks people are taking to effect those changes.

Today is the beginning of two major conferences: Oracle's OpenWorld and the JavaOne event in downtown San Francisco.

As one might expect, the two shows are sharing a few pieces of news, among them the unveiling of a new NoSQL platform.

Ashok Joshi, senior director of Oracle's NoSQL development group, took to the stage on Monday and gave a sneak peek at the project. While few details were given, Joshi described NoSQL as a highly scalable, highly available database which could be expanded to handle massive databases.

Joshi, who was on the stage mainly to outline partnership programmes between Intel and Oracle, mentioned that, during testing at Intel's Oregon labs, the platform had been deployed on server clusters with as many as 96 processor nodes.

At its peak, Joshi said the platform had been tested against a system containing 2.1 billion records.

We expect to hear more about NoSQL later this week as OpenWorld progresses.

Those who have been eagerly awaiting the enactment of laws to preserve net neutrality in the US should mark their calendars for 20 November.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has confirmed that it will enact laws to prevent ISPs deliberately throttling traffic based on the application or service being accessed.

The FCC filing states that the rules will ensure that "the freedom and openness that have enabled the internet to flourish as an engine for creativity and commerce will continue".

"This framework thus provides greater certainty and predictability to consumers, innovators, investors and broadband providers, as well as the flexibility providers need to effectively manage their networks," the FCC said.

The laws do little more than mandate what was already considered the status quo. Most consumers assume that they will get the same internet connection regardless of the site they visit or the application they use.

Net neutrality has been a popular topic among governments. The US and the UK have debated whether enforcing net neutrality constitutes important consumer protection or dangerous government regulation.

The new laws may not last very long, however. Republicans in Congress have been outspoken critics of net neutrality and, with the economy continuing to stall under a Democrat president, voters could give Republicans control of Congress, leading to a prompt repeal of the regulations.

But consumers may still have options if the laws are repealed. Tools such as n00ter promise to identify service providers that throttle certain services, allowing web users to drop ISPs that don't adhere to neutrality.

One of the lingering stories this summer has been the controversial decision by Netflix to split the billing for its DVD rental and streaming services.

Customers have been grumbling for weeks about the move, which turned one bill into two and left them wondering about the status of the mail DVD service as the streaming platform continues to grow.

Well, it took a couple of months, but Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings has finally come forward and admitted that the company mishandled the matter.

"I messed up. I owe you an explanation. It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology," he said.

As with any CEO who acknowledges a ticking off by millions of customers, Hastings was quick to move on with the company's long-term plans.

As many might have guessed, Netflix is hoping to phase out the DVD-by-mail business, which costs significantly more to run than a simple media streaming platform.

The DVD business will be rebranded as Qwikster, and will presumably be wound down and sent out to pasture or spun off. Netflix, meanwhile, will operate as a streaming-only media platform.

The question, however, may be just how many customers Netflix can bring over to its service. The price changes drove away a number of subscribers, and recent reports suggest that the company's stock is at its lowest point in months.

Additionally, rival Blockbuster is preparing to launch its own streaming service. A mass exodus to Blockbuster would be ironic, as it was the emergence of Netflix that was largely credited for destroying Blockbuster's bricks-and-mortar retail operation.

The US hasn't always had the best history when it comes to wireless networking technology.

From the use of CDMA networks to slow uptake of 3G broadband, those of us in the States often lag behind when it comes to the latest and greatest in mobile technology. So anytime a major carrier launches a new network technology, it is good news.

AT&T is to go live this weekend with an LTE wireless broadband network in five US cities, with plans to expand to 15 cities in the coming months. The network will cover some 70 million people, the company estimates.

That number is still a minority of the US population, and those in rural or isolated areas still won't be getting coverage any time soon, but getting the major metropolitan areas covered is a good start.

And those of you who like rumours and speculation should also note that the rollout comes just weeks before Apple is believed to be introducing the next version of the iPhone, which is rumoured to include, among other things, LTE connectivity.