An Indian court today decriminalised homosexuality — but only in the country’s capital, Delhi. The Delhi high court ruled that treating consensual gay sex as a crime was a violation of fundamental rights protected by India’s constitution. The ruling is the first of its kind in the deeply conservative country
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination
Mozilla fired another shot in the browser wars today with the release of Firefox 3.5. The browser, which was previewed before going to the Release Candidate stage, was driven by quality instead of a timeline, according to the company. The focus for this version of Firefox is speed. Vlad Vukicevic, tech lead for the Firefox project at Mozilla, says that the main significance [of the browser upgrade] is that Firefox 3.5 is really, really fast
. Aside from the speed boost, Firefox 3.5 also boasts HTML 5 capabilities for handling audio and video, and a JavaScript performance and stability boost courtesy of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
Amazon cut ties today with its business affiliates in Rhode Island to protest a provision in the draft state budget that would force the company to collect sales tax. Rhode Island is now the second state where affiliates in the program, known as Amazon Associates, have been cut off over the sales tax issue. Earlier this month the Seattle-based online retailer also closed its affiliates’ accounts in North Carolina
The communications regulator has sounded the alarm after receiving a number of complaints from Australians who received SMS messages containing death threats. The threats, which tell the victim I am about to kill you
unless they contact an email address, are part of an SMS scam campaign designed to con targets out of personal details, cash and passwords. The warning from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) today comes after this website reported yesterday how scores of Australians had received SMS spam messages saying they have won $123,000, but must reply with their email address for instructions on how to claim the prize. The campaign is a ruse, attempting to trick people into paying $1000 for courier fees in order to claim a non-existent prize
A new Trojan horse program being distributed by tens of thousands of recently hacked Web sites hijacks search results so that Google.com users can scarcely tell that their Web searches are being funneled through third-party sites. Earlier this month, security experts at Websense warned that some 40,000 Web sites were hacked and seeded with code that bombards a visitor’s PC with a virtual kitchen sink worth of browser exploits, all in an effort to install a Trojan horse program. Websense named this mass compromise Nine-Ball
, and the Trojan dropped on victimized PCs was thought to install a range of malicious software
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