An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has metastasised
from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like
, without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, California, said at a conference at Stanford University
The world’s largest invertebrate is not a fast and voracious predator as previously thought, say scientists. The colossal squid, a creature once linked to maritime myth and feared as a sea monster, is really a slow drifting animal that ambushes unwitting prey. That conclusion was reached by studying the physiology and feeding habits of other deep sea species and scaling up to the colossal squid’s huge size
A court decision ruling that the supply of software through a digital download mechanism is not a supply of goods
has been upheld in the Supreme Court of NSW, setting a precedent that software downloaded via the internet is not protected by the Sale of Goods Act
New computer forensic tools will make it possible to recover more data from corrupted hard drives so long as the missing filles haven’t been overwritten. Tools designed to harvest images from disks even after they have been deleted from the file system can be adapted to seek other file formats including Word documents, says Nasir Memon, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Thanks to Monsanto Roundup, American agriculture is in quite a fix. Monsanto’s genetically modified seed that’s supposed to survive spraying with their weedkiller is struggling against the pesticide-resistant weeds that evolved as a result of their own product
Following pressure from the US Government, Canada is preparing to ram through a revamped copyright bill that will have disastrous consequences for consumers. The Government is hereby ignoring the public consultation held last year, where many Canadians spoke out against harsher copyright legislation
Arab nations are leading an historic
charge to make the world wide web live up to its name. Net regulator ICANN has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called country codes
written in Arabic scripts. The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil
When a piece of software is automatically installed on your computer without your knowledge, it’s called malware. But what do you call it when Facebook apps are added to your profile without your knowledge? We discovered Wednesday that this is actually happening, and stopping it isn’t as easy as checking a box in your privacy settings. If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don’t have to have a Facebook window open, you don’t need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there’s no notification, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings
The telecommunications company has decided to turn its public telephone boxes — which are in danger of becoming obsolete anyway thanks to mobile phones — into battery recharging stations for electric cars. Admittedly, the scheme is still in its infancy: there are just 223 electric cars currently registered in Austria at the moment, plus 3,559 hybrid cars, from a total 4.36 million cars on Austrian roads
Microsoft is killing off its newsgroups and encouraging users to move to forums instead. The software giant has over 2,000 public groups covering its various products, as well as 2,200 private groups for the likes of Microsoft resellers. But from June 2010 these will be moved to revamped forums on TechNet, MSDN and Microsoft Answers. Microsoft said: Forums offer a better spam management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by encouraging a healthy discussion space
Shortly after Metropolis was released in 1927 it was acquired by Paramount Pictures, which drastically edited the film, cutting an hour of footage. For eighty years efforts have been made to locate the deleted scenes; in 2001 a partially reconstructed version was exhibited to the public. In 2008 an even more complete version was located in Argentina. Except for a few frames, the Argentinian version appears to be complete, and film critics viewing it believe it offers new insights into the original film
Google will begin selling electronic books that people can read on any internet-connected device including Apple’s hot-selling iPad tablet computers. The internet giant will launch an online digital bookshop called Editions by the end of July and its virtual shelves will be stocked with in-print works with the permission of publishers who own the copyright
RapidShare is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users, a German court ruled yesterday. The Dusseldorf Court of Appeals overturned the earlier decision of a local district court in a case brought by the movie outfit Capelight Pictures
A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist. How the Maya used the pressurised water is, however, still unknown
Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the North Carolina State University. Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can store an unprecedented amount of data
British e-mail users with Google accounts are now able to change the end of their addresses from @googlemail.com to @gmail.com. A five year trademark dispute meant that Google was not allowed to use the name Gmail in the UK. In 2005 a company called Independent International Investment Research claimed it had used Gmail
first. Google claimed at the time that the settlement IIR asked for was exorbitant
and dropped the name
Google just landed some impressive 3D desktop software in its purchase of Bump Technologies, but a looming patent battle with Apple suggests that Google also had BumpTop’s multi-touch technology on the brain when it gobbled up the company. The existing BumpTop software for Windows and Mac, soon to be discontinued, arranges desktops into three-dimensional spaces. Users can arrange files into stacks and stick notes and photos to the walls, a lot like a real desk. But the real magic happened last October, when Bump introduced multi-touch gestures for BumpTop’s Windows edition. This allowed users to pan and zoom around the desktop and to stack up and fan out their documents with finger swipes
The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers — which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer understanding of language would lead to artificially intelligent machines, inevitably and quickly. But the mispredicted words of speech recognition have rewritten that narrative. We just haven’t recognised it yet
Are you tired of the frozen modified milk products masquerading as ‘ice cream’ in the freezer aisle of your grocery store? Yes? Then you’ll love this super easy two ingredient ice cream. It’s easy to make with REAL wholesome ingredients and you DON’T need an ice cream machine. Best of all, it’s absolutely delicious — via Instructables
After more than two months of downtime caused by a webhost screwup and a lack of backups, the BitTorrent site BitSnoop has returned with many added features. Among other things the BitSnoop team has implemented FakeSkan
, a feature that warns users about suspicious torrent files
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