Facebook has been awarded $711.2m in damages after winning a case against Sanford Wallace, known as Spamford
, who sent mail and made posts without the permission of the social networking web site’s users. The company has been pursuing legal action against Wallace, who last year was fined $230m for attacking MySpace users to send porn spam, in February. In a statement Facebook said that the award, made at a court in California, was the second largest in history
for an anti-spam action
A man who discovered a technology integral to wireless internet while searching for exploding black holes has won this year’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. John O’Sullivan, 62, a CSIRO researcher from Sydney, received his $300,000 award from Kevin Rudd at Parliament House last night. Dr O’Sullivan’s invention, now used by almost a billion people a day, had its genesis in a 1977 paper he wrote about how a set of mathematical equations could be used to sharpen images from optical telescopes
The Stockholm District Court has taken action against two founder members of The Pirate Bay. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij are now banned from operating the site and will have to pay fines of $71,000 each if they continue. This, despite the fact that they nor the site remain in Sweden
Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, warned internet users today that the days of consequence-free
illegal filesharing are over as he unveiled the government’s plan for cracking down on online piracy. Mandelson, speaking at the government’s digital creative industries conference, C&binet, confirmed that the internet connections of persistent offenders could be blocked – but only as a last resort — from the summer of 2011. He added that a legislate and enforce
strategy was the only way to protect the intellectual property rights of content producers. The strategy, which will be officially set out in the government’s digital economy bill in late November, will involve a staged process of warning notifications with internet suspension as a last resort
Xerox announced a new silver ink (among other things) that it’s calling, and apparently is, a breakthrough in printable electronics, a leading edge concept that’s generated a lot of discussion but few actual products to date, largely because of the issues that Xerox’s new technology addresses. In concept, printable electronics is just what it sounds like: using a printer, basically an ink jet, to print electronic circuits. If you can do that reliably, you can print electronic devices for far less than current methods cost. You can also print the devices on a variety of new materials
Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumours of any kind — and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why. The findings show that the mole rat’s cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells claustrophobic
, stopping the cells’ proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumour, the cells’ growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous
The Electronic Frontier Foundation today has aimed a demonstrably potent weapon — the spotlight of public shame — at those corporations and individuals who abuse copyright claims to stifle free speech
Visitors to technology blog Gizmodo are being warned that they could have picked up more than tips about the latest must-have gadget. According to security firm Sophos, the web site was delivering advertisements laced with malware last week. A statement on the Gizmodo web site admits that it was tricked into running Suzuki adverts which were in fact from hackers. It follows a similar problem on the New York Times web site
A French court has convicted the Church of Scientology of fraud, but stopped short of banning the group from operating in France. Two branches of the group’s operations and several of its leaders in France have been fined. The case came after complaints from two women, one of whom said she was manipulated into paying more than 20,000 euros in the 1990s
The internet is on the brink of the biggest change
to its working since it was invented 40 years ago
, the net regulator ICANN has said. The body said it that it was finalising plans to introduce web addresses using non-Latin characters. The proposal — initially approved in 2008 — would allow domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts
A record 5,000 words have been added to the latest edition of the Macquarie Dictionary. The Australian dictionary is growing faster than ever before and the new additions to the fifth version are as varied as the rest of the English language. The dictionary’s editor, Sue Butler, says it is meant to be a snapshot of modern English in Australia
A Chinese-American academic has been sentenced to eight years in prison for selling human skulls unearthed in China to buyers overseas. The US national, 44, only identified by his surname Ding, was sentenced on September 21 for illegal business practices
. His arrest came after the US Federal Bureau of Investigation tipped off Chinese police last year, informing authorities that Ding was sending the skulls to the United States via express mail
Geocities We always imagined how this might end: GeoCities would finally take down all of the animated under construction
signs, and we’d hear one last Midi file to the tune of horns playing taps. Instead, GeoCities will probably go down with a whimper today. Time is up for Yahoo’s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline
With more than half a million visits a day, EZTV is the leading TV-torrent release group. It therefore comes as no surprise that rumours and confusion spread when the site went offline earlier this week. EZTV users can be reassured though, the downtime is caused by technical issues and not any legal trouble as some had suggested
The consumer watchdog says there will be a zero tolerance
approach to dodgy telecommunications companies while the Federal Government has threatened a legislative crackdown after new figures showed a significant rise in complaints against telcos
A new mobile phone charger that will work with any handset has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union. Industry body the GSMA says that 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers are generated each year. Currently most chargers are product or brand specific, so people tend to change them when they upgrade to a new phone. However, the new energy-efficient chargers can be kept for much longer. The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes
All 1.6 million books digitised so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC)
The BBC is reportedly mulling over plans to come up with an international edition of its hugely popular iPlayer service, in a bid to allow global audience to catch up with some of its top shows, according to BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s profit-making arm. BBC Worldwide said that the move would help revamping its business model, and thereby help the corporation in raking in significant profits through its premium content
In a great blow for consumers everywhere, the prospect of 3-strikes for copyright infringers has returned with a vengeance, as both the EU Council and French Constitutional court pushed forward with their respective legislation. HADOPI is alive, and the EU has shredded requirements for judicial oversight
Discarded and left-for-dead, old TV broadcast channels (called white spaces
) that have been freed up by the transition to digital TV in the US are being given new life and used to wirelessly deliver high-speed Internet connectivity to business, education and community users. Under an experimental license granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Spectrum Bridge designed and deployed a wireless TV white spaces network to distribute broadband Internet connectivity in Claudville, Virginia. To ensure the local residents make the most of this new high-speed connectivity, Dell, Microsoft and the TDF Foundation have contributed software and hardware to the local school and the town’s new computer centre
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