Nokia has been on an acquisition tear lately, albeit mostly small deals (Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side all this year). A source close to the deal says that they’ve just made one more acquisition: boutique travel social network Dopplr, headquartered in London
Data centres in Sydney and Brisbane have shut off external ventilation systems, restricted loading dock access and attended false alarms after a major dust storm choked the cities today. Macquarie Telecom, Equinix, ac3, manageNET and AAPT outlined a number of preventative measures taken in their respective data centres to prevent dust ingress. At least two major firms — Optus and CBA — confirmed false alarms had been set off in Sydney facilities due to high winds and dust particles in the air. But all reported they had come out largely unscathed from the storm, one of the worst on record
Web pages have long included anchor links, which, when clicked, send you to a specific section of the page. Wikipedia uses them heavily to help users jump between headings and navigate the sometimes large articles more efficiently. Google has announced that it is now including these anchor links in search results. This is right in line with Google’s mission of helping users to find the information that they are looking for as quickly and accurately as possible
Delays of more than two weeks have prompted irate buyers on eBay, and other sites such as Amazon, to start payment disputes, sparking financial disruption. eBay sellers are worried they may suffer negative feedback from customers as buyers with goods caught up in the postal strike launch pre-emptive dispute
claims in a bid to avoid being out of pocket. Many users of the online auction house have been left empty-handed as the Royal Mail union snarl-up over job cuts and pay causes huge disruption at sorting offices across the country
Scientists said Thursday that a new AIDS vaccine, the first ever declared to protect a significant minority of humans against the disease, would be studied to answer two fundamental questions: why it worked in some people but not in others, and why those infected despite vaccination got no benefit at all. The vaccine — known as RV 144, a combination of two genetically engineered vaccines, neither of which had worked before in humans — was declared a qualified success after a six-year clinical trial on more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand. Those who were vaccinated became infected at a rate nearly one-third lower than the others
They aren’t selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn’t too far off, as costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use. Silicon Graphics International on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory
Demon Internet has sent out a spreadsheet containing the personal details of thousands of customers with one of its new ebills. The spreadsheet contains email addresses, telephone numbers and what appears to be usernames and passwords for the ebilling system
The US inflated the $700,000 bill for damages it slapped on UFO hacker Gary McKinnon by stuffing it with costs incurred for patching the gaping holes the hacker had exposed in its computer security, according to a document filed with the Supreme Court. The US had not taken reasonable steps to protect its security and now expects McKinnon to pick up the bill, said an expert witness statement made in McKinnon’s ongoing appeal against a US extradition order
A business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his asset protection services
to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors
The lack of SMS integration is a perennial complaint for Australian Twitter users. Chime goes a fair way to solving that problem, letting you update your Twitter status via an Australian phone account
The Walt Disney Company’s proposed $4 billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment may come with a headache: a brand-new superhero copyright dispute. Heirs to the comic-book artist Jack Kirby, who has been credited as the co-creator of characters and stories behind Marvel mainstays like the X-Men
and Fantastic Four
, among many others, last week sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel, Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and others who have been making films and other forms of entertainment based on the characters
Australia’s consumer watchdog is leading an international crackdown on internet scams, particularly those taking advantage of the global financial crisis to lure people in. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says the scams are costing Australian consumers $1 billion a year, and that criminals are using the global financial crisis to lure people in
Researchers at the Hohenstein Institute in Stuttgart, Germany developed a method to embed multipotent mesenchymal stem cells onto the surface fibres of common surgical fabric implants. Using such a product it may be possible to directly motivate the regrowth of critical tissue, such as myocardium after a heart attack
Scientists are operating in an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty
because libel laws biased in favour of the plaintiff are making them wary of challenging bogus claims about health products, Richard Dawkins has claimed. Dawkins told the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth that scientists should settle their differences in the lab, not in court, and that libel laws that made it too easy for people to be sued could have disastrous consequences
for the public interest. He condemned the way London had become the libel capital of the world
and backed Liberal Democrat proposals that were approved by the conference for the libel laws to be reformed to provide a better balance
in favour of free speech
A French court has ordered online auction site eBay to pay 80,000 euros ($135,524) to Louis Vuitton for selling fake luxury perfumes
Telstra is believed to be planning to launch a personal video recorder and set-top box, likely to be called the T-box, as early as December, in a bid to shift the entertainment, news and sport content it offers under the BigPond brand from people’s computers to their televisions. The strategy, which puts Telstra into direct competition with Foxtel (which has its own iQ set-top box), enables the telco to retain a content play if it is forced to divest its 50 per cent shareholding in the pay-TV company
Will the world’s fastest land animal make a comeback in India, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country? A serious initiative is afoot to bring the cheetah back to India and make it, as many wildlife experts say, the flagship species
of the country’s grasslands, which do not have a single prominent animal now. A similar effort in the 1970s — India was then talking to Iran, which had around 300 cheetahs at that time — flopped after the Shah of Iran was deposed and the negotiations never progressed
Last month TorrentFreak reported on DigiProtect, the anti-piracy company with the tagline Turn Piracy Into Profit
. A manager from DigiProtect revealed some of the inner workings on how the company operates but according to a lawyer who defends alleged file-sharers, he may have revealed just a little too much
A campaign backed by automakers and some lawmakers to make electric or hybrid cars noisier in a bid to increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists has taken a strange, Blade Runner
-type twist. Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a beautiful and futuristic
noise similar to the sound of flying cars — or spinners
— that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller based on a Philip K Dick science fiction novel
The founders of Skype are escalating their legal battle with eBay. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype in the United States District Court of Northern California. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of Skype for $1.9 billion to a consortium of investors led by the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. In the court filing, Joltid, a company owned by the Skype founders, claims that eBay violated copyright law by altering and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind the free Internet calling service. The Skype founders maintained ownership of that source code after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, and licensed it to eBay
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