eBay has rolled out WorldofGood.com, a new online Green marketplace offering products that are made from recycled or natural materials. The site also allows shoppers to buy products built in developing nations. Thus, eBay said, the site has a positive impact on people and the planet
Smartyhost, an Australian web hosting firm, has been adding Trojans to their clients websites for the past 6 months, potentially driving them off the web and out of business
It’s the success story to beat all internet success stories. Ten years ago, on 7 September 1998, two young graduate students at Stanford University incorporated a company with the (then) odd-sounding name Google
. Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are billionaires. Their company is hugely profitable; between April and June this year alone, it reported a turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn) and generated a net profit of $1.25bn (the first quarter was even more profitable). Not bad for a company that makes its money being a broker for and publisher of online advertising
Scientists have found that bumblebees learn from their near-death
encounters with crab spiders and adapt their future foraging strategies. They watched real bees in an artificial meadow — containing yellow flowers
and robotic crab spiders. Bees that had been captured
spent longer inspecting flowers during subsequent foraging trips. They may outwit the spiders — but at the expense of valuable foraging time
The summer saw a surge in the number of hijacked home PCs or zombies
, say security experts. The Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks zombie numbers worldwide, said it had seen at least a threefold increase in the last three months. More than 450,000 computers are now part of zombie networks, or botnets, run by hi-tech criminals, it said. The rise is believed to be linked to attacks that booby-trap web sites to try to infect the machines of visitors
Criminals can remotely destroy incriminating evidence by exploiting security features on the Apple iPhone, a leading digital forensics expert has warned. The head of the Serious Fraud Office digital forensics unit Keith Foggon cautioned that the ability to remotely wipe the iPhone and other smart phones used by enterprises could be exploited by lawbreakers
California claims copyright to its laws, and warns people not to share them. And that’s not sitting right with Internet gadfly, and open-access hero, Carl Malamud. He has spent the last couple months scanning tens of thousands of pages containing city, county and state laws — think building codes, banking laws, etc. Malamud wants California to sue him, which is almost a given if the state wants to continue claiming copyright. He thinks a federal court will rule in his favor: It is illegal to copyright the law since people are required to know it. Malamud helped force the SEC to put corporate filings online in 1994, and did the same with the patent office. He got the Smithsonian to loosen its claim of copyright, CSPAN to stop forbidding people from sharing its videos, and most recently Oregon to quit claiming copyright on state laws — via Slashdot
Spammers are abusing free Web services to make their spam links look more legitimate, according to e-mail security vendor MessageLabs
BBC Worldwide, Auntie’s commercial arm, is developing a music download service, offering streamed for free and paid download works from its archive of music that bands have recorded for TV and radio in BBC studios. The Beeb’s radio and television music shows frequently feature live sessions recorded at BBC HQ, often of current singles, acoustic versions of popular tracks, or cover versions of other artists’ work. Radio 1’s Live Lounge is a popular destination for pop artists, not to mention the John Peel Sessions. And don’t forget the BBC has exclusive rights to broadcast Glastonbury
Perth-based internet service provider Westnet has started trialling ADSL2+ services using its new parent iiNet’s broadband network, with a formal launch date likely to come before the end of the year
Mozilla has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum — in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company’s total revenue. The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011
A well-known web site owner in one of Russia’s most restive regions was shot to death after he was arrested by authorities on Sunday, according to Russian news reports. Magomed Yevloyev was whisked away by Russian Interior Ministry officials in Nazran, Ingushetia, shortly after he returned from a trip to Moscow. He was shot in the temple. Yevloyev ran a web site, focused on news from Ingushetia, an area sandwiched between Georgia’s North Ossetia region to the west and Chechnya to the east. A court banned his Web site in August, calling it extremist
Oregon Health & Science University scientists have successfully produced functional auditory hair cells in the cochlea of the mouse inner ear. The breakthrough suggests that a new therapy may be developed in the future to successfully treat hearing loss
Employees are failing to properly archive e-mails, according to research, because they are often too busy or too unsure of their IT skills. Over 75% of employees said they received no guidance on the requirements and methods for e-mail storage, and more than a third said their company has no e-mail policy
Google is developing a new web browser built from the ground up and based on WebKit, the same rendering engine that Safari uses. The browser, called Chrome, is open-source software built with security, compatibility and speed in mind. Each tab in the browser will be its own separate running process. For example, if JavaScript hangs in one tab, the other tabs will remain unaffected. The approach is similar to the way Mac OS X isolates applications in their own private areas to prevent one crash from taking down the whole system
In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default
. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft’s promise. This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months
There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most Motorola and Samsung cell phones to capture all data that they contain. More phones will be added to the list, including many from Nokia, RIM, LG and others, in the next generation, to be released shortly. This device connects to the data/charging port and will seamlessly grab e-mails, instant messages, dialed numbers, phone books and anything else that is stored in memory. It will even retrieve deleted files that have not been overwritten. And there is no trace whatsoever that the information has been compromised, nor any risk of corruption
The South Australian Government says it is not concerned that consumers may cross the border to claim the new ten cent refund for beverage containers. From Monday, the refund for people who deposit a can or bottle at a South Australian recycling depot will increase from five cents
Most of us tend to assume that spammers focus on the right-hand side of our email addresses — the part after the @. That’s why big companies and webmail services have to filter out so much junk email: a spammer can try it on with zillions of potential victims in one swoop, simply by throwing everything they’ve got at any @hotmail.com address. However, it turns out that spammers could be more subtle creatures than we give them credit for. A paper presented by Clayton at CEAS 2008, the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam held last week at a Microsoft research facility in California, suggests that the text to the left of the @ also makes a serious difference to how much spam you’re likely to receive. Analysing email traffic logs from Demon Internet, one of Britain’s biggest ISPs, Clayton saw a marked difference between people’s spam load depending on their names: specifically, those with names higher up the alphabet were more likely to get spammed than those closer to the bottom. According to his statistics, someone called Alison may expect around 35% of the email she receives to be spam, while Zadie may only get around 20% — even if both use the same email provider
Researchers discovered that cattle have a good sense of direction and tend to point in a northerly direction. It has long been observed that cows appear to have a talent for weather forecasting and are able to predict when rain is on the way, but until now their navigational abilities have been largely ignored. Their innate ability to find north is believed to be a relic from the days when their wild ancestors needed an accurate sense of direction to migrate across the plains of Africa, Asia and Europe. Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA. They also studied 3,000 deer in the Czech Republic. The deer tended to face north when resting or grazing. Although, in many cases, the images were not clear enough to determine which way the cattle were facing they were aligned on a north/south axis
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