Google accidentally sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog
Google wants to make the information it stores for its users easily portable so they can export it to a competing service if they are dissatisfied. Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle
The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, Frankly, China’s behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago
— via Slashdot
Adobe will contribute source code to the Mozilla Foundation as the two organisations aim to establish a standard scripting language that developers can use to create interactive applications for Adobe’s Flash Player and Mozilla’s Firefox browser
The dentist’s drill is the epitome of pain and discomfort in the modern world, but that could soon change. Bio-medical research and the advent of cold plasma needles could eliminate the need for drilling teeth
Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift — a gene that helped them develop superior brains. And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe
A spam-sending Trojan dubbed SpamThru
is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails. The developers of SpamThru employed numerous tactics to thwart detection and enhance outreach, such as releasing new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse traditional anti-virus signatures detection
Piracy statistics are labelled self-serving hyperbole
in a draft government report. A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General’s Department, prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that they have engineered a strain of the AIDS virus that fights AIDS. This strain of AIDS works like a vaccine and improved the immune system of the test subjects. After three years on this new therapy, no side effects have been observed
Peter Jenner, former manager of bands like Pink Floyd, T Rex and The Clash, states in an interview with the Register that music label executives have lost faith in DRM and dollar-per-track online music selling isn’t working too well as a model. He predicts that in two to three years time, many countries will have moved to a blanket licensing regime — via Slashdot
An internet advertising firm called Zango has agreed to pay $US3 million (AU$4 million) to the US government to settle allegations that its pop-up ad software was secretly installed on millions of personal computers
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, has some concrete suggestions on how to reform the UK’s dated intellectual property laws. The starting point for its deliberations is the notion that knowledge is both a commodity and a public good, and it recommends that the UK move from a model where knowledge is ‘an asset first and a public resource second’ to one where knowledge is primarily a public resource and secondarily an asset. Is that an anti-business attitude? The report’s authors don’t think so — via Slashdot
Malware writers have used a Wikipedia article and special storage features to attempt to plant malicious code on unsuspecting users’ systems, the online encyclopedia’s organisers have confirmed — via digg
The founder of the world wide web has voiced concern over increasing abuse of the internet, with truth the first victim as technology develops at ever more dizzying speeds. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the web while working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the late 1980s, said the global online network was at growing risk of being misused by undemocratic forces
Microsoft has backed off their Vista license, now allowing transfers and even legal sales between third parties — via digg
Google aims to close the gap between the classic way people get e-mail — sitting at a computer — and the slow-as-molasses reality of receiving e-mail on mobiles. They’re introducing a custom version of Gmail that can run on any phone with Java software, or close to 300 different mobile phone devices
Everyone must have noticed a surge in spam recently, particularly for stock pump ‘n’ dump scams. Anti-spam companies have seen a 30% increase in the last two months and, more worryingly, more of this spam is getting through to mailboxes due to the spammers’ change in tactics. Rather than use unsecured mail relays spammers are using bot nets, making spam harder to identify and eliminate. Bounced spam is also on the up, and some experts reckon it’s past time to start worrying
A second security flaw that could cause the new Firefox 2 browser to crash has been publicly disclosed. The vulnerability lies in the way the open-source browser handles JavaScript code
Forgent Networks has settled its lawsuit concerning the so-called JPEG patents for US$8 million, a fraction of what the company initially sought
Providing some information is better than giving none at all, search giants are saying, but human rights groups warned that filtering of web content is increasing in developing countries
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