Telstra migrates email offshore to Windows Live

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13 February 2012
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Australia’s largest telco Telstra has promised its BigPond customers a faster and enhanced email service named BigPond with Windows Live, without the need to change email addresses. The caveat? Their data will now also be stored offshore with Microsoft.

According to a statement issued by Telstra, the new service assures more storage, Microsoft Office apps, as well as the facility to edit and share photos and movies. The partnership with Microsoft will enable Telstra to offer Microsoft Hotmail, SkyDrive and Windows Live to its 4.2 million BigPond mailboxes.

The new move to integrate BigPond with Windows Live is the outcome of Telstra and Microsoft forming a strategic alliance late in 2008. In December 2011, Telstra had revealed that it was consulting its customers about how the BigPond platform could evolve to better suit their needs. The company had been considering integrating its email services with Microsoft’s Windows Live Suite platform to provide new applications and services to its customers — via redwolf.newsvine.com

BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds

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11 February 2012
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A new academic paper by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College has examined the link between BitTorrent downloads and box office returns. Contrary to what’s often claimed by the movie industry, the researchers conclude that there is no evidence that BitTorrent piracy hurts US box office returns. Internationally, there is a link between downloads and revenues, which the researchers attribute to long release windows

The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers

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6 February 2012
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Big Monopoly has learned in the past century that when they look like a little spoiled brat having a tantrum, politicians will throw taxpayer money their way to shut them up. Therefore, this is a behaviour they emulate as soon they are given a good enough excuse. It’s simply a reinforced, learned behaviour.

A boycott against Big Monopoly will not work. Any noticeable drop in profits will cause them to throw a tantrum at policy makers and complain how their profits are dropping due to piracy, and request harder enforcement of their copyright monopolies at the expense of our civil liberties and the freedom of the net.

Buying more of their products (yeah, right) will not work. Any noticeable raise in profits will cause them to commission reports to policy makers illustrating their grandiose importance to the economy as a whole, suggesting that they are the direct reason for at least several hundred per cent of the gross national product. Therefore, they will argue, they need additional protection as a national interest.

Doing nothing will not work either, as we are constantly on the retreat in civil liberties — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Norwegian alarm system monitors length of office lavatory visits

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1 February 2012
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Managers are alerted by flashing lights if an employee is away from their desk for a loo break or other personal activities beyond the allotted time.

But unions and workplace inspectors have branded the practice at insurance company DNB as highly intrusive and a potential breach of their human rights.

Norway’s privacy regulator called Datatilsynet has now written to DNB telling them the monitoring system is a major violation of privacy.

It said: Each individual worker has different needs and these kinds of strict controls deprive the employees of all freedoms over the course of their working day.

The employees union Finansforbundet described the rules as unacceptable.

Primus customers in the dark over outage

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31 January 2012
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Customers hosted at Primus Telecom’s Melbourne datacentre experienced outages this morning, with several sites forced offline.

Among those confirmed to be affected were security software vendor AVG and Mirvac’s chain of sites, including Mirvac Hotels.

These sites were not responding, or were experiencing intermittent delays, from 9.45am AEDST this morning. The outage has resulted in several other sites on the same hosting service being taken offline, but Primus has not indicated the scale of the outage, or how many were affected.

Initial customer reports indicated that the problem was caused by a routing issue with Primus’ upstream providers, but the company later clarified that some of its core switches were having issues. Most outages were resolved almost immediately, and all issues were resolved by 11.35am, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Angry Birds boss: ‘Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business’

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31 January 2012
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Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry’s mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning.

We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products, said Hed.

We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy.

Hed explained that Rovio sees it as futile to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans.

When that’s not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australian tech startup BugHerd strikes gold, raising $500k

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25 January 2012
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An Australian technology startup that aims to make reporting of website faults easier and more visual for non tech-savvy people today announced an investment of $500,000 from Melbourne-based venture capital firm Starfish Ventures.

The startup, BugHerd, was created in 2011 after Melbourne co-founders Alan Downie, 35, and Matt Milosavljevic, 29, were unable to find a bug tracking product suitable for logging and managing visual website issues. Websites owners generally welcome users’ reports of faults — or bugs — so they can fix them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

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23 January 2012
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Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr Obama asked.

Mr Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. Those jobs aren’t coming back, he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that Made in the USA is no longer a viable option for most Apple products — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Johann Hari leaves the Independent after plagiarism storm

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21 January 2012
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Johann Hari, the journalist at the Independent who was suspended for plagiarism, has announced that he will not return to the newspaper.

Hari had been undergoing retraining in the United States and was expected to return to the Independent next month but said on his personal website that he did not want to see colleagues taking the blame for his mistakes — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Target Is Down With Down Syndrome

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18 January 2012
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If you were browsing through this week’s Target ad you may have passed right over the adorable little boy in the bright orange shirt smiling at you on page 9! And if so, I’m glad!

The reason I’m glad? Well, that stylish young man in the orange shirt is Ryan. Ryan just so happened to have been born with Down syndrome, and I’m glad that Target included a model with down syndrome in their typical ad! 🙂

This wasn’t a Special Clothing For Special People catalogue. There wasn’t a call out somewhere on the page proudly proclaiming that Target’s proud to feature a model with Down syndrome in this week’s ad. And they didn’t even ask him to model a shirt with the phrase, We Aren’t All Angels printed on the front.

In other words, they didn’t make a big deal out of it. I like that — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Jenny Craig cancels Kyle & Jackie O sponsorship

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17 January 2012
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Weight loss brand Jenny Craig has pulled its sponsorship of the Kyle & Jackie O Show after just one day, admitting that it badly misjudged public perception of Kyle Sandilands.

The company did so in the face of a growing international backlash. By last night Jenny Craig’s US Facebook page had been overrun by Australian consumers attacking the sponsorship. Many of them pointed out that a previous target of the show was former Jenny Craig ambassador Magda Szubanski who Sandilands had said would lose more weight in a concentration camp. That incident two years ago saw him temporarily taken off the air — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Zappos Hacked: Internal Systems Breached in Cyber Attack

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16 January 2012
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Zappos.com, best-known for selling shoes and clothing online and its top-notch customer service and corporate culture, appears to be the latest victim of a cyber attack resulting in a data breach.

In an internal email to Zappos employees on Sunday, CEO Tony Hsieh asked employees to set aside 20 minutes of their time to read about the breach and what communications would be sent to its over 24 million customers.

While Hsieh, who said the attack occured through one of the company’s servers in Kentucky, said that credit card data was not compromised, but did say that one or more of the following pieces of personal information has been accessed by the attacker(s): customer names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers. User passwords were “cryptographically scrambled, he said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Email after hours? It’s overtime by law for some

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13 January 2012
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The backlash against 24-hour connectivity is gathering pace around the world.

Workers who find themselves answering work emails on their smartphones after the end of their shifts in Brazil can now qualify for overtime under a new law.

The new legislation was approved by President Dilma Rousseff last month.

It says company emails to workers are equivalent to orders given directly to the employee — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The writer who made millions by self-publishing online

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13 January 2012
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When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world, they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer of paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has emerged from obscurity to bestselling status entirely under her own self-published steam. What the historians may omit to mention is the crucial role played in her rise by those furry wide-mouthed friends, the Muppets.

To understand the vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We find Hocking sitting in her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Austin, Minnesota. She is penniless and frustrated, having spent years fruitlessly trying to interest traditional publishers in her work. To make matters worse, she has just heard that an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, is coming to Chicago later that year and she can’t afford to make the trip. As a huge Muppets fan, she is more than willing to drive eight hours but has no money for petrol, let alone a hotel for the night. What is she to do?

Then it comes to her. She can take one of the many novels she has written over the previous nine years, all of which have been rejected by umpteen book agents and publishing houses, and slap them up on Amazon and other digital ebook sites. Surely, she can sell a few copies to her family and friends? All she needs for the journey to Chicago is $300 (£195), and with six months to go before the Muppets exhibition opens, she’s bound to make it.

I’m going to sell books on Amazon, she announces to her housemate, Eric.

To which Eric replies: Yeah. Okay. I’ll believe that when it happens.

Let’s jump to October 2010. In those six months, Hocking has raised not only the $300 she needed, but an additional $20,000 selling 150,000 copies of her books. Over the past 20 months Hocking has sold 1.5m books and made $2.5m. All by her lonesome self. Not a single book agent or publishing house or sales force or marketing manager or bookshop anywhere in sight.

So let the historians take note: Amanda Hocking does get to Chicago to see the Muppets. And along the way she helps to foment a revolution in global publishing — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lawsuit Claims Symantec

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13 January 2012
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Security firms often warn users about scareware: malicious software that performs fake antivirus scans and then demands the user pay for a cleanup. Now a lawsuit claims that the world’s top antivirus firm, Symantec, is itself a scareware scammer.

James Gross, a resident of Washington State, filed what he intends to be a class action lawsuit against Symantec in a Northern District California court Tuesday. Gross claims that Symantec defrauds consumers by running fake scans on their machines, with results designed to bully users into upgrading to a paid version of the company’s software — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Nike agrees $1m overtime payment for Indonesian workers

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12 January 2012
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Sportswear group Nike has agreed compensation in a dispute with workers in Indonesia over unpaid overtime.

The company will pay $1m (£650,000) to about 4,500 workers at a PT Nikomas plant in Serang, Banten.

The workers union that brought the case to Nike said in a statement that 593,468 hours of overtime went unpaid over the last two years.

The union said it hopes this will set a precedent for factories across the country — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hungry Jack’s cops whopper staff pay bill

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11 January 2012
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A Hungry Jack’s fast food outlet in central Victoria has been penalised for underpaying its staff for more than four years.

The Federal Magistrates Court ordered the operator of the Bendigo outlet to pay a penalty of $46,200, after the company volunteered to pay back more than $104,000 it owed to its staff, who were mostly junior employees.

The underpayments occurred between July 2005 and December 2009 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

CSG extraction linked to animal deaths

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10 January 2012
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American research linking chemicals from coal seam gas extraction to the deaths of scores of animals has prompted calls for a freeze on new drilling licences in Australia.

The University of Massachusetts study, published in the New Solutions journal, examined the impact of gas extraction in six US states.

In one case it found 70 cattle died after waste water was dumped in a creek. In another case 17 cattle died after the release of fracturing fluids into a paddock.

It also identified reproductive problems in domestic animals.

The report also gave two examples where humans became ill after fracking took place near their homes.

In one case a child was treated in hospital for delirium and tests revealed he had arsenic poisoning. The family stopped using their well for drinking water — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Virtual Sweatshops Defeat Bot-or-Not Tests

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10 January 2012
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Jobs in the hi-tech sector can be hard to find, but employers in one corner of the industry are creating hundreds of full-time positions, offering workers on-the-job training and the freedom to work from home. The catch? Employees will likely toil for cybercrooks, and their weekly paycheques may barely cover the cost of a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

The abundance of these low-skilled, low-paying jobs is coming from firms that specialize in the shadowy market of mass-solving CAPTCHAs, those blurry and squiggly words that some websites force you to retype. One big player in this industry is KolotiBablo.com, a service that appeals to spammers and exploits low cost labour in China, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

KolotiBablo, which means earn money in transliterated Russian, helps clients automate the solving of puzzles designed to prevent automated activity by bots, such as leaving spammy comments or mass-registering accounts at Webmail providers and social networking sites. The service offers an application programming interface (API) that allows clients to feed kolotibablo.com CAPTCHAs served in real time by various sites, which are then solved by KolotiBablo workers and fed back to the client’s system — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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