Companies will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from a cyber attack
The Greens and privacy advocates have hit back against proposed laws which could allow companies to snoop on their workers’ e-mails, but Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said the laws are needed to protect vital electronic infrastructure from terrorist attacks
eBay is using Australia as a guinea pig to trial a new policy where all other modes of payment are barred except its own transaction gateway, PayPal. Direct deposits, personal cheques and money orders will no longer be payment options from 17 June. This is the first time these restrictions will be imposed by eBay anywhere in the world and could be enforced in other markets in the future
EMC reached a deal to buy data-storage firm Iomega for $US213 million ($228.84 million) in cash, scuttling a deal Iomega previously made with a group of Chinese companies. The two sides agreed to the deal after EMC sweetened its offer to $US3.85 a share
Qantas will allow in-flight SMS and e-mail on select domestic flights by the end of the year after a successful trial of technology developed by aviation tech start-up AeroMobile
Once the darling of Wall Street but more recently known as the burying ground for Netscape, Time Warner’s AOL is entering the social-networking arena with an $850 million acquisition of Bebo
After taking control of Shareaza.com, imposters trying to pass themselves off as an open-source dev team have stepped up their action to destroy the GNU GPL licensed project. In an audacious move, lawyers representing Discordia Ltd have filed to register the Shareaza
trademark at the US Patent Office
Dell, long dinged for using proprietary hardware in its gaming PCs, has seen the light. The company said such annoying traits such as proprietary motherboards and power supplies is now a thing of the past. The change is a long overdue
Google has agreed to build an undersea cable with five telecoms operators that will link the United States to Japan, and provide the capacity to sustain a surge in internet traffic between the continents
Google will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that’s likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the internet search leader
The Church of Scientology can delete auctions from eBay with no supervision under the VeRO program, and has used this to delete all resale of the e-meters Scientologists use. This is to stop members from buying used units from ex-members instead of buying from the official (and very expensive) source. Given Scientology’s record of fraud and abuse, should eBay give them this level of trust? Will this set a precedent for other companies that want to stop the aftermarket resale of their products? — via Slashdot
SCO Group, which for years has claimed that Linux infringes on its Unix intellectual property, has received new funding and seems set to continue its battle against the open source operating system
The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability — where users can take their data from the web sites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet
Two Victorian real estate agents have launched a defamation action against Google. Counsel for agents Mark Forytarz and Paul Castran of Castran Gilbert, appeared in the Supreme Court today for a directions hearing, alleging their clients have been defamed by articles found via Google searches
TPG and SP Telemedia (SOUL) and have announced a merger in a deal worth $250 million
A confidential informant says Google will stop monetising all domains if they are less then five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is a time period when registrars can delete a domain at no cost, but in this time frame a registrant could register millions of these temporary domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them. The result is the ability to produce millions of temporary websites that literally generate millions of dollars in income per week for Google
Sun Microsystems has agreed to buy open-source software maker MySQL for $US1 billion, and said its fiscal second-quarter net income nearly doubled on boosted margins, according to preliminary results
Oracle said that it would acquire BEA Systems for $8.5 billion, just three months after BEA handily rejected its original unsolicited bid. The $19.38-a-share deal is 14 percent higher than Oracle’s original offer of $17, and spares both companies the sort of ordeal that accompanied Oracle’s hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft in 2003
Amazon offered free shipping in France, got sued for it by the French Booksellers’ Union, and lost. Now it’s choosing to pay €1,000 a day rather than follow the court’s order
After losing some of its lustre on the personal computer, embattled Internet icon Yahoo is hoping to outshine Google and other rivals on the mobile phone. Yahoo has opened its mobile platform so outside programmers can develop new applications for Yahoo pages accessed on mobile handsets. Yahoo hopes the mini-applications, known as widgets
, will help attract more on-the-go users, which will bring the company more money from advertising
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