Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $1.1bn

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20 May 2013
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Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£725m), US media reports say.

The acquisition is expected to be announced as early as Monday.

The deal was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously voted for by the board, tech blog AllThingsD reported, citing sources close to the matter.

If confirmed, it will be CEO Marissa Mayer’s largest deal since taking the helm of Yahoo in July 2012.

Neither Yahoo nor Tumblr responded immediately to requests for comment.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Tumblr would continue to operate as an independent business, the Wall Street Journal said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation.

The company is currently run by David Karp, a 26-year-old New Yorker who founded Tumblr in 2007, and he is expected to remain in his role.

Analysts say that by acquiring Tumblr, Yahoo will gain a larger social media presence and enhance its ability to attract younger audiences in its battle with internet rivals Google and Facebook — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Reckless Oz regulator runs roughshod over rights

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17 May 2013
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…if Section 313 sounds wide ranging, that’s because it is, and its use by ASIC is rather different.

ASIC has warned consumers about the activities of a cold-calling investment scam using the name ‘Global Capital Wealth’ … The scammers offer consumers opportunities to invest in a managed share trading fund, it wrote in a media release dated 22 March.

The scammers operate websites at www.globalcapitalwealth.com and www.globalcapitalaustralia.com, which purport to provide share trading services. ASIC has already blocked access to these websites.

ASIC’s concern is that the scammers, via their websites, promotional material, and cold calling, appear to be fraudulently using the Australian business number (ABN), Australian company number (ACN), and Australian financial services (AFS) licence number of Global Capital Resources Pty Ltd, a licensed financial services business with no connections to Global Capital Wealth.

Life and limb are not under threat here, nor are young children being abused. The only risk is about money — and, even then, the only people at risk are those too greedy or too stupid to realise that the deals being offered are too good to be true. That’s quite a bit of scope creep — especially since ASIC only has concern about what the sites appear to do.

ASIC made the mistake of requesting that access be blocked to the sites’ internet protocol (IP) address. More than 1,200 other sites used the same address — a common situation with commodity-grade shared internet hosting. That ASIC didn’t know this demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of how the internet works. It’s like putting road blocks around an entire suburb because one shop is selling dodgy merchandise. And the problem was compounded by not providing an explanatory web page — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Interpol filter scope creep: ASIC ordering unilateral website blocks

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16 May 2013
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The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for other government agencies to unilaterally block sites they deem questionable in their own portfolios.

The news came tonight in a statement issued by the office of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, following a controversial event in April which saw some 1,200 websites wrongfully blocked by several of Australia’s major Internet service providers.

On 12 April, Melbourne publication the Melbourne Times Weekly reported that more than 1,200 websites, including one belonging to independent learning organisation Melbourne Free University, might have been blocked by the Australian Government. At the time, Melbourne Free University was reportedly told by its ISP, Exetel, that the IP address hosting its website had been blocked by Australian authorities. The block lasted from 4 April until 12 April.

Subsequently, the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a media release linking the issue to the Labor Federal Government’s various Internet filtering initiatives, especially the voluntary filtering scheme currently implemented by a number of major ISPs including Telstra, Optus and Vodafone — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Amazon staff go on strike in Germany

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15 May 2013
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Amazon employees in Germany have staged their first ever strikes, in a dispute over pay and benefits with the vast US online retailer.

Employees at two huge distribution warehouses, in Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig, launched the one-day strike, the giant services sector union Ver.di said.

Ver.di is demanding that Amazon’s 9,000 workers in Germany be paid according to a wage deal in place for the retail and mail-order industries. The head of Amazon Germany, Ralf Kleber, rejected these demands, arguing that the retailer’s staff were working in the logistics business, packing and dispatching parcels, rather than in the retail and mail-order sector.

Bad Hersfeld has a workforce of more than 3,000, while the Leipzig site employs around 2,000 people.

Amazon says it pays an hourly wage of €9.30 (£8) to employees in their first year, rising to €10 after that. Ver.di is demanding the minimum hourly retail wage of €10.66 for Leipzig; in Bad Hersfeld, the union wants staff to be paid the agreed sector rate, of just over €12 per hour, compared with the €9.83 Amazon currently offers — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Jail Terms For Unlocking Cellphones Shows The True Black Heart Of The Copyright Monopoly

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13 May 2013
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There is a weak copyright monopoly reform bill happening in the United States Congress at the moment.

This bill is not about the copyright monopoly at all, and at the same time, about everything that the monopoly actually is. It is the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013.

The bill, which was presented to the US Congress three days ago, makes it legal to unlock devices such as phones that you own, and do what you like with them. Let’s take that again, because it is jaw-dropping: the bill reforms the copyright monopoly to make it legal to tinker with objects that you own. It has nothing to do with BitTorrent, MKVs, streaming, or what we normally associate with the activity of sharing culture outside of the copyright monopoly distributions.

The bill is about your ability to take your phone to a different wireless operator. Your own phone, that you bought and paid for. Your legal ability to bring your own property wherever you like, without breaching criminal law and risking jail. How on Odin’s green Earth did this come to have to do with the copyright monopoly?

Few contemporary discussions put the spotlight like this one on how the copyright monopoly is not about rewarding artists, but is a political war on property — on our ability to own the things we paid for. (I won’t say bought, as that implies we actually own them.) The copyright monopoly is dividing the population into a corporate class who gets to control what objects may be used for what purpose, and a subservient consumer class that don’t get to buy or own anything — they just get to think they own things that can only be used in a predefined way, for a steep, monopolised, fixed price, or risk having the police sent after them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite

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10 May 2013
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On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around 10.00pm in each time zone, at which point a chart of Internet consumption looks like a python that swallowed a cow. By midnight Pacific time, streaming volume falls off dramatically.

As prime time wound down on 31 January, though, there was an unusual amount of tension at Netflix. That was the night the company premièred House of Cards, its political thriller set in Washington. Before midnight about 40 engineers gathered in a conference room at Netflix’s headquarters. They sat before a collection of wall-mounted monitors that displayed the status of Netflix’s computing systems. On the conference table, a few dozen laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other devices had the Netflix app loaded and ready to stream.

When the clocks hit 12.00am, the entire season of House of Cards started appearing on the devices, as well as in the recommendation lists of millions of customers chosen by an algorithm. The opening scene, a dog getting run over by an SUV, came and went. At 12.15am, around the time Kevin Spacey’s character says I’m livid, everything was working fine. That’s when the champagne comes, says Yury Izrailevsky, the vice president in charge of cloud computing at Netflix, which has a history of self-inflicted catastrophes. Izrailevsky stayed until the wee hours of the morning—just in case—as thousands of customers binge-watched the show. The midnight ritual repeated itself on 19 April, when Netflix premièred its werewolf horror series Hemlock Grove, and will again on 26 May, when its revival of Arrested Development goes live — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Adobe goes all in on the cloud, ditches Creative Suite

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7 May 2013
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The latest version of Adobe’s Creative Suite — the exceedingly popular design, web and multimedia software suite that includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, Dreamweaver and Acrobat — will be its last, the company announced at its MAX conference in Los Angeles.

Moving forward, the company will double down on its Creative Cloud software-as-a-service offering, introduced last year.

Creative Suite 6 — the current version of the desktop-based offering — will still be available for purchase, but it is the final version and will not be updated beyond routine maintenance.

Goodbye, CS. Hello, CC — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Mozilla: government spyware disguising itself as Firefox

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2 May 2013
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Mozilla has called on a commercial spyware company to stop masquerading as its Firefox browser to avoid detection on people’s computers.

The action comes after a report from human rights group Citizen Lab claimed that Gamma International, a controversial surveillance software company, was using Firefox as a mask to hide its FinSpy software, which is used by governments to snoop on citizens.

British-based Gamma disguises its surveillance tool — which can be installed covertly, and then access key-strokes, activate webcams and record Skype calls — as Firefox so that users don’t delete it, Mozilla said.

We’ve sent Gamma a cease and desist letter today demanding that these illegal practices stop immediately, Mozilla said in a blog.

We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be — and in several cases actually have been — used by Gamma’s customers to violate citizens’ human rights and online privacy.

Mozilla stressed that the two software packages remained separate and that FinSpy did not affect Firefox itself or the way the browser operated. Gamma’s software is entirely separate, and only uses our brand and trademarks to lie and mislead as one of its methods for avoiding detection and deletion, Mozilla said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Excite Mobile found guilty of outrageous customer deception

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23 April 2013
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South Australian mobile phone provider Excite Mobile has been found guilty of false, misleading and unconscionable conduct by the Federal Court after the ACCC took action against the company for faking a debt collection agency, creating a fictional complaints body, and misrepresenting scope of mobile coverage.

The Federal Court ruled Excite acted unconscionably in getting customers onto a 24 month phone contract, and used “undue coercion” when sending fake debt collection letters to 1074 customers, according to a statement by the competition watchdog.

The phone number included on the fake debt collection letters was answered by Excite Mobile staff.

The ACCC said the company had falsely stated on the letters that a court would make the customers pay 20 percent of the debt for failing to pay on time, and would order the repossession of all valuable assets owned by the customer, including children’s toys, to force late-paying customers to hand over the owed amount.

Excite Mobile directors Obie Brown and David Samuel were also found to have created a fake complaints company, called Telecommunications Industry Complaints, to deceive customers into believing their complaints were being handled externally and independently.

Additionally, the company told customers mobile service was available at their premises when it wasn’t, including in indigenous communities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lesley Kemp faces libel suit over Twitter comments

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21 April 2013
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A woman who complained about an unpaid £146 invoice is facing a libel battle that could cost her more than £100,000.

Lesley Kemp, 55, took to Twitter claiming that a company based in the Middle East had failed to pay her promptly for transcription work.

Now the firm is suing Mrs Kemp, of Milton Keynes, for defamation, claiming up to £50,000 in damages and a further £70,000 in costs.

The company, Resolution Productions, based in Qatar, has yet to comment — via redwolf.newsvine.com

LVMH-backed fund buys stake in RM Williams

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16 April 2013
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A private equity fund sponsored by French luxury brand LVMH Group has snapped up just under half of Australia’s RM Williams in a deal aimed at helping the bushwear firm expand further overseas.

The sale of the 49.9% holding was valued at around A$52m (£35.4m), said a source close to the deal who was not authorised to speak on the record.

Singapore-based L Capital Asia, which is also backed by Groupe Arnault, the holding company of LVMH chairman and chief executive Bernard Arnault, and Malaysia’s YTL Corp, specialises in developing distinctive but affordable brands in the Asia-Pacific region.

Last year, it took a 50% stake in upmarket Australian food store Jones the Grocer — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Sky Email Avalanche Angers Customers

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9 April 2013
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Sky customers are complaining they were bombarded with literally thousands of old email messages when the company switched email provider from Google to Yahoo last week.

Sky has been looking into the issue since Friday, but has so far failed to find a solution — so on Monday afternoon, users are still reporting a flood of old messages. The company’s only advice so far has been to delete the unwanted emails through Yahoo’s cloud client — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Waiting for a train that has yet to be built

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8 April 2013
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Gen Okajima is waiting for a train. He knows it won’t arrive soon, not even in the next few years, but he isn’t feeling anxious or impatient. He says it will come once Australia is ready for it.

Mr Okajima, general manager of the Sydney office of Japan’s biggest railway company, is waiting for the day Australia builds a high-speed rail line between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the subject of a federal government study.

It is his job to ensure that when or if that happens, Australia uses Shinkansen, the bullet trains that carry hundreds of millions along Japan’s great network of high-speed rail lines.

Since the Shinkansen technology is a world-class system, we are proud as a nation, Mr Okajima said. And Australia is such an important friend to Japan we are looking to share its benefit.

This partnership would include sharing research and development costs with the Central Japan Railway Company, Mr Okajima’s employer. But the company has been waiting 26 years for high-speed rail to come to Australia. It opened its Sydney office in 1988. For now, its main line of business is exporting Australian wine and snacks such as beef jerky to Japan to be sold on the Shinkansen — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Amazon Is Buying Goodreads

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29 March 2013
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Noted online bookstore and retailer Amazon is buying the excellent online books-related social network and information portal Goodreads. Well, that’s a deal that makes a lot of sense.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Goodreads, the online books portal is a place where users can connect with each other and keep track of the books they’re reading as well as what they’d like to read. So, you know, it’s exactly the type of service that Amazon would want to acquire, given that it’s in the business of selling books — via redwolf.newsvine.com

USPS Discriminates Against Atheist Merchandise

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29 March 2013
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Suspecting that their strongly branded Atheist products may be treated differently by more religiously-oriented postal regions, Kickstarter success Atheist Shoes conducted an experiment. They sent 178 packages to 89 people in different parts of the US, each person receiving one package prominently branded as Atheist merchandise, and one not. The results: packages with the atheist label were nearly 10 times more likely to be lost, and took on average 3 days longer to show up when they did. Control experiments were also done in Europe and Germany — it’s definitely a USPS problem — via Slashdot

Consumers abandon newspapers, local TV as quality of coverage sinks

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22 March 2013
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Cutbacks at newspapers and local television stations have left the news industry undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories or dig deep into public issues, according to the Pew Research Centre’s annual report on American journalism.

That conclusion might be expected to matter most to journalists struggling to keep their jobs. But members of the general public have noticed the cutbacks in quality, which have caused them to turn away from news outlets, reports Pew, a respected non-partisan organisation.

Nearly one-third of US adults have stopped using a news source because it no longer provided them with the quality of coverage they were accustomed to getting. With reporting resources cut to the bone and fewer specialized beats, journalists’ level of expertise in any one area and the ability to go deep into a story are compromised, the report said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Adobe: Fly to US for cheaper software

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22 March 2013
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Australians can go to the US if they want lower American prices on boxed Adobe products, or buy the company’s cloud-based offering, an Adobe official told a Parliamentary panel today.

In a hearing about higher IT pricing in Australia compared to other markets, Adobe managing director of ANZ, Paul Robson, dodged and slapped back a flurry of volleys from the House Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications.

Robson stressed that the Australian price of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, $49.99 per month, is similar to the US price. He said that most of Adobe’s customers are moving to the cloud versions of the company’s software — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Crown Casino rocked by massive betting scam

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19 March 2013
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Melbourne’s Crown Casino is working with police and Victoria’s gaming regulator to investigate a betting scam which is believed to have netted a high-rolling cards player $32 million.

A staff member who looks after VIP gamblers has been sacked over the scam and a gambler has been banned from the premises.

The Herald Sun has reported the scam netted the high roller $32 million, but Crown is refusing to confirm that figure.

It is believed the scam involved the use of the casino’s own surveillance system, but Crown is not commenting — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)

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25 February 2013
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According to numerous sources, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has instituted a HR plan today to require Yahoo employees who work remotely to relocate to company facilities. The move will apparently impact several hundred employees, who must either comply without exception or presumably quit. It impacts workers such as customer service reps, who perhaps work from home or an office in another city where Yahoo does not have one — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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