Yahoo has bought Koprol.com, an Indonesian mobile location-based-services Web company similar to Foursquare in the US. The purchase gives Yahoo an expert in location-based mobile services, including helping people find nearby local businesses complete with reviews, on their mobile phones, as well as seeing where friends are and what they’re doing, and more. Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, Yahoo had reportedly been seeking a deal for New York City-based Foursquare valued at over US$100 million
Because of Google’s large market share in the Internet search engine business, hackers developed a vested interest in ensuring that their attacks are effective in poisoning Google results, according to software company Symantec. Google’s breadth and speed of indexing also play a role,
added Symantec, a company involved in providing security, storage and systems management solutions. Symantec reported that search engine results poisoned with links to fake antivirus software have been a constant problem for Internet users. However, it is an effective way for cyber attackers to infect users’ machines
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says he plans to introduce legislation for the Federal Government’s internet filter in the second half of the year. Senator Conroy had intended to introduce the legislation in the first half of 2010
Eircom will from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of graduated response
is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year
Scared of snoops finding out what you’re searching for on Google? Have no fear: the comany has introduced encrypted search which gives the user the option to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to prevent packet sniffing which in turn could reveal user’s searches on the site
Iceland’s supply of renewable power has won its first high-profile international data centre customer. Web browser developer Opera Software was announced today as the first customer of the Thor Data Centre. The facility in Hafnarfjorour is one of several new data centre projects underway in Iceland, which has been actively marketing itself as a destination for data centres
Google’s doodles start to become more interactive. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Google created a doodle that lets you play the game. Go to Google’s home page and the game starts automatically after 10 seconds
An internet firm linked to many of the internet’s criminal gangs has been shut down. The US Federal Trade Commission said Belize-based 3FN aided gangs that ran botnets, carried out phishing attacks and traded in images of child abuse. The servers and net hardware of 3FN have been seized and are due to be sold off as the firm is dismantled. The operators of 3FN must also pay back $1.08m they are reputed to have made by hosting criminal sites
The US District Court of California has issued a permanent injunction against the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, forcing it to shut down in the United States. IsoHunt is expected to block all access to US visitors in response to the decision, but no action has been taken thus far
ASIC is finally going to get the power to intercept phone calls in its pursuit of insider traders, years after the US authorities were given the right to use phone taps to pursue convictions. Minister for Corporate Law Chris Bowen yesterday released draft legislation that will also increase criminal penalties for insider trading and sharemarket manipulation. Following a period of exposure for discussion, the federal government should be able to pass the increased powers into law later this year
Hewlett-Packard says it’s developing a next-generation wristwatch for the US military. The printing and computer company says the watch will have a flexible display that shows maps and other strategic information to soldiers in remote combat fields. The watch’s screen will be made of plastic and it will run on solar energy, making it less likely to malfunction or run out of power in a tense scenario. We call it a Dick Tracy watch,
said Carl Taussig, director of information surfaces at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, in a reference to the comic-strip detective whose high-tech wristwatch doubled as a two-way radio
Since the release of Time Machine, backing your Mac up has never been easier. If you want to back up different sets of files to more than one drive, though, this script will help you do so — via lifehacker
Office 2010 ramps up its attempts to protect viewers from dodgy documents, popping a warning and restricting editing on anything that gets emailed to you. If that seems like overkill, here’s how to fix it — via Lifehacker Australia
America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centres of companies like Google and Microsoft. While not immediately intuitive, the idea plays on two trends: the building of computing centres in more rural locales, and dairy farmers’ efforts to deal with cattle waste by turning it into fuel. With the right skills, a dairy farmer could rent out land and power to technology companies and recoup an investment in the waste-to-fuel systems within two years, Hewlett-Packard engineers say in a research paper to be made public on Wednesday
This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago. On 20 May, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis
Scientists have implanted the first functional glucose biofuel cell in a living animal. Unlike batteries that supply power to implants, a power-generating device may not have to be surgically removed and replaced, because glucose is a potentially limitless source of energy
A leading Russian politician has accused a prominent Moscow businessman of running an international spam and online pharmacy operation while serving as an anti-spam adviser to the Russian government. Russian investigators now say they plan to create a special task force to look into the allegations
Smartphones that offer the ability to remote wipe are great for when your device goes missing and you want to delete your data so that someone else can’t look at it, but not so great for the United States Secret Service
Well, as you already know that to support Internet Explorer we often serve different CSS files using IE’s special conditional-comment syntax, which is great in terms of having clean and maintainable stylesheets throughout your application, it also mitigates the need of writing CSS hacks which often makes the stylesheets messy and becomes a maintenance nightmare later. You may argue that serving different CSS files only to IE is certainly not an elegant solution and of course it is not, it still requires that extra effort and extra bandwidth for users of Internet Explorer, but it’s somewhat the most practical or possibly the cleanest solution that you can have — via Web Gyani
The head of Sweden’s National IT Crime Unit says that following the introduction of IPRED anti-piracy legislation it has become more difficult to track down serious criminals. This unfortunate eventuality is a side-effect of ISPs throwing away logging data to protect the privacy of their customers. While this protects casual file-sharers, it unfortunately protects serious criminals too
RSS – Posts