The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their web sites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced. Users will pay ¬£1 for a day’s access and ¬£2 for a week’s subscription. The move opens a new front in the battle for readership and will be watched closely by the industry. NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition
. Both titles will launch new web sites in early May, separating their digital presence for the first time and replacing the existing, combined site, Times Online
Want to know what expenses your boss claimed last month? How much your colleague makes? What the co-worker down the hall is really working on? Forget about hacking their computers — you might want to hit the nearest photocopier instead. Turns out the newfangled, multi-purpose copy machines in your office keep a wealth of copied data on a hard drive that anyone can hack
Schools and libraries are hurting students by setting up heavy-handed Web filtering software that block access to potentially educational sites. Instead, educators should trust teachers and librarians to oversee schools Internet access, says Craig Cunningham, a professor at National-Louis University. Web filtering software should be configured so that, when a student stumbles across a site that’s blocked, the teacher or librarian can make a judgment whether the content is appropriate for study, and if it is, the teacher or librarian can let the site through
Twitter has radically reduced the amount of spam on the site, announcing that just over one per cent of all tweets are now spam-related. This is a significant change from August 2009 when spam was at its highest on the site accounting for a massive 11 per cent of tweets sent
Researchers in Japan have designed a super-elastic iron alloy which they hope can be used in sophisticated heart and brain surgeries and even buildings in earthquake zones. The researchers said the metal’s super-elasticity allows it to return to its original form and gives it additional properties, such as ductility and a change in magnetisation. The iron alloy’s stress level is about twice that of nickel titanium and it can be used to deliver stents, which are tubes placed in blood vessels to stop them from collapsing
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)-led team of researchers and clinicians has published the first proof that a targeted nanoparticle — used as an experimental therapeutic and injected directly into a patient’s bloodstream — can traffic into tumours, deliver double-stranded small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and turn off an important cancer gene using a mechanism known as RNA interference (RNAi). Moreover, the team provided the first demonstration that this new type of therapy, infused into the bloodstream, can make its way to human tumours in a dose-dependent fashion — i.e., a higher number of nanoparticles sent into the body leads to a higher number of nanoparticles in the tumour cells
Google today added an alert to Gmail that warns users of the Web mail service when their account may have been hijacked. Using several criteria — including plotting the Internet protocol (IP) address of each successful log-on — Google determines whether to sound the alarm, which pops up at the top of a user’s account and reads Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…
along with the location associated with the log-on. If an account is accessed from one country, then again a few hours later from a different country, Google would likely sound the alarm. The assumption: The multiple and geographically divergent log-ons would be a clue that the account had been hacked, and was now being used to send spam, spread scams or distribute malware
The new UK Space Agency (UKSA) will take over responsibility for government policy and the key budgets for space, according to ministers. The agency, which comes into being on 1 April, will also represent Britain on space matters in all negotiations with international partners. The UKSA’s name, logo and remit were announced at a conference in London
Four countries and two territories have won preliminary approval to have Internet addresses written entirely in their native scripts as early as this summer. However, proposals for Internet addresses that would say China
and Taiwan
in Chinese will require a few more months of technical review. The delay is not over political disputes, but rather because the Chinese language can be written in two ways — using simplified and traditional scripts. Rules are being developed to make sure that addresses in either script go to the same Web sites
Companies have been urged to start budgeting for a new domain name scheme to protect their brands and prepare themselves for bidding wars that could cost tens of millions of dollars. Towards the end of the year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will start accepting applications for generic top level domain names (gTLDs). Unlike the current scheme, under which a string of characters appears before the dot in an internet address, gTLDs appear after the dot — for example, .qantas, .holiday or .woolworths. It would be a tight race to the finish line as the application window was only open for 45 days, warned AusRegistry chief executive Adrian Kinderis
Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast. Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed malvertising
In their constant quest to find new and interesting ways to abuse the Internet, attackers recently have begun using an old technique to obfuscate URLs and IP addresses to bypass URL filters and direct users to malicious sites. The technique takes advantage of the fact that modern browsers will allow users to specify IP addresses in formats other than base 10. So a typical IP address that looks something like this — 192.10.10.1 — can also be written in base 8, hexadecimal or a handful of other formats, and the browser will recognise it and take the user to the specified site
Australia’s biggest technology companies, communications academics and many lobby groups have delivered a withering critique of the government’s plans to censor the internet. The government today published most of the 174 submissions it received relating to improving the transparency and accountability measures of its internet filtering policy. Legislation to force ISPs to implement the policy is expected to be introduced within weeks. The filters will block a blacklist of refused classification
web sites for all Australians on a mandatory basis
The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of Google on Tuesday in a case concerning the use of trademarks in online advertising. French luxury goods maker LVMH took Google to court for using its brand names as keywords to trigger ads. The Court concluded that Google has not infringed trade mark law by allowing advertisers to purchase keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trade marks
. However, advertisers themselves cannot, by using such keywords, arrange for Google to display ads which do not allow Internet users easily to establish from which undertaking the goods or services covered by the ad in question originate,
the court added. The case sets important precedents for e-commerce, by appearing to uphold the right of Internet service providers to protection from liability for the content they carry on their networks
It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with a malware-laden PC, but my long streak of luck ran out this weekend when a family friend–who describes himself as computer illiterate–called. “Every time I try to do anything on the computer,” he told me, “I get a message saying it’s infected, and I have to pay $69 to clean it, but I tried to do that and I couldn’t.” He couldn’t even navigate to the Mozilla site to download Firefox; Internet Explorer was completely hijacked — via Smarterware
XP AntiSpyware 2010 also known as XP AntiSpyware, XP Antivirus Pro and XP Antivirus Pro 2010 are names of one program, which is a rogue antispyware application. It is promoted and installed with the help of trojans. When the trojan is started, it will download and install XP AntiSpyware 2010 (XP Antivirus Pro 2010) onto your computer — via My Anti Spyware
The war of words between China and the internet giant Google has escalated, with the company announcing it is no longer censoring its Chinese language search engine. There had been speculation that Google might pull out of China altogether, but instead the internet company has opted to try and sidestep Chinese authorities by redirecting online traffic off the mainland
A medical invention currently in development may one day be able to create new organs, right there in the hospital. The 3-D bio-printer takes cells from a patient’s failing organ and prints out
a new organ — almost like a 3-D ink-jet printer. Guy Raz explains how the device works with the man who developed the prototype, Gabor Forgacs
Just a month after the proposals were first outlined in full, the Swiss National Council has now officially passed a law that will ultimately lead to the complete ban of any violent video games in the country
In a bid to cut down on fraud and inappropriate content, the organisation responsible for administering Russia’s .ru top-level domain names is tightening its procedures. Starting 1 April, anyone who registers a .ru domain will need to provide a copy of their passport or, for businesses, legal registration papers. Right now, domains can be set up with no verification — a practice that has allowed scammers to quickly set up .ru domains under bogus names
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