Roughly a week ago, Mininova was still the largest torrent site on the Internet, but this quickly changed after the site’s founders removed of millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In the days that followed, traffic to the site dropped 66%, while the number of daily downloads are less than 4% of what they used to be
Google is being unfairly scapegoated by newspaper publishers, and wants to help the troubled industry build online revenue, the chief executive of the internet giant said. With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame,
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an opinion column published on Thursday in The Wall Street Journal
Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers
The EFF, with the help of a group at the UC Berkeley Law School, has issued a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies, asking for their policy on the use of social media content during investigations. Having received no response, they’re now taking six government agencies to court
Cameroon (.cm) web domains supplanted those in Hong Kong as most likely to harbour malware, with more than one in three (36.7 per cent) of domains registered in the West African country hosting viruses or malicious code. The .cm used by Cameroon is a common typo for .com, a factor that security firm McAfee speculates may explain why cybercriminals have set up fake typo-squatting sites that lead to malicious downloads or spyware under the country’s domain
Facebook is enhancing privacy controls and eliminating its regional framework for online communities as the internet’s most popular social networking service tops 350 million users. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes and the milestone in a blog post, saying new privacy features will let users determine who gets to see pictures, comments, videos and other material in profiles
Intel has unveiled a prototype chip that packs 48 separate processing cores on to a chunk of silicon the size of a postage stamp. The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), as it is known, contains 1.3 billion transistors, the tiny on-off switches that underpin chip technology. Each processing core could, in theory, run a separate operating system. Currently, top-end chips for desktop computers typically contain four separate processors. Intel and rival AMD will both launch new six-core devices in 2010, allowing computers to simultaneously tackle a number of complex tasks, such as processing graphics
Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription web sites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has issued a formal warning to online retailer Topbuy, following an investigation that found the company had breached the Spam Act 2003 by sending three commercial electronic messages to consumers without their consent. The ACMA formed the view that the breaches it found were indicative of broader systemic issues. The ACMA’s investigation related to complaints alleging that Topbuy had sent emails to people who had previously requested to be unsubscribed from Topbuy’s mailing list or who had not consented to receive commercial electronic messages in the first place. Topbuy claimed in at least one case that it had obtained consent through a family and friends’ referral campaign
JB Hi-Fi’s web site was redirecting customers to malicious web pages over the weekend in a cyber attack that appears to have affected several other Australian websites in the lead-up to Christmas. The exact details of the attack are not yet clear as the retailer has refused to comment but users first started reporting problems on Friday night
Bit.ly, the service Twitter uses to shorten URLs to keep them under the service’s 140-character limit, has announced partnerships with Verisign, Websense and Sophos that are designed to keep spam and malicious software off of the network
General Electric has reached a tentative agreement to buy Vivendi’s 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for about $5.8 billion, helping clear the path to a sale of the television and movie company to Comcast, people briefed on the matter told DealBook. But much remains to be negotiated, these people warned. The Vivendi agreement values NBC Universal at $29 billion, less than the $30 billion or so that GE and Comcast had agreed to last month
German federal president Horst Köhler has refused to sign a law to block child pornography that passed Parliament earlier this year, stating that he needs more information
. In Germany, the federal president has the right to reject a law only if its passage violated the order mandated by the constitution, or if it is obviously unconstitutional — he can’t veto a law simply because he disagrees with it. The law was passed under a coalition government, but a different coalition took power before the law reached the president’s desk. Political observers guess that the political parties would like to get rid of the law without losing face, but since it has already passed the Parliament, they can’t simply abandon it — via Slashdot
Real-time torrent search engine NowTorrents has returned by popular demand. The owner has decided to put the website back online after hundreds of users wrote emails saying they much preferred the old NowTorrents to the new TorrentFly
Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) showed off a number of flexible display screen technologies in Taipei as part of a show promoting e-readers and e-paper. One of the newest technologies from ITRI was a flexible 4.1-inch color OLED (organic light emitting diode) display
For more than a year, BitTorrent search engine isoHunt has chased the Canadian music industry in court. In an act of self-defence, the founder of the site has sued the Canadian branch of the RIAA, asking the court to legalise its operations. After an initial setback, isoHunt submitted a full claim to the court this week
Scientists worldwide are striving to develop thin, flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, environmentally friendly batteries made entirely from nonmetal parts. Among the most promising materials for these batteries are conducting polymers. However, until now these have impractical for use in batteries — for instance, their ability to hold a charge often degrades over use. The key to this new battery turned out to be an often bothersome green algae known as Cladophora. Rotting heaps of this hairlike freshwater plant throughout the world can lead to unsightly, foul-smelling beaches. This algae makes an unusual kind of cellulose typified by a very large surface area, 100 times that of the cellulose found in paper. This allowed researchers to dramatically increase the amount of conducting polymer available for use in the new device, enabling it to better recharge, hold and discharge electricity
The Netherlands-based file-sharing website Mininova has removed all torrents that enabled users to download copyright-protected material
A team of pioneering South Korean scientists have succeeded in producing the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel based chemicals. Polymers are molecules found in everyday life in the form of plastics and rubbers. The team, from the prestigious KAIST University and the Korean chemical company LG Chem, led by Professor Sang Yup Lee focused their research on Polylactic Acid (PLA), a bio-based polymer which holds the key to producing plastics through natural and renewable resources
Spam king Alan Ralsky has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for fraud and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. The Department of Justice said Ralsky’s spam was difficult to trace, and a Cisco researcher said Ralsky was one of the first to use botnets. Progress is being made against spam, with traffic down this year from 2008
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