Demon Internet has sent out a spreadsheet containing the personal details of thousands of customers with one of its new ebills. The spreadsheet contains email addresses, telephone numbers and what appears to be usernames and passwords for the ebilling system
The US inflated the $700,000 bill for damages it slapped on UFO hacker Gary McKinnon by stuffing it with costs incurred for patching the gaping holes the hacker had exposed in its computer security, according to a document filed with the Supreme Court. The US had not taken reasonable steps to protect its security and now expects McKinnon to pick up the bill, said an expert witness statement made in McKinnon’s ongoing appeal against a US extradition order
A business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his asset protection services
to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors
The lack of SMS integration is a perennial complaint for Australian Twitter users. Chime goes a fair way to solving that problem, letting you update your Twitter status via an Australian phone account
Australia’s consumer watchdog is leading an international crackdown on internet scams, particularly those taking advantage of the global financial crisis to lure people in. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says the scams are costing Australian consumers $1 billion a year, and that criminals are using the global financial crisis to lure people in
A French court has ordered online auction site eBay to pay 80,000 euros ($135,524) to Louis Vuitton for selling fake luxury perfumes
Telstra is believed to be planning to launch a personal video recorder and set-top box, likely to be called the T-box, as early as December, in a bid to shift the entertainment, news and sport content it offers under the BigPond brand from people’s computers to their televisions. The strategy, which puts Telstra into direct competition with Foxtel (which has its own iQ set-top box), enables the telco to retain a content play if it is forced to divest its 50 per cent shareholding in the pay-TV company
Last month TorrentFreak reported on DigiProtect, the anti-piracy company with the tagline Turn Piracy Into Profit
. A manager from DigiProtect revealed some of the inner workings on how the company operates but according to a lawyer who defends alleged file-sharers, he may have revealed just a little too much
A campaign backed by automakers and some lawmakers to make electric or hybrid cars noisier in a bid to increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists has taken a strange, Blade Runner
-type twist. Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a beautiful and futuristic
noise similar to the sound of flying cars — or spinners
— that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller based on a Philip K Dick science fiction novel
The founders of Skype are escalating their legal battle with eBay. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype in the United States District Court of Northern California. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of Skype for $1.9 billion to a consortium of investors led by the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. In the court filing, Joltid, a company owned by the Skype founders, claims that eBay violated copyright law by altering and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind the free Internet calling service. The Skype founders maintained ownership of that source code after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, and licensed it to eBay
After an earlier decision failed to reach its objective, this week a Brazilian court made an unprecedented ruling against file-sharing clients. Following legal action by anti-piracy groups against a website offering a file-sharing client for download, the court decided that software which allows users to share music via P2P is illegal
Microsoft has filed five civil lawsuits in King County Superior Court in Seattle against alleged malvertisers. Malvertising camouflages malicious code, and Microsoft wants to stop it
After Australia’s Senator Stephen Conroy’s plans to filter the Internet earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year, today there is more chin-scratching over the plans. Speaking yesterday, the Senator Conroy said there has never been any suggestion that the government could or would block P2P traffic
Using Google to research a news story is easy on your iPhone. Which is why one lawyer wants jurors to stop doing it
The use of checks on web sites before comments, forum posts, or registrations, are allowed to happen are commonplace with probably the best known being the CAPTCHA test. CAPTCHAs present users with characters that are obscured in some way and presented as an image making it very difficult for anything other than a human to decipher. Those tests are quite effective, but one company called reCAPTCHA had a better idea: use the CAPTCHA tests to serve another purpose by helping to digitise books. When you solve a reCAPTCHA you are actually turning a reference from one of those digital book projects into text. This is necessary because the optical character recognition software used to scan those books can’t always figure out what some of the words are, especially in older books, or when copies exist that have some damage. Now the use of reCAPTCHA is set to expand as Google has announced it has acquired the company
Mobile technology specialist Myriad Group has acquired Xumii, a mobile social networking and instant messaging start-up with roots in Australia that also operates in the United States
Adobe Systems said it would buy the Web analytics software company Omniture for about $1.8 billion, giving the maker of content-creation software a way to let marketers monitor the effectiveness of such content
Panasonic has launched a new household LED lightbulb in Japan that it says lasts 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs. The screw-in bulbs are part of the EverLed line, and they’re scheduled to hit stores in Japan on 21 October, with monthly production at 50,000 units. No changes to lighting equipment used for incandescents are required. If used an average of five and a half hours per day, the new bulbs can last up to 19 years, according to Panasonic. That’s 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs
Thousands of businesses and homes in Sydney’s CBD could be without phone, internet and mobile phone coverage for up to a week after a contractor accidentally severed crucial cables. Contractors working for Energy Australia cut through a bundle of 10,000 Telstra copper wires and some multiple-fibre optical cables near the corner of York and Erskine streets about 9.30pm yesterday
After its initial adoption in May, the original version of the 3 strikes
Hadopi anti-piracy legislation was struck down by France’s highest legal authority after declaring the proposals unconstitutional. A modified version of the bill was accepted in July by the Senate and today it was passed in the National Assembly
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