Google may strive not to be evil, but the company works directly with typosquatters to help them — and Google — make money, according to a class action lawsuit. The suit, filed by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin G Edelman, says that Google and the companies that are engaging in typosquatting are taking advantage of existing trademarks and should be stopped
McDonald’s has announced it will roll out the largest network of free wireless internet in Australia, in partnership with Telstra. It will offer free wi-fi in 720 restaurants across Australia by March next year, with Queensland internet hotspots launching from late December onwards
Cray has announced the CX1 desktop supercomputer. Cray teamed with Microsoft and Intel to build the new machine that supports up to 8 nodes, a total of 64 cores and 64Gb of memory per node. CX1 can be ordered online with starting prices of $25K, and a choice of Linux or Windows HPC. This should be a pretty big deal for smaller schools and scientists waiting in line for time on the world’s big computing centers, as well as 3D and VFX shops — via Slashdot
The iBurst wireless broadband network owned by failed Australian ICT products and services firm Commander would be shut down by 19 December, according to a failed bidder for the network
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has slapped telco company Dodo with a fine of $147,400 for allegedly engaging offshore call centres to make around 70 calls on its behalf to numbers on the Do Not Call Register. The penalty is the largest issued by ACMA since the Do Not Call Register legislation took effect in May 2007. The fines are set at $2,200 per call or up to a maximum of $110,000 per day
For the second time this year, eBay has forgotten to adjust its clocks for daylight saving, creating mass confusion around when auctions will actually end. Clocks published on eBay auction pages are one hour behind, meaning the auctions are listed as ending an hour before they actually do. This causes confusion among buyers and means sellers could miss out on the typical surge of last-minute bids
Fans of Firefox get ready, because this version is simply an amazing feat of browser design. But you expected no less, right? The Test Center’s reviewers loaded Firefox 3.1 beta on a Vista desktop outfitted with 2GB RAM and Pentium dual-core at 1.80GHz
The Pirate Bay has always made it clear that they don’t obey takedown requests from content owners. That doesn’t stop Hollywood from going after the Pirate Bay’s users, however, and they do so on a large scale. The Pirate Bay is well aware of these pirate tracking outfits, and does what it can to give them a hard time. Reporting fake peers is one of the tricks they use
Interpol chiefs will propose the use of automated facial-recognition technology at borders to flag up internationally wanted suspects. The UK already has airport gates equipped with such technology, intended to remove the need for a human border guard to check that a passenger’s face matches the one recorded in his or her passport. Interpol database chief Mark Branchflower believes that his organisation should set up a database of facial-recognition records to operate alongside its existing photo, fingerprint and DNA files
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society
OpenOffice.org last week released the first version of its open-source application suite written for Mac OSX. Although the organisation’s web site is back online — it was knocked offline for several hours on Monday as demand exceeded server capacity — the version now available is bare-bones. Users can access the 163MB download installer, however
The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn’t index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it’s Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set — via Slashdot
New Zealand is known for sheep, rugby and dramatic filming locations. However, it will also be known for being the first place in the world with a 3-strikes law for copyright infringement. The Copyright Amendment Act 2008 gained royal assent earlier this year, and goes into effect at the end of February 2009. Opposition to this bill, despite being signed into law, is still growing though
Airport security in America is a sham — security theatre
designed to make travellers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items — as Jeffrey Goldberg did with ease
ComScore’s most US search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft’s MSN sites
The Communications Data Bill (2008) will lead to the creation of a single, centralised database containing records of all e-mails sent, web sites visited and mobile phones used by UK citizens. In a carnivore-on-steroids programme, as all vestiges of communication privacy are stripped away> The BBC reports that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says this is a necessity
— via Slashdot
A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored
Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say. Under the government’s $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material. Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether
Steven Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, has announced a new line of Apple laptop computers that he said were made with a new manufacturing process. Jobs introduced new versions of the company’s MacBook Pro and MacBook portable computers that are carved from 1.1kg blocks of aluminium
Defendants can’t deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled
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