Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding web sites with meaningless traffic; on Slashdot, they’re seeing them as 6% of their page traffic now. Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by web sites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots — via Slashdot
With the push for more sustainable energy, easy DIY kits for alternative energy sources are likely to become quite popular in the coming years. We may see some big improvements in our ability to ‘green up’ if these photovoltaic curtains become widely available — via Slashdot
For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Illinois, the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (SPAM) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool’s Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants — via Slashdot
Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3.0 took place in June. Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it an extremely impressive accomplishment
The International Music Score Library Project has re-opened to the public for good after a 10-month hiatus. All the news updates in the interim can be found linked to the main page. They take great pride in re-opening as it demonstrates their willpower to make the masterpieces of history free to the world; and moreover to make manifest that they will not be bullied by publishers sporting outrageous claims of copyright in a country where they clearly are expired — via Slashdot
Virgin Media, plagued by a recent flurry of bad publicity thanks to its policy of working with the music industry to warn file-sharers, has announced today that there is absolutely no possibility
that it will disconnect its users from the Internet or hand over their details to the music industry
Consumers will have to pay between $21 and $83 to downgrade from Windows Vista to Microsoft’s older operating system, XP. Microsoft has been struggling to convince Windows XP users to embrace Vista and PC makers have shunned the new operating system as well due to negative feedback from customers. The new platform, they claim, is too bloated and slow when compared with its predecessor
A French court ordered eBay to pay €38.6 million (AU$63.84 million) to luxury goods group LVMH for allowing the sale of fake merchandise, in a ruling immediately appealed by the online auction web site. The decision, a month after eBay was ordered by another French court to pay handbag maker Hermes 20,000 euros for allowing the sale of counterfeits, is the latest episode in a long fight between luxury goods makers and the world’s biggest online auctioneer
Apple will roll out movie sales on the Australian version of the iTunes store within the next month, with ISP iiNet hoping unmetered downloads will provide a download bonanza
Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009
Adobe announced that it provided some its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to improve the indexing of SWF files and especially Flex applications. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states
In his talks about the history of Apple, Steve Wozniak has often recounted how the 1971 Esquire article Secrets of the Little Blue Box
set him on the road to phone phreaking. Now someone has obtained the FBI file of one of the phreaks, Joe Engressia (who later changed his name to Joybubbles), via Freedom of Information requests. The file reveals that Engressia was illegally wiretapped by the FBI and the phone company back in 1969. J Edgar Hoover considered the blind college student a national security risk and wrote a memo about him to John Ehrlichman — via Slashdot
Yahoo began pressing its case to shareholders that its board and management deserve a chance to prove they made the right move when they rejected a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers — and televisions and iPods and everything else — to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment
A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn’t just any GoDaddy employee; he’s head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions. Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn’t win. The conflict of interest is unethical, but could this practice also be illegal? Said a representative for a competitor, Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it
. This comes hot on the heels of news that despite earlier promises to ICANN to end their 60-Day ban on transfers, GoDaddy quietly circumvented it by forcing customers to agree to the ban anyway. ICANN doesn’t appear to be investigating or asking follow-up questions about this. What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible? — via Slashdot
Netgear launches Open Source edition of wireless-G router enabling Linux developers, geeks, hackers and enthusiasts to create Firmware for specialized applications Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L) delivers higher processing power and more memory for a Wide Variety of customised applications. The product is supported by a dedicated and responsive open source community
Intel researchers have built a superfast silicon chip for optical networking. It is Intel’s latest advance in silicon photonics. The chip contains eight modulators that encode data onto light that enters and exits from the side via optical fibres. This chip can process 200 gigabits of data per second and is used to test designs that could ultimately process a terabit of data per second
On 30 June, US federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded 30 June deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future. Under a White House policy issued in August 2005, all federal agencies must demonstrate the ability to pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks by this deadline
eBay has delayed its 15 July deadline to impose a new payment system until a review by the competition watchdog is completed. On its web site, eBay Australia said: Changes to eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete
A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris. The net’s regulator, ICANN, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called top-level domain names, such as .com or .uk. The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names. A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved
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