Both the music and movie industries see file-sharing as a very real threat to their livelihood. Their approaches to the problem have differed, however, as the RIAA has targeted individual P2P users with lawsuits while the IFPI and MPAA have chosen to go after BitTorrent sites. The MPAA has scored some high-profile victories against P2P site operators and the men behind The Pirate Bay have been indicted by Swedish prosecutors, but many observers have questioned whether the motion picture industry’s efforts are in fact backfiring, as traffic to popular BitTorrent sites and participation in swarms appears to be on the upswing
PayPal, eBay’s electronic payment service, plans to take the dramatic step of locking out people using older versions of web browsers in order to stem phishing attacks. PayPal said a significant
group of people still use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, and IE 4, which debuted in 1997. Those browsers lack a phishing filter, which can block users from accessing a reported phishing web site
About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington
This laboratory in a leafy part of Hampshire is where defence and security firm Qinetiq develops and tests its ion engines 𗾤 a technology that will take spacecraft to the planets, powered by the Sun. Ion engines are an electric propulsion system
. They make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current. This is used to accelerate a beam of ions (charged atoms) of xenon away from the spacecraft, thereby providing thrust
The first draft of a book which changed the world’s attitude to evolution is available for the first time online. Papers which led to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University’s library. The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime
Apple has fixed the Safari flaw that allowed the MacBook Air to be hacked at the CanSecWest security conference. Mozilla has also issued an update to fix a critical vulnerability in Firefox
New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam. The data from Sophos also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds. For the first time Turkey’s contribution to the global spam problem puts it in the top three offending countries
After the Guardian did their own investigation into the Mac clone maker Psystar, Gizmodo decided to take it a step further and see if they actually exist, in the physical sense. How could a company so brazenly challenge Apple and have little to no record of actually being a company? They set off to get pictures of both their supposed addresses, and found that they’re as much vapourware as the Phantom Console of yore
Sun Microsystems pushed out a near final
version of MySQL 5.1 on Tuesday, but is holding back the production release of the open-source database until it irons out some remaining bugs, officials said Tuesday. Sun wants to avoid issuing another buggy release of the database, which is what happened when MySQL, which Sun acquired in January, released MySQL 5.0 two years ago
Google has announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the deep web, the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines
. Directions like nofollow
and noindex
are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search
Windows XP Service Pack 3 is apparently set to debut later this month. While Microsoft has not commented, tech news outlets are reporting that the much-anticipated update will be available on 29 April
eBay Australia has applied for legal protection as it seeks to force members to use a payment gateway it owns for buying and selling goods. It is the ACCC’s policy to grant immediate immunity from the date the notification is validly lodged. The public will have until 2 May to provide submissions. Meanwhile, an online petition against eBay’s new policy has been established by Brisbane small business operator Daniel Gibney
You can plug lots of handy items into your computer’s USB port, from mobile storage devices to printers — but if you’re not careful, you can also plug in a piece of damaging malware as well
Dubai authorities have impounded two ships suspected of damaging undersea telecom cables in the Middle East earlier this year. One of the ships has reportedly been released after paying for the damage. The cable cuts, which disrupted Internet traffic in much of the Middle East, India and Pakistan, sparked a flurry of conspiracy theories that the series of outages in the region were not a coincidence. The action was taken after Reliance Globalcom provided details of its analysis of satellite images documenting the ship movements around the area of undersea cable damage
Companies will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from a cyber attack
The Greens and privacy advocates have hit back against proposed laws which could allow companies to snoop on their workers’ e-mails, but Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said the laws are needed to protect vital electronic infrastructure from terrorist attacks
Victoria Police has been refused access to a self-proclaimed terrorist’s personal Facebook details after the social networking web site demanded more information about an international counter-terrorism investigation into its member. Counter-terrorism agents were asked to supply more details about a death threat made via Facebook against a Melbourne Jewish woman and her family by an alleged member of the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah
A new form of cloning has been developed that is easier to carry out than the technique used to create Dolly the sheep, raising fears that it may one day be used on human embryos to produce designer
babies
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioural targeting. That’s good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on
Researchers have found evidence during the last six months of the year that Internet fraudsters are adopting mainstream tactics, including hiring teams of hackers to create new viruses and offering volume discounts on stolen data to encourage larger orders. In some cases, stolen credit card numbers were sold in batches of 500 for a total of $200
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