A French judge has dismissed a defamation and privacy case against Wikipedia, after ruling the free online encyclopaedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its web site. The US-based Wikipedia Foundation, which is behind the popular compendium, was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists. Judge Emmanuel Binoche ruled that a 2004 French law limited Wikipedia’s liability and noted that contentious references in the disputed article had in any case been removed
Google has purchased the shortest possible domain name to make it easier for Chinese users to find Google: g.cn
JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today’s browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language — via Slashdot
The University of Oregon has filed a motion to quash the RIAA’s subpoena for information on student identities in what is believed to be the first such motion made by a university with support from the state Attorney General. The motion explains that it is impossible to identify the alleged infringers from the information the RIAA has presented
If you’ve been waiting impatiently for Google to roll out IMAP access to your Gmail account, your wait is over — IMAP access is now available to all. Now everyone can turn Thunderbird into the ultimate Gmail IMAP client — via lifehacker
A handful of consumer groups have filed a complaint with the FCC over Comcast’s delaying
some BitTorrent traffic. The complaint seeks fines of $195,000 for each Comcast subscriber affected by the traffic blocking as well as a permanent injunction barring the ISP from blocking P2P traffic. Comcast’s defence is bogus,
said Free Press policy director Ben Scott. The FCC needs to take immediate action to put an end to this harmful practice. Comcast’s blatant and deceptive BitTorrent blocking is exactly the type of problem advocates warned would occur without Net Neutrality laws
— via Slashdot
The Australian Defence Department has injected $4.4 million worth of funding to further the CSIRO’s research into designing clothing which can be used as a self-recharging electrical source on the battlefield. The CSIRO’s Flexible Integrated Energy Device (FIED) was one of eight proposals selected as part of the latest round of Defence Capability and Technology Demonstrator (CTD) Program funding announced in October
Google has launched a system that will allow developers to create applications for a variety of social networks. Developers currently have to customise their designs for a particular site with many partnering with the hugely popular Facebook. Google’s OpenSocial system will allow a wider distribution for tools like Facebook’s music recommendation service iLike and its Top Friends application
New technology that can make tanks invisible has been unveiled by the Ministry of Defence. In secret trials last week, the Army said it had made a vehicle completely disappear and predicted that an invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012. The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank — via Warren Ellis
Following the bust of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, most of its 180,000 members are keeping their heads down and trying to stay inconspicuous. However, Trent Reznor, frontman of Nine Inch Nails isn’t worried: I had an account there,
he said. It was like the world’s greatest record store
The guys from The Pirate Bay are always working on interesting side-projects, but there is one in particular that’s so significant, it might be the future of filesharing. For a while now, they have been working on a brand new protocol — which may come to replace BitTorrent in the near future
The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple’s new OS, without investing in new hardware — even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple’s terms and conditions. The forum is offering full instructions on how to install the system, including screenshots of the installation process. Not all the features of Leopard function with the patch — Wi-Fi support, for example, is reportedly inoperable. Historically, Apple’s likely next move will be to track down and act against those behind the hack — via Slashdot
Copy and burn firm, Slysoft reckons it has cracked the beefed-up copy protection on Blu-ray disks, BD+. It reckons it has the routine cracked even though Sony says its protection will be good for ten years
Didier Stevens recently took a closer look at some Internet Explorer malware that he had uncovered and found that most antivirus products that it was tested against failed to identify the malware through one of the most basic and straight forward obfuscation techniques — the null-byte. With enough null-bytes between each character of code, it is possible to fool all antivirus products (though additional software will trap it), yet Internet Explorer was quite happy to render the code. Both the antivirus / anti-malware companies and Microsoft’s IE team have something to answer for — via Slashdot
Retrodata, a data-recovery company, has just issued a warning for Apple MacBook owners with Seagate hard drives that were manufactured in China and have a firmware version of 7.01. Apparently these have a fatal flow that cause their read/write heads to fail mechanically, scratching up the hard drive surface as pictured and making data unrecoverable (even by professionals such as themselves). If you’ve got a MacBook, you should check to see if your internal drive is a Seagate and back up your data accordingly — via Gizmodo
DirectRevenue/Best Offers, a company notorious for using underhanded tactics to get its spyware on millions of computers, has gone out of business. The company was also known for its use of aggressive pop up ads. Last February the company was fined over a million dollars by the FTC for its shady practices
A new type of carbon fibre, developed at the University of Cambridge, could be woven into super-strong body armour for the military and law enforcement. The researchers say their material is already several times stronger, tougher and stiffer than fibres currently used to make protective armour. The lightweight fibre, made up of millions of tiny carbon nanotubes, is starting to reveal exciting properties
In the wake of the OiNK takedown, many thousands of people started to panic today when they tried to access EZTV and instead got directed to Google. But there is no need to worry, EZTV is alive and well and now available via two new domains — www.eztv.it and www.eztv.nl
Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers’ pockets within a few years. Thanks to a new technique for manipulating charged copper particles at the molecular scale, researchers at Arizona State University say their memory is, bit-for-bit, one-tenth the cost of — and 1,000 times as energy-efficient as — flash memory, the predominant memory technology in iPhones and other mobile devices
The Pirate Bay is currently working on an OiNK replacement in an attempt to bring the hundreds of thousands of music albums back online that disappeared during the raid. The replacement will be released within a week and on the BOiNK.cd
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