A German operator of a Tor server used to anonymously route traffic over the net said he was arrested in a midnight raid on his residence that stemmed from an investigation into bomb threats said to have passed through an internet protocol address under his control
Google added 54 new countries to Google Maps ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen and has plans to add even more countries in the coming months. Along with the Google Maps addition, DigitalGlobe, provider of Google’s satellite images, is launching a new satellite on Tuesday
The $100 laptop — which was already up to a hefty $175, has gotten yet another price bump to $188. A spokesman says they’re committed to keeping the price from rising above $190, and probably below $200 if at all possible. It’s very strange that the price keeps rising, seeing as it’s been, what, two years since the project was announced, plus they’ve gotten more orders from companies so they can ramp up bulk production. Shouldn’t hardware prices have dropped instead of risen? — via Gizmodo Australia
The X PRIZE Foundation and Google has announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a $30 million prize purse
Using lasers to drive spaceships has been a subject of interest for many years, but making a photonic engine powerful enough for practical use has been elusive. Dr Young Bae, a California physicist, has built a demonstration photonic laser thruster that produces enough thrust to micro-maneuver a satellite. This would be useful in high-precision formation flying, such as using a fleet of satellites to form a space telescope with a large virtual aperture. Scaled up, a similar engine could speed a spacecraft to Mars in less than a week — via Slashdot
The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender’s internal emails from the last six months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business — via Slashdot
The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report [PDF] that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the US economy and add more value to the US economy than copyright industries contribute. Recent studies indicate that the value added to the US economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion,
said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the US economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion — via Slashdot
Google is calling on businesses and regulators throughout the world to set international standards for protecting consumer privacy online and offline
First drug companies were caught deleting side effects about drugs on Wikipedia, now the big law firms working for the drug companies are getting caught deleting what they don’t want people to know about them
Fark.com has
sued a man
it accuses of attempting to hack into the e-mail and computers of its staff members. The lawsuit says an unknown computer hacker sent e-mails 8 imploring Fark staff members to visit a particular Web site. For the next four days, Fark staff received forged e-mails that appeared to come from other staff members, containing links to three Web sites. The links contained Trojan horse programs, malicious software that allows secret unauthorised remote access to computers
Microsoft has been granted a patent for stealthy audio watermarking
, which is just a slick way of saying inaudible digital watermarks directly embedded in the audio of a file, allowing the owner to be traced. Apparently, in their version of the tech, the watermark’s scattered throughout the file so it’s more difficult to pull out or tweak and it’s able to be compressed while remaining intact — via Gizmodo Australia
The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyse extremist activities online
. The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating ‘anonymous’ content
with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release — via Slashdot
In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is suing the founder of the forums as the founder allowed statements relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious
to be published on the Whirlpool forums — via Slashdot
Virginia’s law banning the massive distribution of junk e-mail is an unconstitutional barrier to free speech, a lawyer for a former spammer told the state’s highest court
A Las Vegas man faces about 20 years in prison after pleading guilty in a case where he impersonated intellectual property lawyers and tried to bully owners out of their domain names. According to the FBI, David Scali is charged with registering an e-mail account under an alias and then sending e-mails in which he claimed to be the intellectual property lawyer. In the e-mails, which were sent in late June and early July of 2006, Scali threatened to file $100,000 trademark infringement lawsuits against the owners of various Internet website names unless they gave up their domain name registrations within two days
Google claims to rank search results by relevance, but the search engine engages in deceptive conduct by selling off the top positions to commercial partners, a Sydney court has heard. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is taking world-first legal action in the Federal Court against Google Inc over allegedly deceptive conduct related to sponsored links on its websites. The ACCC has brought a two-pronged case against Trading Post and Google — including subsidiaries Google Australia and Google Ireland — for potentially misleading consumers. The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate organic
search results — those ranked by relevance — from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page — via Slashdot
Hewlett-Packard is licensing a medical patch it has developed to Ireland’s Crospon that potentially can replace hypodermic needles or pills for delivering vaccines or other types of medication to patients. The patch contains up to 90,000 microneedles per square inch, microprocessors and a thermal unit. Medications contained in the patch are heated and then injected through the needles. Processors can monitor drug delivery, deliver doses over extended periods of time or deliver drugs in response to a patient’s vital signs (eg, blood pressure or heart rate), depending on how it is programmed
A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours — a record for both unmanned aerial vehicles and solar craft. None before has managed to store enough solar energy to fly through more than one night — via Slashdot
The Mozilla Foundation last week released the first beta version, 8.0.0b1, of the revised Eudora e-mail application since Qualcomm stopped developing it commercially and turned it over to the open-source community in 2006. Mozilla already has an open-source e-mail program, Thunderbird, and the new Eudora will be a branded offshoot, with some new features, according to the release site. In addition, a related extension called Penelope
will provide some extra features to both Eudora and Thunderbird
Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai’s police are requiring the city’s 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have your credit card number. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely
— via Slashdot
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