The European Union’s consumer chief has hit out at Apple’s bundling of its iPod music players and its iTunes online music store
Sweden’s government has presented a bill to give its defence intelligence agency powers to monitor any e-mail or phone call into or out of the country. The National Defence Radio Establishment currently listens in on military communications and needs a court order for any other surveillance. The government says conversations within Sweden would remain untouched
Apple may sell zippy notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, driving down prices of hard-disk drives, according Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research. A shift to flash memory in place of much slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers
The prototype of a short-range gigabit wireless chip, which promises more than 2Gbps throughput speeds and costs just AU$10, will be unveiled by the end of this year, according to researchers from National ICT Australia
VMware is introducing a public beta version of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, an upgrade of its two-year-old ACE program for virtualising desktop computers so they can run multiple software or operating systems. One of the new features is Pocket ACE, which allows the user to store the ACE desktop virtualisation tool on a USB drive, a portable hard drive or an Apple iPod, plug it into a remote computer and run the virtualisation software on that computer
Most people just grumble and hit delete, but when Gordon Dick received a spam message advertising Internet services, he fought back. The 30-year-old Web marketing specialist from Edinburgh sued the sender, Transcom Internet Services, in small-claims court. The court ordered the company to pay $1,445 in damages and $1,190 in court costs. If someone was throwing stones through your window, would you just ignore it?
Dick said. It’s anti-social behaviour and they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place
Access to YouTube has been suspended in Turkey following a court order. The ban was imposed after prosecutors told the court that clips insulting former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had appeared on the site. According to Turkish media, there has been a virtual war
between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both sides posting insulting videos
Google is developing a program to help academics around the world exchange huge amounts of data. The firm’s open source team is working on ways to physically transfer huge data sets up to 120 terabytes in size. Google sends scientists a hard drive system and then copies it before passing it on to other researchers
OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company supporters. WordPress announced their support and 37Signals support is nigh. These two organisations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki and others in their support of OpenID
Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to introduce Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future
Dell is considering offering the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows on its personal computers. The PC maker said it received more than 100,000 customer requests for Linux in a suggestion box
posted on Dell’s Web site less than three weeks ago
As of today, the Ubuntu development branch includes a tool called Proprietary Drivers manager
that makes it easy for users to activate proprietary drivers. Together with the graphical frontends to Beryl and Compiz this will make the activation and experience of the 3D desktop very pleasant
The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts. SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that’s likely low since it’s based on information volunteered in user profiles. China has blocked the site before, for no clear reason — then unblocked it again just as mysteriously, without any concessions from the company. The timing of the block coincides with the National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing, says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese dissident and founder of the China Digital Times. According to Xiao, the event is often accompanied by stepped up security and a worsening of China’s notorious internet censorship policies
Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, reviews his phone under the headline, My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots.
It gets even better from there. This may be the best mobile phone review ever written — via Bruce Sterling
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 2007 from its offices, and is considering switching its operations to Macs and PCs running Novell’s SuSe Linux. The DOT enacted the ban in mid-January because certain applications essential to the agency’s function can’t run on Windows Vista
Random House and HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books
The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software WordPress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to execute code remotely. This is interesting because the official release was quietly and subtly compromised, and has been in the wild for a few days now. There’s no word on if any affected sites have been compromised, but anyone running WordPress is urged to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately
A genuine crack for Windows Vista has just been released, which allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. Unlike cracks which have been floating around since Vista RTM was released in late November, this crack doesn’t simply get around product activation with beta activation files or timestop cracks — it actually makes use of the activation process. It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn’t require product activation — apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient
Computer hackers have scored a victory in their battle against Sony and the way the company controls its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld games console. Last month three hacker teams — Noobz, Team C+D and a group led by PSP hacker Dark Alex — co-ordinating their efforts over the internet, found a flaw in the most recently released version of the firmware — version 3.03. Using this flaw they devised a way to unlock all PSPs, regardless of their age or the firmware running on it
The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web’s most popular video sharing website, owned by Google. Three YouTube channels — one for news and two for entertainment — will showcase short clips of BBC content. The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube’s monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website. The corporation will also get a share of the advertising revenue generated by traffic to the new YouTube channels
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