Funded by Google and Sun the Stop Badware project will expose the hidden extras that popular software, such as file-sharing programs, often has inside it and will also identify companies that develop the programs and distribute them on the Internet — via digg
Google Date lets you enter a date and then searches using Google for what happened on that date and shows results — via digg
Microsoft has taken the wraps off Internet Explorer 7, releasing the new beta version of its Web browser to the general public for testing. Of interest to web monkeys, they’ve killed off the CSS star hack without fixing the problems it was used to workaround
The Russian justice ministry has asked a court to shut down the Russian Human Rights Research Centre, one of the country’s oldest human rights group — via Boing Boing
US Representative Marty Meehan’s staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio, among other things removing criticisms. In total, more than one thousand Wikipedia edits in various articles have been traced back to congressional staffers at the US House of Representatives in the past six months
Canada’s biggest record label, publisher and management company is helping out a family sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement. The privately-owned Nettwerk Music Group is intervening because the current actions of the RIAA are not in their artists’ best interests
Google’s new China search engine not only censors many web sites that question the Chinese government, but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes. In addition, contrary to Google founder Sergey Brin’s promise to inform users when their search results are censored, the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it
A court has ruled that Google’s caching and displaying of millions of web-pages is legal. Google Cache is the service that offers to show you stored versions of the web-pages that turn up in the results for your Google searches. Until recently, no court had ruled on the legality of this, and it was unclear whether this would qualify as a fair use
. If not, Google and a number of other caching services, particularly the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, would have been in deep trouble — via Boing Boing
The ACLU has received complaints from six organisations and nearly two dozen people who fear they have been spied upon, photographed, videotaped or had their events infiltrated by government agents. They say none of them did anything that would justify surveillance but rather are critics of the Bush administration — via digg
The collision was inevitable. Google has vowed to provide unbiased, accurate, and free access to information
to people around the world, while touting a corporate motto of don’t be evil
. And China, which controls information with an iron grip, has blossomed into the world’s second-biggest and fastest-growing Internet market. For those wondering what would happen when the irresistible force of Google and its altruistic motives finally met up with the immovable object of China, with its lure of higher profit, the answer came when Google unveiled its first search service inside China. Its concession: Google will play by government rules and censor results of sensitive queries, such as Falun Gong
or multiparty elections
. There’s already a workaround
A 20-year-old Californian, Jeanson James Ancheta, accused of using hundreds of thousands of hijacked computers to damage systems and send waves of spam across the internet, has pleaded guilty to US federal charges
A group called the Metamorphosis Foundation reports that 126 nongovernmental organisations in Macedonia have signed an open letter to that country’s president and parliament demanding prompt adoption of the Law on Free Access to Information
— via Boing Boing
eBay has scrapped all sellers’ transaction fees in China in an effort to compete with local outfits offering free services. The online auctioneer announced the changes on its China web site, saying transaction fees would be waived, but small fees would continue to be charged for listing products on the site’s webspace and for feature
products
Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has written about the recent spate of hijackings at LiveJournal. Hundreds of journals have now been taken over by a notorious group called Bantown
using a series of complicated cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. It is unclear whether LiveJournal has managed to close the security holes that the hackers claim to have used. The company says it has, but the hackers insist there are still at least 16 other similar Javascript flaws on the LiveJournal site that could be used conduct the same attack. Bantown group members said they plan to turn their attention to looking for similar flaws at another large social-networking site — via Slashdot
The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don’t glue ourselves together when we cut ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibres in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft’s skin with hollow fibres containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility
The IEEE Task Group N
voted to confirm the proposal for the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. Submitted by the Joint Proposal team, this specification was developed by the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) and included several elements developed within the Joint Proposal team
Google has been subpoenaed by the US Justice Department to turn over a database of search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography. Google is resisting the demand
Like most creatives who prefer working on Apples, I’ve been hanging out for some sort of concrete evidnece that the Adobe CS2 suite will run well/much better on the new Intel-based Macs under the Rosetta emulator, or that Adobe will release a Universal Binary update. Well I need a new mac within the next week, and decided to just go ahead and place an order for a 17-inch PowerBook any ways. I’ve also managed to find a two-tone purple laptop bag over at the Crumpler site named, The Dreadful Embarrassment.
However, it’d still be nice to know when Adobe are going to make that Universal move. I have no concrete evidence, but the guys over at Photoshop TV have this for us to mull over: No Intel-based OS X version of CS until CS3?
And on another tangent, you can now get a diploma in advanced studies in character animation over at Animation Mentor.com.
The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses ping attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a ping
attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new feature
allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it
eBay plans to offer an instant-purchase service to supplement its bid-and-wait online auctions, pitting the company directly against conventional e-commerce retailers
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