Amazon confirms Sydney CDN node

By
21 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology
677 views

Global cloud computing player and retailer Amazon today confirmed that it had added an edge location in Sydney to speed up the delivery of content to Australians, confirming a deployment model which was the subject of speculation some 12 months ago.

The company has long been suspected of rolling out data centre infrastructure in Australia to support its Amazon Web Services business, which is one of the largest global cloud computing infrastructure players. Many within the industry have believed the first step in such an investment could be the deployment of a so-called edge node which would allow the company to speed up the deployment of content to local users, ahead of a potential larger data centre roll-out down the track — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Why Scammers Say They’re From Nigeria

By
21 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology
655 views

We all get them: scam emails that claim to be able to make us millionaires overnight. But why are they so terribly unconvincing? And why do they even admit to being based in places like Nigeria? One Microsoft researcher claims to have the answer.

In particular, we’re talking about the offers to cut you into a deal, which offer a healthy cut of the profits. They normally end up requiring a small transfer of money from the person who’s being scammed to enable the deal to take place. Then another transfer of money, then another until… everything goes quiet.

These scams are normally know as Nigerian scams, because that’s where they tend to originate from. But you might also know them by their proper name: advance fee fraud. And they work! Last year, one Nigerian fraudster received a 12-year jail sentence after scamming $US1.3 million from victims.

But why on Earth are the emails written to sound so hugely unbelievable? Who the hell is going to fall for them? — via redwolf.newsvine.com

TPG Cops $2 Million Fine Over Misleading Ads

By
20 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Business, Technology
700 views

A Federal Court judge has decided that TPG should pay a whopping $2 million in penalties for failing to specify that the company’s $29.99 Unlimited ADSL2+ deal needed a bundled $30 home phone plan in its ads, but it’s not something the ISP is going to take laying down.

TPG was offering an unlimited ADSL2+ broadband deal, but the offer only applied when a customer took a $30 home phone plan with the ISP. The ACCC turned its nose up at TPG in December 2010, throwing the book at the ISP for the potentially misleading offer. TPG was found to be at fault in November and the Federal Court has now handed down a $2 million fine.

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Murphy, said in the judgement that such a high penalty was needed to discourage similar behaviour by ISPs in future — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Malawi school kitchen to be named in honour of school meal blogger Martha

By
19 June 2012
2 min read
Leave a comment
In Food, Technology, Wildlife
963 views

A school kitchen being built in Malawi is to be named in honour of a nine-year-old blogger who has raised £85,000 for charity.

Martha Payne started the NeverSeconds blog six weeks ago, posting daily pictures of, and opinions about, her school lunches.

The blog has received 6m views and won the support of celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Nick Nairn.

On Friday Martha was told by Argyll and Bute council to stop taking photos for her blog as media coverage had apparently left catering staff fearing for their jobs. But the council reversed its decision after a barrage of negative publicity in the media and on social networking sites.

The ban led to thousands of donations flooding in to Martha’s JustGiving site, which she had set up to raise money for Mary’s Meals. The charity runs school feeding projects in communities around the world where poverty and hunger prevent children from gaining an education.

Martha’s fundraising total rocketed from £3,000 to almost £85,000 in just four days. It means a kitchen will be built at Lirangwe primary school in Blantyre, Malawi, and all 1,963 of the pupils will be fed for a whole year, as part of the charity’s Sponsor a School initiative.

Martha has chosen to name the kitchen Friends of NeverSeconds, in recognition of the worldwide support she has received — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Nine-year-old critic Martha wins food fight with council

By
18 June 2012
59 second read
Leave a comment
In Food, Politics, Rights, Technology
957 views

A nine-year-old blogger has won a food fight with authorities in her Scottish town, after an online outcry prompted officials to lift a ban on posting photos of her school lunches.

Martha Payne’s images of uninspiring school meals — one consisted of two croquettes, a plain cheeseburger, three slices of cucumber and a lollipop — drew international attention. The blog, set up about six weeks ago as a writing project and to help raise money for a school-meals charity, has drawn more than two million hits — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Ethiopia Criminalises VoIP Services

By
18 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Politics, Rights, Technology
737 views

The Ethiopian government has passed legislation criminalising the use of VoIP services like Skype and Google Talk. Anyone using these services within the country now faces up to 15 years in prison. Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of national security concerns and to protect the state’s telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizen’s Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets. … Reporters Without Borders also reports that Ethio Telecom installed a system to block access to the Tor network, which allows users to surf the Web anonymously. The organisation notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic — via Slashdot

Death of an invention

By
18 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology
762 views

It was France’s first glimpse of an online future. But now, 30 years after it was invented, the wired experiment that foreshadowed the World Wide Web is about to lose its connection once and for all.

Long before the coming of the World Wide Web, the Minitel provided a sort of Internet-in-one-country. Long before Facebook, Google or Twitter — millions of French people went online daily to search for information, to book their holidays, chat to strangers or seek cheap (or not so cheap) thrills.

The Minitel — a rather sinister, computer-like terminal attached to classic telephone landlines — was installed in one million French homes by 1985. At the end of the 1990s, nine million terminals were linked to some 25,000 Minitel services. So the French invented the Internet? No, not exactly.

At the end of this month, Minitel will finally go offline, ending a brave experiment in French exceptionalism. The surprise is that the network has lasted so long — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Kogan to tax shoppers for using IE7

By
15 June 2012
2 min read
Leave a comment
In Business, Technology
687 views

Australian consumer electronics upstart Kogan Technologies has deployed a special tax on its popular website which will charge online shoppers an extra 6.8 percent on top of their purchases if they persist in using what the company described as Microsoft’s antique Internet Explorer web browser.

The way we’ve been able to keep our prices so low is by using technology to make our business efficient and streamlined, Kogan wrote on its company blog yesterday. One of the things stopping that is our web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7. This is an extremely old browser, so from today, anyone buying from the site who uses IE7 will be lumped with a 6.8% surcharge — that’s 0.1% for each month IE7 has been on the market.

It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions, the company claimed. Customers who enter our site using Internet Explorer 7 can avoid the impost by simply downloading an up-to-date browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera or even a more recent version of Internet Explorer. Kogan wrote that all Internet citizens had a responsibility to make the Internet a better place.

By taking these measures, we are doing our bit, the company added. This will help us increase our efficiency, help keep prices for all smart shoppers down, and hopefully help eradicate the world of the pain in the rear that is IE7! So, what are you waiting for? Time to upgrade your browser! — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Facebook, Twitter, Google, AOL join new alliance to fight ‘bad ads’

By
15 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology
574 views

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and AOL have joined an alliance that has been set up to counter bad ads, including those that deliver malware, direct users to scams, or try to sell counterfeit goods, said StopBadware, the promoters of the alliance.

The Ads Integrity Alliance was launched Thursday and has Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in New York also as a charter member.

No individual business or law enforcement agency can single-handedly eliminate these bad actors from the entire web, Eric Davis, Google’s global public policy manager said in a blog post on Thursday — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Top bosses admit: Tweets, Facebook Likes influence decisions

By
14 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Business, Technology
711 views

Nine out of 10 execs think Big Data — the hoarding of information from server logs to social networking posts — is the fourth most important input to a business. The execs questioned in a survey published yesterday described data sets as the fourth factor of production after land, labour and capital.

The research by the Economist Intelligence Unit and funded by Capgemini examines the role of Big Data in influencing management decisions. Of the 600+ senior execs questioned, 65 per cent of them asserted that more and more management decisions are based on hard analytic information, as opposed to just having a hunch — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Orvillecopter, the stuffed helicopter cat, sparks global outrage

By
14 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology, Weird, Wildlife
3080 views

Dutch artist Bart Jansen is under attack after images of his flying helicopter cat went viral on the Internet this week.

Jansen created the bizarre cat helicopter after his pet Orville was killed by a car.

According to media reports, Jansen kept Orville’s body in a freezer for about six months, before taking him to a taxidermist and attaching a plastic propeller to each of his four paws. Then he put a remote control engine inside the stomach of the cat, and after a few false starts, the Orvillecopter achieved lift-off — via LA Times

4G ‘far superior’ to the NBN, claims Joe Hockey

By
13 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Politics, Technology
687 views

Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey has inaccurately claimed that 4G mobile broadband has the potential to be far superior to the fibre technology which Labor’s National Broadband Network policy features, in a controversial interview in which he also claimed that it could cost Australians up to $1,000 to connect to the NBN.

The claims were made in a radio interview which Hockey gave with the ABC’s Statewide Mornings show on ABC 936 in a visit to Tasmania last week. The host, Leon Compton, asked Hockey a number of questions about the Coalition’s own approach to the NBN. In one segment of the interview, Hockey spoke extensively about the potential of wireless technologies to serve the nation’s future broadband needs — via redwolf.newsvine.com

What is an internet troll?

By
13 June 2012
3 min read
Leave a comment
In Politics, Technology
991 views

I’m sitting waiting for the House of Commons to start debating a Law Against Trolls or, as they would call it, an amendment to the Defamation Act. It would basically let internet providers off the hook for the publication of their content, so long as they signed up to divulge the identity of any of their users. To warrant such a disclosure, the injured party would have to show that their reputation had been significantly damaged; then they would be given the offender’s identity, and would be free to pursue a civil case. Online abuse still won’t be a criminal offence, even if the bill is passed. It has wide support in parliament, so is not intended to be a very heated debate: I want to watch it to see how many MPs actually know what a troll is.

The term is widely misused: Frank Zimmerman, who received a suspended sentence for asking Louise Mensch which of her children she wished to remain alive, is not a troll, he is a hater (the death threats take him beyond the realm of ordinary hater into criminal hater; but that’s his category nonetheless). You can hear haters described in song by Isabel Fay, but they’re not the same as trolls, even while many people (Fay included) use the terms interchangeably (I’m not being a hater when I say that, by the way; I’m being a pedant). Trolls aren’t necessarily any more pleasant than haters, but their agenda is different – they don’t just want to insult a particular person, they want to start a fight — hopefully one that has a broader application, and brings in more people than just the object of their original trolling. The term derives from a fishing technique – say your stupid thing, watch the world bite — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Browse Like Bond: Use Any Computer Without Leaving a Trace with Tails

By
12 June 2012
1 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology
1039 views

In this post, we’ll walk through how to use a USB stick or DVD to anonymise, encrypt, and hide everything you do on a computer no matter where you are. When we say browse without leaving a trace, we truly mean it. Using the Linux-based, live-boot operating system Tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System), you can use any computer anywhere without anyone knowing you were ever on it. Tails is a portable operating system with all the security bells and whistles you’ll ever need already installed on it. You can install Tails on one of your many dust-gathering USB drives or a DVD. We’ll show you how to set up your own portable boot disc in the second section, but let’s start by taking a look at what you get with Tails — via Lifehacker

Websites to be forced to identify trolls under new measures

By
12 June 2012
38 second read
Leave a comment
In Politics, Rights, Technology
643 views

Websites will soon to be forced to identify people who have posted defamatory messages online.

New government proposals say victims have a right to know who is behind malicious messages without the need for costly legal battles.

The powers will be balanced by measures to prevent false claims in order to get material removed — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Alleged Romanian Subway Hackers Were Lured to US

By
12 June 2012
2 min read
Leave a comment
In Technology, Weird
1042 views

The alleged ringleader of a Romanian hacker gang accused of breaking into and stealing payment card data from hundreds of Subway restaurants made news late last month when he was extradited to face charges in the United States. But perhaps the more interesting story is how his two alleged accomplices were lured here by undercover U.S. Secret Service agents, who promised to shower the men with love and riches.

Adrian-Tiberiu Oprea, 27, appeared in a New Hampshire federal court a week ago Tuesday, after being extradited from Constanta, Romania to face charges of hacking into the point-of-sale terminals at more than 150 Subway restaurants and at least 50 other retailers. Oprea was among four men indicted last year on charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, wire fraud and access device fraud.

Two of Oprea’s alleged accomplices arrived in Boston one day apart in August 2011, and were arrested immediately after stepping off of their respective flights. Previous news stories have noted their arrests and detentions in the United States, but all of the accounts I read neglected to mention one very interesting fact: Both men entered the country of their own volition — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS

By
6 June 2012
2 min read
Leave a comment
In Business, Technology
686 views

Thirty-one.

That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.

Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore. There are parts of the story that are simply lost, viewpoints and perspectives that have been rendered extinct either through entrenched politicking or an employee base that has long since given up hope and dispersed for greener pastures. What we do know, though, is enough to tell a tale of warring factions, questionable decisions, and strategic churn, interspersed by flashes of brilliance and a core team that fought very hard at times to keep the dream alive.

The following is an account of Palm’s ascent prior to the launch of the Pre, the subsequent decline, and eventual end, assembled through interviews with a number of current and former employees — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google Is Buying Meebo

By
5 June 2012
54 second read
Leave a comment
In Technology
729 views

Google has acquired one-time mobile chat king and current internet uglifier Meebo. Details are sparse right now, but the purchase would make sense if Google’s after Meebo as an ad platform.

Another possibility? Meebo’s bottom bar would be a logical social and traffic information gatherer to pair with Google+. As for the sticker price, All Things D had it at $US100 million last month. We’ll let you know more as more information is available — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Previous 27 28 2930 31 Next