The United States’ global trade representative has strongly criticised a perceived preference on the part of large Australian organisations for hosting their data on-shore in Australia, claiming it created a significant trade barrier for US technology firms. A number of US companies had expressed concerns that various departments in the Australian Government, namely the Department of Defence had been sending negative messages about cloud providers based outside the country, implying that hosting data overseas, including in the United States, by definition entails greater risk and unduly exposes consumers to their data being scrutinised by foreign governments
. Recently, Acting Victorian Privacy Commissioner Anthony Bendall highlighted some of the privacy concerns with cloud computing, particularly in its use by the local government. He said the main problems were the lack of control over stored data and privacy, in overseas cloud service providers — via Slashdot
Recent ebanking heists — such as a $121,000 online robbery at a New York fuel supplier last month — suggest that cyber thieves increasingly are cashing out by sending victim funds to prepaid debit card accounts. The shift appears to be an effort to route around a major bottleneck for these crimes: Their dependency on unreliable money mules.
Mules traditionally have played a key role in helping thieves cash out hacked accounts and launder money. They are recruited through email-based work-at-home job scams, and are told they will be helping companies process payments. In a typical scheme, the mule provides her banking details to the recruiter, who eventually sends a fraudulent transfer and tells the mule to withdraw the funds in cash, keep a small percentage, and wire the remainder to co-conspirators abroad — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In May 2012 Facebook is set to launch one of the top-25 IPOs in history. By May 2013 it may well be scrambling to keep investors happy, given the apparent flight of teenagers to Twitter, Pinterest, and flavour-of-the-month social media. It’s not that Facebook has lost its mojo. It’s that it may be becoming cool with the wrong sort of people: parents — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Maryland on Monday became the first state in the nation to ban employers from requesting access to the social media accounts of employees and job applicants.
The state’s General Assembly passed legislation that would prohibit employers from requiring or seeking user names, passwords or any other means of accessing personal Internet sites such as Facebook as a condition of employment — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Microsoft is buying the majority of AOL’s patents in a deal worth $1.06bn (£668m) statement said the agreement covers the intellectual property rights to more than 800 innovations.
Microsoft will also be granted licensing rights to about 300 patents that AOL is keeping.
It is the latest in a series of such deals as technology firms act to bolster their chances in related lawsuits — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Facebook, just weeks away from what’s expected to be the biggest Internet IPO in history, today signed a deal to acquire the hugely popular photo-sharing smartphone app Instagram in a cash and stock deal valued at about $1 billion.
Facebook has made a slew of acquisitions to date, but nothing of this scale. But Instagram is a 2-year-old startup that comes with some 33 million users and a growth rate that’s the envy of Silicon Valley.
Photo-sharing has been a big part of Facebook’s success, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now making a big bet that it will be a critical part of its future — via redwolf.newsvine.com
CSIRO has begun talks with global manufacturers to commercialise microwave technology it says can provide at least 10 Gbps symmetric backhaul services to mobile towers.
The project, funded out of the Science and Industry Endowment Fund and a year in planning, could provide a ten-fold increase in the speed of point-to-point microwave transmission systems within two years, according to project manager, Dr Jay Guo — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sure, we’re all familiar with borders. Is there anything new that could possibly be introduced? Well, I bet there’s quite a few things in this article that you never knew about!
Not only can CSS3 be used to create rounded corners, but plain-ole’ CSS can also be wrestled into displaying custom shapes. That’s right; in the past, before these techniques were discovered, we might have resorted to using absolutely positioned background images to display circles or arrows. Thankfully – as we gleefully take one more step away from Photoshop — this is no longer the case — via Nettuts+
Richard Bell, an Australian Film Maker, on a fellowship in New York, produced and directed approximately 18 hours of raw footage for a film with the help of an assistant called Tanya Steele and paid her for these services. Ms Steele, through her American lawyers, sent letters to Mr Bell and his agent claiming that she owned the copyright in the footage and demanding that the trailer be removed from the Internet. She also caused the Vimeo website to remove the trailer. In response, Bell went to the (Australian) courts, which declared him the owner of the copyright in the film, and deemed Steele’s threats unjustifiable
. Bell then asked for damages. These were granted in the latest judgment because Bell had lost the opportunity to sell some of his works, which typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, as a result of Steels’ threats. The Australian judge awarded over $150,000 in damages plus another $23,000 costs against her — via Slashdot
Twitter has filed a lawsuit against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers
in a federal court in San Francisco, opening a new front in its battle against spam, it said Thursday.
With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,
Twitter said in a blog post. It hopes the civil suit will act as a deterrent to spammers. By shutting down tool providers, it expects to prevent other spammers from having the services at their disposal, the company said.
Twitter is the latest among Internet companies to use legal action against alleged spammers. In January, Facebook and the Washington state attorney general announced dual lawsuits against the co-owners of Adscend Media, an ad network that is alleged to develop and encourage others to spread spam, including through so-called clickjacking
. Adscend denied the allegations, and instead said it would investigate for the malpractices the affiliates it hires to drive traffic to advertisers’ sites — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Though unlikely to pass any First Amendment test. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer has a bill on her desk that would in essence make trolling
illegal. The law states It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use any electronic or digital device and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.
This did indeed manage to pass through both houses of legislature and only needs a signature to become law — via Slashdot
Amazon.co.uk, Britain’s biggest online retailer, generated sales of more than £3.3bn in the country last year but paid no corporation tax on any of the profits from that income — and is under investigation by the UK tax authorities.
Regulatory filings by parent company Amazon.com with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) show the tax inquiry into the UK operation, which sells nearly one in four books sold in Britain, focuses on a period when ownership of the British business was transferred to a Luxembourg company.
The SEC filings, highlighted by Bookseller magazine, show that in the past three years, Amazon has generated sales of more than £7.6bn in the UK without attracting any corporation tax on the profits from those sales — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yahoo has said that it is laying off about 2,000 employees as it struggles to regain its web crown.
The firm said those at risk would be told of their job elimination or phased transition
as part of its restructuring, which will save the company $375m every year.
Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require,
CEO Scott Thompson said in a canned statement — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google is responsible for misleading and deceptive ads that use the name of a company to direct traffic to a competitor’s site, an Australian court ruled on Tuesday.The Federal Court of Australia ruled in an appeal that Google is responsible for misleading and deceptive advertising targeted to appear near search results for a competitor’s name. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) brought the case to court over four instances of misleading ads. In an earlier ruling a primary judge had ruled in favour of Google.In the four cases, searches for a company’s name brought up sponsored links containing that name — but the links led to the websites of competitors that had paid for the ads — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Flashback, a Mac Trojan horse that’s been in the public eye since it was uncovered by security firm Intego last year, has a new trick up its sleeve: It can now infect your computer from little more than a visit to a website.
Originally, Flashback masqueraded as an installer for Adobe’s Flash Player—hence the name—but the malware has changed tacks at last once since then, instead pretending to be a Mac software update or a Java updater.
The latest variant, discovered by security researchers at F-Secure and dubbed OSX/Flashback.K, takes advantage of a weakness in Java SE6. That vulnerability, identified as CVE-2012-0507, allows the malware to install itself from a malicious website the user visits, without needing the user to enter an administrator’s password — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has given a formal warning to Melbourne-based company, Ezystays Pty Ltd, following an investigation that found it breached the Spam Act by sending marketing emails without consent of the recipients.
Ezystays is an Australian company that provides travel related products and services. The ACMA received complaints alleging Ezystays had sent marketing messages by email without the recipient’s consent. Ezystays claimed it was able to send the emails because the recipients’ email addresses appeared on a purchased marketing list. The investigation concluded that the fact an email address appeared on a marketing list did not mean that Ezystays had consent from the recipients to send them marketing messages — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Many law enforcement agencies across the US track mobile phones as part of investigations, but only a minority ask for court-ordered warrants, according to a new report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
More than 90 law enforcement agencies said they track mobile phones during investigations, but only six of those agencies reported receiving court-approved warrants after demonstrating that there’s probable cause of a crime, according to an ACLU report based on public information requests filed by the group last year.
Ten agencies, including the Hawaii Department of Public Safety and the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, told the ACLU they do not track mobile phones.
In most cases, police received subpoenas, typically from clerks of court or prosecutors, to track mobile phones, the ACLU said in its report — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Global Payments, the credit and debit card processor that disclosed a breach of its systems late Friday, said in a statement Sunday that the incident involved at least 1.5 million accounts. The news comes hours ahead of a planned conference call with investors, and after Visa said it had pulled its seal of approval for the company.
In a press release issued 9.30pm ET Sunday, Atlanta based Global Payments Inc. said it believes the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported…Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes that this incident is contained.
It remains unclear whether there are additional accounts beyond these 1.5 million that were exposed by the breach; the company’s statement seems to be focusing on the number of cards it can confirm that thieves offloaded from its systems — via redwolf.newsvine.com
John Mavrothalassitis used to communicate using pictures and one or two words. But over the past 18 months, the seven-year-old, who has autism, has started speaking in sentences with the help of an iPad application.
His family said he requested or commented on things they didn’t realise he understood. This year he moved from a school for autistic students to a satellite class in a mainstream school.
His mother, Yvette, said he was infinitely happier. He no longer gets frustrated and upset by not being able to communicate with us and every day his speech is progressing
.
John uses the Proloquo2go app, which turns pictures into sentences then voices them out loud so they can be repeated — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Federal Government has described a multi-million-dollar legal settlement over CSIRO’s Wi-Fi technology as a major boost for the organisation.
The settlement secures more than $220 million for the Australian organisation, which invented the technology in the 1990s.
Wi-Fi technology is used in more than 3 billion electronic devices worldwide, including personal computers, video games and mobile phones.
Today’s settlement is the second successful litigation to be conducted by the CSIRO, which patented the technology and now has licence agreements with 23 telecommunications companies — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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