Paypal Demands Destruction of Violin

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5 January 2012
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In Business, Technology
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I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.

This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless.

Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as counterfeit even though there is no such thing in the violin world.

The buyer was proud of himself, so he sent me a photo of the destroyed violin.

I am now out a violin that made it through WWII as well as $2500. This is of course, upsetting. But my main goal in writing to you is to prevent PayPal from ordering the destruction of violins and other antiquities that they know nothing about. It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn’t have the violin returned to me.

I spoke on the phone to numerous reps from PayPal who 100% defended their action and gave me the party line — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Belarus Bans Browsing of All Foreign Websites

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4 January 2012
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In Politics, Rights, Technology
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As citizens of the United States worry over the implications of the pending SOPA legislation, a small land-locked country on the fringes of Europe is showing how bad things can really get. Labelled by the United States as an outpost of tyranny, Belarus is certainly living up to its reputation. This Friday, browsing foreign websites will become an offence punishable by fines, with service providers taking responsibility for the actions of their user — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Orangutans go ape for iPads

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2 January 2012
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In Technology, Wildlife
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For the last six months, three orangutans at the Milwaukee County Zoo have had the pleasure of playing with a donated iPad a couple times a week, and guess what? They love it.

We show them the iPad, and read them stories or let them have different apps,” said Jan Rafert, curator of primates and small mammals at the zoo. “We don’t let them hold them, but they can do some of the paint apps by sticking their fingers through the mesh.”

The orangutan iPad program, known as Apps for Apes, was started after the gorilla keeper at the zoo mentioned on her Facebook page that she’d like to get some iPads for her gorillas to play with, Rafert explained. It was kind of a joke, but a zoo volunteer took it seriously and donated a used iPad to the zoo. It turned out that the gorillas didn’t really enjoy the iPad – “they are more stoic,” said Rafert – but the orangutans went wild — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Tech solution developed for disabled parking abuse

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2 January 2012
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In Rights, Technology
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What does it mean when a parking spot is marked with a wheelchair symbol? If you answered, It means I can park there as long as I’m going to be quick, you’re wrong — yet you’re also far from alone. Every day in parking lots all over the world, non-disabled drivers regularly use spaces clearly reserved for the handicapped. They often get away with it, too, unless an attendant happens to check while their vehicle is parked there. Thanks to technology recently developed by New Zealand’s Car Parking Technologies (CPT), however, those attendants could soon be notified the instant that a handicapped spot is improperly occupied — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use

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2 January 2012
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Scottish teachers are being warned that their use of social networking sites could put their careers at risk.

The Scottish Secondary Teachers Association believes teachers can reveal too much personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The union also fears they could become overly familiar with pupils.

The General Teaching Council of Scotland is preparing new guidelines on social networking sites.

This follows a number of recent cases brought before the GTC’s regulatory body — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Ocean Marketing makes fatal gaming PR mistake

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28 December 2011
2 min read
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Even as the holiday season comes to a close, it seems that there are no limitations on what sort of epic douchebaggery still lurks on the internet. Originally reported by Destructoid along with a posting on Reddit, today may live to be one of the worst days in PR history as Penny Arcade published an email thread that transpired between one of its readers and third party peripheral marketer, Ocean Marketing. Dave, the customer in question, preordered a pair of PlayStation 3 controllers that were supposed to be available prior to the Christmas weekend. Following over a month of zero communication, he emailed Paul Christoforo in regards to his order.

With a reply from Christoforo of simply, December 17, there’s little to argue in the ambiguity therein, let alone the simple lack of customer service — especially when said buyer is still expected to pay full price for the preordered merchandise. Upon following up, Dave was told that his controllers had yet to ship from China and that any hope of delivery prior to Christmas could no longer be guaranteed. Setting a new precedence for lacking professionalism, Christoforo told his customer to put on [his] big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else. Christoforo goes on to sound even more contrived by stating, feel free to cancel we need the units were back ordered 11,000 units so your 2 will be gone fast. Maybe I’ll put them on eBay for 150.00 myself — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Is GoDaddy Blocking Domain Transfers After the SOPA Boycott?

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27 December 2011
1 min read
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In Business, Politics, Technology
688 views

A few days ago thousands of customers turned against domain registrar GoDaddy for their support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Transfer requests for thousands of domains were started, and even big players such as Wikipedia threatened to move.

In a response, GoDaddy was quick to drop their support for SOPA (but not really), and the company kindly asked customers to come back.

Many customers were nevertheless determined to move to other registrar, but that presented a new problem.

It turns out that GoDaddy is delaying a significant number of the domain transfers for reasons unknown. GoDaddy competitor Namecheap suggests that the transfers are blocked on purpose — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Superior Alternatives to Crappy OS X Software

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24 December 2011
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In Design, Technology
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Macs come bundled with a lot of software out of the box and while most of it is at least passable, much of it lacks the feature set power users need. That’s the catch with a lot of default Mac software, it’s easy, but the second you want to do something more with it, you’re out of luck. We’ve compiled a list of our favourite replacements for the usually workable, but generally boring OS X default software — via Lifehacker

WhatFont Tool

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24 December 2011
48 second read
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In Design, Technology
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What is the easiest way to find out the fonts used in a webpage? Firebug or Webkit Inspector? No, that’s too complicated. It should be just a click away.

Hence I wrote WhatFont, with which you can easily get font information about the text you are hovering on.

To embrace the new web font era, WhatFont also detects services used for serving the font. Now supports Typekit and Google Font API

Exposed: ‘new’ Dick Smith hard drive full of pirated movies

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22 December 2011
1 min read
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Sydneysider Darryl Mason bought a new portable hard drive from Dick Smith only to find that it was filled with pirated movies and potentially contained malware that has ruined crucial footage for his documentary.

The retailer has since admitted that it sells second hand hard drives as new, but in this instance forgot to wipe it clean.

The Minister for Fair Trading, Anthony Roberts, said he was very concerned with Dick Smith’s actions and that the retailer may be liable for compensation under Australian consumer laws — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Liquid metal capsules used to make self-healing electronics

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22 December 2011
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In Technology
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A crack team of engineers at the University of Illinois has developed an electronic circuit that autonomously self-heals when its metal wires are broken. This self-healing system restores conductivity within “mere microseconds,” which is apparently fast enough that operation can continue without interruption.

The self-healing mechanism is delightfully simple: The engineers place a bunch of 10-micron (0.01mm) microcapsules along the length of a circuit. The microcapsules are full of liquid metal, a gallium-indium alloy, and if the circuit underneath cracks, so do the microcapsules (90% of the time, anyway — the tech isn’t perfect yet!). The liquid metal oozes into the circuit board, restoring up to 99% conductivity, and everything continues as normal. This even works with multi-layer printed circuit boards (PCBs), such the motherboard in your computer, too. There’s no word on whether this same technology could one day be used by Terminators to self-heal shotgun blasts to the face, but it certainly sounds quite similar — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Websites allow Kenyans to report bribes and battle corruption

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22 December 2011
1 min read
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In Politics, Rights, Technology
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Ask a Nairobi resident to name the most frustrating part of living in Nairobi, and they’re likely to answer: bribing a cop.

Well, now Kenyans have a way to combat corruption, by text messaging, emailing, or even tweeting an incident to a website called hatari.co.ke. Hatari (which means danger in Swahili), is just one of several private anti-corruption initiatives aimed at fighting corrupt practices that cost Kenya as much as $1 billion a year.

Kenya, a country where scandals make daily headlines and where public opinion polls show a declining trust in political leadership, has made small strides this year in bringing down corruption in government institutions. A Bribery Index published by Transparency International in October 2011 found that the prevalence of bribery had actually dropped slightly, making Kenya the fourth rather than the third most-corrupt nation in East Africa. Even so, Kenya’s police remained the most corrupt institution, the survey found — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Nuance to acquire mobile speech software provider Vlingo

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21 December 2011
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Consolidating the rapidly growing market for voice recognition systems and services, Nuance Communications is in the process of acquiring Vlingo, a provider of mobile voice recognition and analysis software, the two companies announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nuance plans to uses Vlingo’s resources — personnel, research and technologies — to aid in the development of its own next generation natural language interfaces, according to Nuance — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google and Bing fight off ‘content farms’ in effort to improve online searches

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21 December 2011
1 min read
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Online search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knockoffs that repeat information produced elsewhere, but even they get overwhelmed. As recently as March, for example, the first 10 results from a Google search for how to organise your desktop contained nine links to pages churned out by content farms — Web sites that publish reams of articles that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars.

That prompted New Scientist magazine to ask computer scientist Richard McCreadie at the University of Glasgow to look into the issue. The results show that Google and Microsoft’s Bing seem to be regaining the upper hand in the fight against content farms.

Most of the credit has been given to Google, which announced in February that it had updated its search algorithm in a bid to prioritise sites that publish original and well-researched material. It won’t provide details, but many site owners noticed that the update penalized sites that publish multiple, near identical articles, a favourite tactic of content farms — via redwolf.newsvine.com

RockPod 2

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20 December 2011
30 second read
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In Technology
795 views

Looking for an easy-to-use audio/video converter? Check out PC User RockPod 2. For the first time ever, our popular media converter is yours to download for free — for a limited time. RockPod 2 isn’t the latest version, but it still offers plenty of must-have features

Scientists break world record for data transfer speeds

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15 December 2011
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611 views

Researchers are claiming a new world record for data transfers over long distances.

Data was moved back and forth at a combined rate of 186Gbps (gigabits per second), fast enough to transfer two million gigabytes of data or 100,000 full Blu-ray discs in one day.

It could pave the way for networks with standard speeds of 100Gbps.

That would speed up the sharing of scientific research, such as that at the Large Hadron Collider — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Judge Orders Man To Delete Revenge Blog

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14 December 2011
1 min read
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In Rights, Technology
656 views

A Minnesota man violated a restraining order obtained by his ex-girlfriend by blogging about her mental health and sexual issues, and sending links to posts on the blog to her family, friends, and co-workers. The judge then extended the restraining order by 50 years, ordered the guy never to write about his ex on the Internet and ordered him to delete the blog he created. Even though there was no evidence that what he had written was false, the judge said the ex-girlfriend’s right to be free from harassment outweighed the guy’s right to free speech. I believe it’s rare, if not unprecedented, for a court to order an entire blog deleted, says technology law professor Eric Goldman — via Slashdot

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