The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843. The highly stylised rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland
Anyone who plays FarmVille knows it is critical to harvest your crops on time. But maybe it’s not as important as administrating the second-largest city in Bulgaria. Dimitar Kerin was voted off a committee assignment by the Plovdiv City Council for his inability to stop tending his virtual crops on the Facebook game during meetings
Yahoo e-mail accounts belonging to foreign journalists appeared to have been hacked and Google’s Chinese search engine was intermittently blocked Tuesday, the latest troubles in China’s heavily censored internet market. The Yahoo accounts of at least three journalists and an analyst became inaccessible over the last few weeks. They were greeted with messages saying, We’ve detected an issue with your account
and were told to contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it was not clear if the other instances were related
Google said it appeared to have inadvertently sparked the blockage of search queries from across China this evening, reassuring users who feared authorities were shutting off all access in response to the internet giant’s decision to close its mainland service. Users had reported that all standard searches on Google’s Hong Kong-based service were failing. But it seems that the introduction of a new search parameter, which by chance included a sensitive three-letter phrase, had triggered an existing keyword filter
The US government says it has concerns about Australia’s plan to introduce a mandatory internet filter. The Federal Government wants to force internet service providers to block offensive material, including child pornography and instructions for criminal activity, from overseas web sites. The Government is facing growing pressure from anti-censorship and internet groups to drop the idea. Now the US government has added its voice to those expressing concern
A China-based root DNS server associated with networking problems in Chile and the US has been disconnected from the Internet. The action by the server’s operator, Netnod, appears to have resolved a problem that was causing some Internet sites to be inadvertently censored by a system set up in the People’s Republic of China
Colombo-BT, once the largest torrent site in Italy, was shut down in the summer of 2008. At the time no arrests were made, but following an extensive investigation Italian authorities have announced today that two admins and four associates have been reported for breaking copyright law
The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their web sites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced. Users will pay ¬£1 for a day’s access and ¬£2 for a week’s subscription. The move opens a new front in the battle for readership and will be watched closely by the industry. NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition
. Both titles will launch new web sites in early May, separating their digital presence for the first time and replacing the existing, combined site, Times Online
The new UK Space Agency (UKSA) will take over responsibility for government policy and the key budgets for space, according to ministers. The agency, which comes into being on 1 April, will also represent Britain on space matters in all negotiations with international partners. The UKSA’s name, logo and remit were announced at a conference in London
Four countries and two territories have won preliminary approval to have Internet addresses written entirely in their native scripts as early as this summer. However, proposals for Internet addresses that would say China
and Taiwan
in Chinese will require a few more months of technical review. The delay is not over political disputes, but rather because the Chinese language can be written in two ways — using simplified and traditional scripts. Rules are being developed to make sure that addresses in either script go to the same Web sites
Australia’s biggest technology companies, communications academics and many lobby groups have delivered a withering critique of the government’s plans to censor the internet. The government today published most of the 174 submissions it received relating to improving the transparency and accountability measures of its internet filtering policy. Legislation to force ISPs to implement the policy is expected to be introduced within weeks. The filters will block a blacklist of refused classification
web sites for all Australians on a mandatory basis
The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of Google on Tuesday in a case concerning the use of trademarks in online advertising. French luxury goods maker LVMH took Google to court for using its brand names as keywords to trigger ads. The Court concluded that Google has not infringed trade mark law by allowing advertisers to purchase keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trade marks
. However, advertisers themselves cannot, by using such keywords, arrange for Google to display ads which do not allow Internet users easily to establish from which undertaking the goods or services covered by the ad in question originate,
the court added. The case sets important precedents for e-commerce, by appearing to uphold the right of Internet service providers to protection from liability for the content they carry on their networks
The war of words between China and the internet giant Google has escalated, with the company announcing it is no longer censoring its Chinese language search engine. There had been speculation that Google might pull out of China altogether, but instead the internet company has opted to try and sidestep Chinese authorities by redirecting online traffic off the mainland
Just a month after the proposals were first outlined in full, the Swiss National Council has now officially passed a law that will ultimately lead to the complete ban of any violent video games in the country
In a bid to cut down on fraud and inappropriate content, the organisation responsible for administering Russia’s .ru top-level domain names is tightening its procedures. Starting 1 April, anyone who registers a .ru domain will need to provide a copy of their passport or, for businesses, legal registration papers. Right now, domains can be set up with no verification — a practice that has allowed scammers to quickly set up .ru domains under bogus names
Spain is becoming the last bastion of common sense when it comes to peer-to-peer and file sharing, at least until the big media companies get their own way and change the law in the country altogether. Torrentfreak, the ever-vigilant blog focusing on BitTorrent and file-sharing issues, points to a recent lawsuit in Spain that ended quite favourably for both P2P users and link sites and dedicated search engines, and that found both use-cases to be perfectly legal in the country
US regulators have unveiled the nation’s first plan to give every American super-fast broadband by 2020. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has submitted the plan to Congress, said broadband was the greatest infrastructure challenge
. It estimates that one-third of Americans, about 100 million people, are without broadband at home. The FCC’s goal is to provide speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), compared to an average 4Mbps now
In this two-year-old classified Army Counterintelligence Centre report [PDF], American spooks set out to destroy Wikileaks by intimidating its sources. They cite as justification for this the fact that Wikileaks has outed American embarrassments and crimes including US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay
Pipe Networks’ shareholders have voted to approve a $373 million deal that will see the company acquired by TPG Telecom. The acquisition will give TPG an extensive dark fibre network across major Australian business centres, such as Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and will also give it Pipe Networks’ newly lit-up Sydney to Guam international cable
Internet service provider Internode has signed up for 2.5 gigabits per second more international capacity from Southern Cross Cable’s Network and says it has plans to buy another 12.5 gigabits. Southern Cross had been providing 5Gbps to the ISP, with the increase announced today to take the purchased capacity to 7.5Gbps. Internode hopes to ramp up capacity to 10Gbps by the middle of this year and double it again next year
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