ALIS, Israel’s answer to the MPAA, has moved aggressively against a site which provides translated subtitles for movies and TV shows. Three individuals who work to provide free subtitles on Qsubs, one of Israel’s most prominent subtitle providers, have been ordered by ALIS to pay $264,000 each in damages and issue a public apology
The company known as China’s eBay will aim for expansion abroad in the long term, but first it wants more foreign products sold on its platform in China. Taobao.com, a booming auction and retail site, does not have a concrete plan for the overseas market but will likely target regions with cultural similarities to China first. Alibaba Group, Taobao’s parent company, wants 1 billion global users shopping on the site in 10 years, group CEO Jack Ma earlier told reporters. The target, more than one-seventh of the world’s population, compares with Taobao’s current average of up to 25 million shoppers each day
Librarians, youth-workers, and local vicars are being encouraged to apply to a fund which will provide free net access in selected UK communities. The fund is run by Freerunner, a company that installs wi-fi hotspots. The firm has said it will install 50 access points in communities across the UK, no matter where they are
The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the appalling
way he was treated for being gay. Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of gross indecency
in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. Gordon Brown’s statement came in response to a petition posted on the Number 10 web site which has received thousands of signatures in recent months
A South African information technology company proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom, the country’s leading internet service provider. Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive. Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg. Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line. SAPA said Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times
Hackers temporarily shut down Kevin Rudd’s web site last night in an apparent protest at federal government proposals for a mandatory internet filtering system. The web site of the Australian Communications and Media Authority was also taken down by the attack at about 7.20pm, but both sites were reported to be back online an hour later. There was also an apparent attempt to shut down the website of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy
Submitted by the Australian branch of Scientology to the local Human Rights Commission is a proposal to eliminate anonymity on the net and the removal of critical web sites (MS Word document). The submission is listed as #1931 at this page at the Australian Human Rights Commission — via Slashdot
Much of the world knows Petra, the ancient ruin in modern-day Jordan that is celebrated in poetry as the rose-red city, ‘half as old as time’
, and which provided the climactic backdrop for
A Bigpond internet outage that affected a suburban neighbourhood in southern Perth for almost a week has raised questions about Telstra’s customer complaint handling systems. Residents from Safety Bay, Rockingham, have complained that their BigPond ADSL broadband connection suffered an outage from 29 August until the night of 3 September. The outage, which one resident said Telstra confirmed to have affected 57 households in the neighbourhood, occurred after a hardware failure in the local exchange. Instead of notifying customers that the outage would last several days while a replacement part was flown in from the east coast, the telco left customers scratching their heads
A Sony Music office in Mexico has been raided after the label refused to hand over the recordings of one of Latin America’s biggest artists, Alejandro Fern?°ndez. Police took over 6,000 CDs that Sony refused to return, even though Fernández’ contract with the label had ended
Australia’s peak internet industry group which represents Telstra and Optus has thrown its weight behind iiNet’s Federal Court bid to fend off a major copyright lawsuit. The Internet Industry Association wrote to all parties involved in the case last week informing them of its intention to lodge an application to be heard by the court under its amicus curiae (friend of the court) provisions
NSW Premier Nathan Rees has announced a data feed for RailCorp information, which he hopes will signal the start of much more government information being made available
Britain’s oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order. The computer, which was designed in 1949, first ran in 1951 and was designed to perform mathematical calculations; it lasted until 1973. When first built the 2.4m x 5m computer was state-of-the-art, although it was superseded by transistor-based systems. The restoration project is expected to take a year
A triumph for Dutch police quickly turned out to be an embarrassing mistake after they destroyed what they thought was a field of cannabis plants. Police on Wednesday announced they had discovered a plantation of some 47,000 illicit cannabis plants with a street value of €4.4m. They had destroyed much of the crop when they were told the plants belonged to a respected school of agriculture. They were a type of hemp, being grown as a fibre for use in textiles
Telstra’s national internet network went down for an hour today, the company says. The outage affected all Telstra home and businesses broadband and mobile internet customers nationwide, between 7.50am and 8.50am, a spokesman said. The company formed a major incident response team to investigate the outage. It’s not yet known what caused it. Another spokesman told Sky News that customers could not access any international sites or Australian sites containing international links
Vodafone’s 3G network coverage in Perth has now been restored after an 11-hour outage caused by routine network maintenance
. Vodafone Hutchison Australia confirmed that its 3G coverage in Perth and surrounding suburbs experienced an outage between midnight and 11.00am today. Customers had earlier today complained that 3G and GSM/GPRS reception was intermittent
At a busy Madison Common Council meeting on Tuesday night, council members voted to make the plastic pink flamingo the official city bird. At Tuesday night’s meeting, the mayor introduced his proposed capital budget and council members discussed funding for the plastic bag recycling program. The new mascot was debated for five minutes, and then the Common Council voted 15-4 to make the plastic pink flamingo the official city bird. The idea was by a 1979 prank on Bascom Hill when the Pail and Shovel Party on campus put out 1,008 of the birds
Optus has been forced to halt the planned shut down of its optushome.com.au email domain after users complained of insufficient warning. Thousands of long-time Optus customers awoke this morning to find empty email inboxes after the telco last night flicked the off switch to its optushome.com.au email domain server. Optus says it warned subscribers of the impending change — a migration to a new domain, optusnet.com.au — in an April newsletter but admitted it failed to issue any follow-up warnings
Vodafone has gone live today with its expanded 3G coverage to rural areas, now reaching 94 per cent of the population. Coverage has been extended out to Kununurra in Western Australia, Port Douglas in Queensland and Devonport in Tasmania, according to the company. Vodafone’s 3G coverage previously reached 80 per cent of the Australian population. The upgrade has also included adapting the 2G network to support EDGE technology
Telstra has expanded its Twitter customer support footprint with the takeover of the @Telstra account. The account will handle customer support for the telco’s mobile, fixed line and Foxtel services. The account was previously in the hands of a cybersquatter
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