Former President Bill Clinton has announced the creation of a $1 Billion investment fund devoted to renewable energy. This will be an investment fund as opposed to charity, and Clinton has said that; The Green Fund would focus on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, creating jobs, lessening pollution and helping to reduce global warming, all while making a profit
. Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn will be managing the fund
A copyright dispute between Google and a group of publishers in Belgium escalated Friday as the Internet search engine defied a court order to publish an earlier decision in the case on its Belgian web sites
BAE Systems, one of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers, is designing a new generation of green
munitions, including lead-free
bullets and rockets with reduced toxins. It also wants to cut the dangerous compounds in its jets, fighting vehicles and artillery, which it warns can harm the environment and pose a risk to people
A US Department of Justice official has joined the debate surrounding Apple’s proprietary digital music technology by criticising European antitrust activities, but groups attacking Apple are defending their actions — via Macworld
Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne on new non-lethal weapons such as the Active Denial System, which fires ultra-painful bursts of microwave energy: If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation. (Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press
— via Boing Boing
In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers — 100 million in all — one swirl bulb. In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the United States, and energy consciousness, too. It also aims to change its own reputation, to use swirls to make clear how seriously Wal-Mart takes its new positioning as an environmental activist — via meta-roj blog
Jimmy Wales has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive Wikipedia entries. He challenges other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing. Wikipedia has been banned from China since last October. Whereas Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo went into the country accepting some restrictions on their online content, Wales believes it must be all or nothing for Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information
— via Slashdot
Servers participating in the TOR anonymising network have been seized by public prosecutors during a child porn crackdown in Germany. TOR provides anonymity for clients and servers by redirecting traffic through a network of volunteer-operated relays; the German prosecutors may have been trying to locate an anonymous server by examining the logs of the captured relays — via Slashdot
France issued an implicit criticism of US foreign policy on Thursday, rejecting talk of a war on terror
Australian motor sport legend Peter Brock has died after his car hit a tree during a rally in Western Australia
Google, which refused in the past year to hand over user search data to US authorities fighting children’s access to pornography, said yesterday that it was complying with a Brazilian court’s orders to turn over data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia. The difference, it says, is scale and purpose. The Justice Department wanted Google’s entire search index, billions of pages and two months’ worth of queries, for a broad civil case. Brazil, by contrast, is looking for information in specific cases involving Google’s social networking site, Orkut
A century after they were wiped out by hunters and a burgeoning population, wolves have returned to parts of eastern Germany as factories close down, businesses fail and people move out
Japanese authorites reported yesterday the first case in Japan of an Apple laptop catching fire and ordered the US company to investigate the trouble involving the faulty Sony batteries and report back within a week
Two whistleblowers — one in Italy, one in Greece — uncovered a secret bugging system installed in mobile phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration — via digg
The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court recently ruled that police may seize cash from motorists, citing that possession of a large sum of cash is ‘strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity
. Gonzales was never charged with any crime, but his cash was stolen by police anyway — via digg
The FDA has recently claimed that there are no medical benefits to marijuana use. Yet at the same time, the FDA has approved synthetic versions of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active ingredient in marijuana, for use in high-priced prescription drugs. Surprisingly, the FDA also lists marijuana to be as dangerous as heroin and PCP — via digg
The nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD — via Slashdot
Brazil has published a list of more than 5,000 generic terms from the Portuguese language related to Brazilian plant biological diversity to raise awareness and prevent further misuse of trademarks that hinder Brazilian exports. The Brazilian government has been, and is, involved in a number of trademark disputes with companies that, for example, take a name of a fruit in Brazilian Portuguese and trademark it to get exclusive rights to commercialise it under that name in a certain country or region. This hinders Brazilian exports, especially when it happens in larger markets, Cristiano Franco Berbert of the Permanent Mission of Brazil in Geneva told Intellectual Property Watch
Last week the BBC demanded video host YouTube remove many copies of its Top Gear
TV service from its web site. That was because, this week, the BBC made Top Gear
available in its entirety on-line at BBC2 — via digg
Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which last week gave up on Germany, is reportedly looking at trying its luck in Australia and is sizing up our two biggest supermarket operators, Coles Myer and Woolworths
RSS – Posts