Three years after rumours of a Google phone first surfaced, the search giant has taken the wraps off its own branded and designed mobile phone, the Nexus One. Initially available on T-Mobile’s network or unlocked, Google said the phone will also become available from Verizon as well as Vodafone in Europe. Customers can buy the phone now on a new Google Web page, Google.com/phone. It’s US$530 unlocked. The phone costs $179 with a T-Mobile contract. The Vodafone and Verizon options are expected to be available sometime in the first quarter. Buyers must use Google Checkout to buy the phone and must have a Google log-in
A US student who was fined $675,000 for illegally downloading music has asked a judge to reduce the damages or offer him a retrial. Joel Tenenbaum said that the costs awarded were grossly excessive
. The court case focused on 30 tracks that Mr Tenenbaum admitted downloading. He was fined $22,500 per song
A web site that was taken offline by the domain name regulator .au Domain Administration, is now back online and continuing its protest against the Government’s internet filtering policy. The site stephenconroy.com.au, which takes aim at the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy for his policy on what it deems as internet censorship, was taken down by auDA at the end of last month less than two days after it went live
During the first decade of the 21st century we went through over 1.3 billion IPv4 addresses. eighty-one percent of the usable IPv4 addresses are now gone, leaving us with just a couple years’ supply left
Obama administration officials say this new executive order doesn’t allow INTERPOL to do any more than they were allowed to do once Reagan recognised them as a public international organisation. Though clearly the Executive Order does prohibit US law enforcement from searching and seizing INTERPOL records, officials say, those provisions can be waived by the president if need be
The United States has lifted a 22-year ban preventing anyone with HIV or AIDS from entering the country. President Barack Obama says the measure was not compatible with American ambitions of becoming a world leader in the fight against the disease
Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner. Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked. The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs
Belarus’ authoritarian leader is promising to toughen regulation of the internet and its users in an apparent effort to exert control over the last fully free medium in the former Soviet state. “We will identify any person who disseminates lies and dirt, and will make them answer strictly to the law,” said President Alexander Lukashenko
The rules of political speech on the Internet are usually pretty simple. In America, almost anything goes. In places like China, the censors call the shots. But in India — a boisterous democracy that’s riven by religious and ethnic tension — the game is far trickier, as Google is discovering. In September, lawyers at Google’s New Delhi office got a tip from an internet user about alarming content on the company’s social networking site, Orkut. People had posted offensive comments about the chief minister of India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who had died just a few days earlier in a helicopter crash. Google’s response: It removed not just the material but also the entire user group that contained it, a person familiar with the matter says. The Internet giant feared the comments could heighten tensions at a time when thousands of mourners of the popular politician were emptying into the street
New cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced giving police and Security Intelligence Service officers the power to monitor all aspects of someone’s online life. The measures are the largest expansion of police and SIS surveillance capabilities for decades, and mean that all mobile calls and texts, email, internet surfing and online shopping, chatting and social networking can be monitored anywhere in New Zealand. In preparation, technicians have been installing specialist spying devices and software inside all telephone exchanges, internet companies and even fibre-optic data networks between cities and towns, providing police and spy agencies with the capability to monitor almost all communications. Police and SIS must still obtain an interception warrant naming a person or place they want to monitor but, compared to the phone taps of the past, a single warrant now covers phone, email and all internet activity. It can even monitor a person’s location by detecting their mobile phone; all of this occurring almost instantaneously
The National Airlines Council of Canada, which represents the four largest Canadian carriers, is demanding that the Canadian government act quickly to find a solution to a dilemma created by the US air security plan. The airlines say unless the problem is fixed they will be be breaking the law one way or another if they continue to operate. The US secure flight program would collect the names, genders and birth dates of the estimated five million Canadians who fly through US airspace every year. This directly contravenes Canadian privacy laws
In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled the legal action and apologised for the strong-arm tactics agents used
Swedish hunters have begun culling wolves for the first time in 45 years after parliament ruled that numbers needed to be reduced again. More than half the quota of 27 may have died on the first day alone with nine shot dead in Dalarna and up to nine killed in Varmland, Swedish radio says. Hunters have until 15 February to complete the cull, which will leave Sweden with an estimated 210 wolves. Some 10,000 hunters were reported to be planning to take part in the hunt
The first effects of France’s new law against internet piracy will begin to be felt as the new year begins. The law was passed after a long struggle in parliament, and in the teeth of bitter opposition from groups opposed to internet restrictions. Illegal downloaders will be sent a warning e-mail, then a letter if they continue, and finally must appear before a judge if they offend again. The judge can impose a fine, or suspend their access to the internet
Researchers believe they have identified the source of fatal tumours that threaten to wipe out the wild population of Tasmanian devils
The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity
A Canadian company behind a search engine called Groovle.com has won a case filed against it by online search giant Google. Google said the domain name used by the small business, 207 Media, was too similar to its own, but mediators the National Arbitration Forum disagreed. In the complaint, Google asked for the judges to rule that 207 Media transfer the domain name over to it. But three judges appointed by the forum refused the request. They said the name was not similar enough to confuse people and the word groovle
was more closely linked to groovy
or groove
rather than Google
UK firm Spinvox, which converts voicemails into texts, has been bought by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5m (£64m). The deal is worth $66m in cash and $36.5m in stock, about a third shy of the earlier rumoured $146m price tag
The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen. Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned. Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue
Means plan would unfairly require majority of population whom don’t file-share to pay for the failings of the entertainment industry. A new report indicates that an evolved
plan by UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, head of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and whom ultimately is tasked with implementing the recommendations for dealing with illegal file-sharing as outlined in the Digital Britain report, to disconnect accused copyright infringers from the Internet will cost UK consumers more than £500 million ($799.5 million USD) annually. That means an individual three-strikes
tax per broadband connection of approximately £25 ($40 USD) a year
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