Lesbian couples who have children through fertility treatment can now register both their names on the birth certificate, following a change in the law. The change, which applies to couples in England and Wales beginning fertility treatment on or after 6 April 2009, confers legal parenthood on a biological mother’s female partner for the first time
The Walt Disney empire is to buy the superheroes stable Marvel Entertainment for $4bn (£2.5bn) in a star-studded Hollywood deal that unites family names such as Mickey Mouse with lucrative characters including Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men. Disney hopes to put Marvel’s 5,000 characters to work on its television channels and in video games, theme parks and movies. The agreed takeover is for a mixture of cash and stock, with Disney shares accounting for roughly 40% of the buyout price
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
Google has already scanned 10 million books in its bid to digitise the contents of the world’s major libraries, but a copyright battle now threatens the project, with Amazon and Microsoft joining authors and publishers opposed to the scheme
News Corporation’s James Murdoch has said that a dominant
BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK. The chairman of the media giant in Europe, which owns the Times and Sun, also blamed the UK government for regulating the media with relish
It’s one of the bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean. Most of the trash has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether it’s sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it. During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected
It’s quite common for regulators around the world to insist that no company can call itself a bank
unless it’s an official, regulated bank. In fact, that’s often why you see companies (including holding companies of real banks) that use the word banc
instead of bank
. It’s to get around such regulations. However, it looks like regulators in Sweden have gone a step further, telling the Swedish domain registrar, that it can’t even allow any domain name to be sold with bank
in it, unless it’s sold to an official bank
The ISP that supplied much of The Pirate Bay’s bandwidth before cutting them off yesterday, is reporting that it has been sabotaged. Calling in experts and the police, Black Internet says the attack on them is intentional and has caused substantial damage
In a record reminiscent of a 100-meter dash, scientists at the University of South Wales in Sydney, Australia, have created the world’s most efficient solar power cell ever… by a hair. Professor Martin Green and his colleague Anita Ho-Baillie led a team of US researchers to victory with a multi-cell combination that is able to convert 43 percent of sunlight into electricity. The previous record was 42.7 percent
Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn’t exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago. The planet is known as a hot Jupiter
, a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its year
) in less than an Earth day. Of the more than 370 exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than our sun — discovered so far, this is just the second with such a close orbit
Lord Mandelson’s plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download copyrighted music and films were attacked by privacy campaigners, internet service providers and Labour MPs yesterday as unworkable, unnecessary and potentially illegal. TalkTalk, Britain’s largest consumer broadband provider, warned that innocent web users could be disconnected after having their connections hijacked by pirates looking to circumvent the new rules. It added that the move will likely breach fundamental human rights
Tartu, Estonia is the hometown of an Internet company that, from the outside, looks just like any other legitimate ISP. On its web site, the company lists services such as hosting and advertising. According to publicly available information, it posted more than US$5 million in revenue and had more than 50 employees in 2007. In reality, however, this company has been serving as the operational headquarters of a large cybercrime network since 2005. From its office in Tartu, employees administer sites that host codec Trojans and command and control servers that steer armies of infected computers. The criminal outfit uses a lot of daughter companies that operate in Europe and in the United States. These daughter companies’ names quickly get the heat when they become involved in Internet abuse and other cybercrimes. They disappear after getting bad publicity or when upstream providers terminate their contracts
Amazon Web Services has launched its virtual private cloud, which it said provides a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud
A federal appeals court has reversed a judge’s decision that granted the copyright of the Unix computer operating system to Novell, and has ordered a trial to determine ownership
YouTube has offered a way for creators of videos which go viral to cash in on their success. The Google-owned video-sharing site said in a blog post that it was expanding its YouTube Partnership Program to the creators of successful one-off
videos. The program had previously focused on what YouTube described as prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is on the cusp of launching a major revamp to how people contribute to some pages. The site will require that revisions to pages about living people and some organisations be approved by an editor. This would be a radical shift for the site, which ostensibly allows anyone to make changes to almost any entry
The organisation behind Wikipedia is getting a $2 million commitment from a philanthropic investment group started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar Network’s grant over two years will support Wikimedia Foundation’s key goals of bringing free educational content to people around the world and of supporting more people to help create that content
Australia enjoys high-speed wireless broadband from four carriers, each offering a choice between contract and pre-paid services. Now there’s one more option on the mobile broadband menu — short-term hire from as little as three days to a month. A new service launched by Laptop Connect allows businesses to rent a USB modem for $11 a day for a three-day minimum. Rates fall for longer hires, down to $5 a day for a full month
MYOB subsidiary SmartyHost has been castigated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for breaching the Spam Act. An investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found SmartyHost, was sending commercial emails to people who had asked to be removed from the sender list
RSS – Posts