PayPal, the online payment company owned by eBay, appears to be gearing up to let customers send money or order and pay for products by text message from a mobile phone
Thirty-five years ago, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent — via digg
A federal judged issued a ruling Friday in the spat between Google and the Department of Justice over a government request that the company turn over search-query data. US District Court Judge James Ware’s decision mandates that Google turn over 50,000 random URLs from its database. Google, which had cited user privacy as its chief argument for its refusal to comply with the subpoena, has praised the ruling because of its requirement to release only a limited set of data
As part of its ongoing enforcement actions against phishers, Microsoft has created a global initiative designed to thwart large-volume scam artists, no matter where they are in the world. A year ago, Microsoft filed 117 lawsuits against phishers and found that many of the perpetrators were overseas. That finding led the company to launch the Global Phishing Enforcement Initiative and to file 53 new suits against alleged phishers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Like its US antiphishing activity, Microsoft’s new campaign will bring together law-enforcement agencies in other countries to pursue forensic evidence, network shutdowns, and eventual prosecution
Marvel Comics is continuing in its bid to steal the word super-hero
from the public domain and put it in a lock-box to which it will control the key. Marvel and DC comics jointly filed a trademark on the word super-hero
. They use this mark to legally harass indie comic companies that make competing comic books
The UK government has threatened to cancel an order for US-built Joint Strike Fighter jets unless America turns over the source-code for the jets’ firmware. Britain is worried that the jets could contain back-doors that let the US remotely disable them. Australia has made the same demands — via Boing Boing
Playing DRM-crippled music will shorten the battery life of your music-player. Listening to DRMed iTunes songs on an iPod shortens the battery life by eight percent; playing back WMA-crippled files on a device from Creative Labs can knock 25 percent off the life of your device’s battery. The extra battery-drain is attributed to the computation necessary to decrypt the files and verify their licences — via Boing Boing
The Canadian Record Industry Association’s own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders’ computers, that P2P users frequently try music on P2P services before they buy, that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic, and that reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services — via Boing Boing
An Israeli company says it has developed a system for managing traffic by tracking drivers’ mobile phone signals. Based on the idea that most people keep their mobile phones on while driving, Israel-based Cellint created the TrafficSense system to detect the cellular signals and use them to create a real-time moving picture of what’s happening on the roads — via Warren Ellis
The teddy bear’s fluffy, cream coloured fur looks like that of a typical stuffed animal. But this teddy’s fur has something more in common with health foods than children’s toys — it comes from soy. Tofu Bear is part of Biltmore World Trade’s line of SoySilk Pals, stuffed animals whose fur is made out of soy fibre that is extruded from soybean cake, or tofu
Jakub Fik, 33, cut off his own penis during a Northwest Side rampage. When confronted by police, Fik hurled several knives and his severed organ at the officers. Officers stunned him with a Taser and took him into custody — via The Cult of Father Darwin
The Australian Government has shut down a parody web site that mocked Australian Prime Minister John Howard. The web site featured a satirical speech that apologised
for the Iraq war. The site was down for two days before a phone call from Melbourne IT advised the owner that it had been shut down on the advice from the Australian Government
. A mirrored PDF copy of the apology speech
is available
The controversial American fundamentalist missionary organisation the New Tribes Mission is making weekly visits to a group of isolated Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indians first contacted in 2004 — via Warren Ellis
Booster jabs could soon become obsolete following the discovery by a British scientist of the world’s first effective way to control the speed at which vaccines are released in the body
In a legal win for Google, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results. Thankfully, we can all still read Usenet articles on Google as well as other archive services
US and Japanese researchers have announced results of a study showing that capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot, can cause prostate cancer cells to kill themselves
The Pentagon’s defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions
Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration’s eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in US law
Internet copyright pirates in France will face prison and large fines after French MPs pushed through laws to curb illegal music and film downloads
Cheap radio chips that are replacing barcodes are a threat to privacy and susceptible to computer viruses. Researchers at the Amsterdam’s Free University created a radio frequency identity (RFID) chip infected with a virus to prove that RFID systems are vulnerable despite the extremely low memory capacity on the cheap chips
RSS – Posts