Verizon loses customer switching lawsuit Reuters

A U.S. appeals court has upheld a law barring Verizon Communication Inc (VZ.N) from using proprietary information to try to convince customers from switching to rival phone services. On Tuesday, the court rejected Verizon’s request that it be allowed to offer better deals to customers when it learned from rival cable companies that a customer planned to switch carriers.

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UK Girl starves to death after dentist pulls teeth Associated Press

Eight-year-old Sophie Waller cracked a baby tooth eating candy, and set off the chain of events that led to her death. Sophie refused to open her mouth for a dentist so doctors at her local hospital took out the tooth in an operation, one of the doctors told a coroner’s inquest. They removed all seven of her other baby teeth at the same time to avoid the need for future operations, the doctor said. After the surgery Sophie refused to eat or even open her mouth for her parents, the couple told the inquest. But she was sent home anyway, and starved to death three weeks after the operation.

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Lawyer behind Ticketmaster suit says he’s received hundreds of calls CNet

One of the lawyers behind the class-action lawsuit being filed against Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. says hundreds of people have called asking for information. Jay Strosberg of Sutts, Strosberg LLP, one of the two firms behind the Ontario lawsuit, says his office has received more than 500 inquiries already, and the phone won’t stop ringing.

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FAA says hackers broke into agency computers CTV

Hackers broke into the Federal Aviation Administration’s computer system last week, accessing the names and Social Security numbers of 45,000 employees and retirees.

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US lawmaker injects ISP throttle into Obama rescue package The Register

US Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to update President Barack Obama’s $838bn economic stimulus package so that American ISPs can deter child pornography, copyright infringement, and other unlawful activity by way of “reasonable network management.” Clearly, a lobbyist whispering in Feinstein’s ear has taken Comcast’s now famous euphemism even further into the realm of nonsense. According to Public Knowledge, Feinstein’s network management amendment did not find a home in the stimulus bill that landed on the Senate floor. But lobbyists speaking with the Washington DC-based internet watchdog said that California’s senior Senator is now hoping to insert this language via conference committee – a House-Senate pow-wow were bill disputes are resolved. “This is the most backdoor of all the backdoor ways of doing things,” Public Knowledge’s Art Brodsky told The Reg. “Conference committees are notorious for being the most opaque of all legislative processes.”

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Germany deploys cybersoldiers  The Inquirer

Germany has revealed that it has a team of 76 soldiers who are trained to defend the country from cyber attacks and software piracy. Wearing a uniform which is a bit like those worn by the Luftwaffe the secret unit was exposed by the German magazine Der Spiegel. Based in a barracks in the central Tomburg not far from Bonn, the unit is trained to sabotage attacks on Germany’s World Wide Wibble connections.

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Book publishers object to Kindle’s text-to-voice feature CNet

Was your mother a lawbreaker when she read you The Little Prince or Green Eggs and Ham? That’s the question raised Tuesday by the Author’s Guild, an advocacy group for writers. Paul Aitken, the group’s executive director objects to the text-to-speech feature on Amazon’s Kindle 2 digital-book reader. Aitken told The Wall Street Journal: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

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Human hair found in prehistoric hyena poop MSNBC

Hairs that likely belonged to humans living 195,000 to 257,000 years ago in Africa have been identified in fossilized brown hyena dung, according to a new study that describes the first non-bony material in the early human fossil record.

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SanDisk to mass produce 64GB memory cards NewsAU

SANDISK has announced it will begin mass producing flash memory cards with an unprecedented 64GB of storage capacity. The California-based company developed the high-performance card in collaboration with Japanese electronics titan Toshiba using 43-nanometer process technology. In what the firms described as a breakthrough, cells in the “X3″ cards hold two to four times the amount of data as is typical in the industry.

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Texas Judge Forces Topix To Unveil Info About Anonymous Commenters Techdirt

While plenty of other countries don’t provide very much protection to anonymous commenters online, US courts have time and time and time and time again found that it’s important to protect the rights of anonymous speech online. That doesn’t mean that you can say anything you want — but it does mean that a court should be quite clearly convinced that the speech violates the law before allowing any progress in an attempt to unmask an anonymous participant. Unfortunately, it looks like a judge in Texas has ignored all of that. Topix, the online news aggregation and local community site, has apparently been told by a judge to cough up identifying information on 178 formerly anonymous commenters on the site. The details are still a little unclear from the article linked here — but it looks like the commenters were discussing a sexual harassment case that was happening in Texas. In that case, the defendants were found not guilty, but apparently the online comments on Topix got somewhat nasty. So the couple, fresh off being acquitted of sexual assault charges, sued 178 different anonymous commenters — and the judge seemed to have no problem ordering Topix to turn over any identifying information it had on those commenters.

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Japan Pledges To Halt Production Of Weirdo Porn That Makes People Puke The Onion

Acknowledging its embarrassment over worldwide outbreaks of violent, uncontrolled regurgitation, the Japanese government apologized Wednesday to the millions of viewers who have been sickened over the past three decades by the revolting depravity of the nation’s pornographic exports. The response came after leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies signed an accord threatening sanctions against Japan if international distribution of the nauseating materials did not immediately cease. The proposed new measures include a 50 percent reduction in live-eel anal insertions, and a requirement that portrayals of group sex involving seven or more individuals feature at least four human participants. Also under consideration is a zero-tolerance policy covering all “prurient uses” of colostomy bags.

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Certicom accepts RIM takeover bid Globe and Mail

Research In Motion Ltd. has prevailed in its pursuit of Certicom Corp., after California-based VeriSign Inc. announced that it would not match RIM’s $3-a-share offer. Certicom has about 43.7 million shares outstanding, making the deal worth more than $130-million. Carmi Levy, an analyst at AR Communications Inc., says RIM will find itself in the position of gatekeeper when it officially gets its hands on Certicom — a company that holds a “critical” encryption technology for the industry. RIM has used Certicom encryption technology in its BlackBerry devices for years. “Strategically, it’s a great place (for RIM) to be simply because encryption is going to be increasingly important as wireless technology becomes even more mainstream,” Mr. Levy said. “Companies that hold the reins to those technologies will gain competitive advantage over those companies that don’t.”

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Google May Have Crippled Android Because Apple Asked Wired

The T-Mobile HTC G1 — the first phone to run Google’s Android platform — may lack multi-touch capabilities because of an agreement with Apple. VentureBeat’s MG Siegler cites an anonymous Android team member, who said the G1’s touchscreen isn’t multi-touch because Apple asked Google not to implement it. Why would Apple do such a thing? It’s a feature that sets Apple’s handset apart from its competitors, whose touchscreen phones can’t detect simultaneous input like the iPhone’s. It’s the feature that enables that precious “pinching” gesture for zooming, which Apple is attempting to protect with its recently approved, 358-page iPhone patent. Source: http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/09/apple-asked-google-not-to-use-multi-touch-in-android-and-google-complied/

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China preps internet porn snitching awards The Register

China’s crackdown on internet pornography and “lewd” content on the web has claimed another 276 websites, the government said on Tuesday, bringing the total number of websites closed to 1,911. The official stated that many sites have sidestepped government warnings by changing the offending website’s URL or simply the page’s appearance. That’s partially why People’s Republic authorities are developing a scheme to get the public involved in snitching on internet smut peddlers. Under the program, those who report online porn to regulators would be given unspecified “rewards.” China’s nationwide campaign launched earlier this year against websites, video games, mobile text messages, and other forms of digital communication fingered for “violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people.” Of course, covered under the definition of “lewd” is media containing violence, libel, or material that violates the government’s standards of public decency. That has many worried the porn side of the purge is a distraction from a cracking down on online political dissent.

February , 2009

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 4:17 pm and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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