Father killed partner who became hooked on Sony PlayStation The Telegraph

A father stabbed his partner to death after she threw him out of their bedroom so she could spend the nights playing on a Sony PlayStation console. Malcolm Palmer, 62, turned on the mother of his three children after she became hooked on the violent Grand Theft Auto driving game. He was forced to sleep on a sofa in their conservatory as Carol Cannom, 46, stayed up all night with the 37-inch plasma television screen she brought into their room for her all-night gaming sessions. The couple from Long Sutton, Lincolnshire. had been together for 30 years but their relationship soured after they bought the console for their 10-year-old son James. He would play on the computer until midnight, after which Ms Cannom would take over, regularly staying up until five or six in the morning, Lincoln Crown Court was told. “Carol quickly became hooked. He was very unhappy about the amount of time she was playing on the PlayStation,” said John Pini QC for the prosecution.

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Jimmy Wales Whacks Wikia Search SearchEngineWatch

Jimmy Wales launched Wikia Search a little over a year ago. His idea was to build a user-generated search. It opened to not-so-great fanfare and the dismal economy didn’t help things. Wales said that due to a reassessment of priorities, he’s nixing Wikia Search. Not all Wikia products are suffering a dark fate. Wikia Answers is proving to be quite popular, which holds with the current trend in the popularity of Answers sites. Wales hopes to return to his Wikia Search project during future, more profitable times. He holds strong to his belief in openness and transparency in search.

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aXXo, Where Art Thou? TorrentFreak

In what must appear like a lifetime to his loyal fans, the popular DVD ripper aXXo hasn’t uploaded any torrents for three weeks. As always, rumors surface that claim to explain the hiatus. Has aXXo been arrested, or transferred to one of the MPAA’s covert detention facilities? Did BitTorrent’s favorite uploader fall off a cliff? axxo The most recent torrent uploaded by aXXo dates back to March 11. In the days that followed, millions have been waiting anxiously for fresh content, performing their daily aXXo search on their favorite torrent sites in vain. The aXXo brand has achieved cult status and for some has become synonymous with quality. Over the years aXXo has grabbed the attention of scammers, the mainstream press and even documentary makers. So, when he goes silent it is quickly noticed and the demand from his fans for news or an update quickly grows.

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Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia New York Times

Microsoft delivered the coup de grâce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web. In January, Wikipedia got 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to the Internet ratings service Hitwise. Encarta was second, with 1.27 percent. Unlike Wikipedia, where volunteer editors quickly update popular entries, Encarta can be embarrassingly outdated. The entry for Joseph R. Biden Jr., for example, identifies him as vice president-elect and a U.S. senator.

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EU threatens action to defend Web users’ privacy Reuters

Some Internet companies are abusing consumers’ personal data and this cannot be allowed to continue, a top European Union official will warn the industry on Tuesday. Consumer Affairs Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, in a speech whose text was obtained by Reuters in advance, will threaten EU intervention to set tougher rules on how Internet users’ personal data is collected, analyzed and shared by search engines and service providers. “The current situation with regard to privacy, profiling and targeting is not satisfactory. Basic consumer rights in terms of transparency, control and risk are being violated and this cannot continue,” she will say in the speech.

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TomTom to pay Microsoft to end patent fight Associated Press

Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, today said it settled a patent dispute over car navigation technology with TomTom NV for an undisclosed amount. In February, Microsoft filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Washington and with the International Trade Commission against TomTom NV and its U.S. subsidiary, TomTom Inc., claiming their car navigation systems infringed on patented technology that let vehicle computer systems run more than one application at a time, provide more natural driving directions and access the Internet, among other functions. TomTom filed a countersuit earlier this month against Microsoft in U.S. District Court in Virginia, saying the software maker’s Streets and Trips products for PCs infringe on four TomTom patents.

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Teacher taped young boy’s mouth shut The Local

A pre-school teacher in Sweden has been reported to police for taping a six-year-old’s mouth shut after he refused to be quiet. When the boy wouldn’t quiet down during a gathering of his classmates, the teacher took him out of the room. “When they were in the kitchen the teacher asked him if he understood that he had done something wrong by not being quiet. He answered, ‘You be quiet yourself’ and it was then she put a piece of tape over his mouth,” the boy’s mother told the Helsingborgs Dagblad newspaper.

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European Commission publishes guidance on overseas transfers of personal data Out-Law.com

The European Commission has prepared a set of questions and answers as well as a flowchart to help companies understand when they can and when they cannot send personal data abroad. The European Union’s Data Protection Directive protects the personal data of EU citizens from abuse and misuse. Organisations have a duty to protect it, and that means ensuring that it is not sent to countries with poor data protection. The Directive says that data can be sent to another country “only if … the third country in question ensures an adequate level of protection”. Only a handful of countries have been deemed acceptable destinations for data by the European Commission. Those are Switzerland, Canada, Argentina, the Bailiwick of Guernsey, the Isle of Man, the Bailiwick of Jersey and the US, when the data’s treatment is in the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles of the US Department of Commerce.