p2pnet World Headlines: Feb 8, 2010
More tainted milk found in latest crackdown China Daily
More than 170 tons of milk powder have been recalled amid a 10-day nationwide crackdown on melamine-tainted dairy products, authorities have said. The recall is the latest of dairy products to resurface from a 2008 contamination scandal that hit the country. Two dairy companies in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region were closed for selling tainted milk powder on Saturday, while candies made with tainted milk powder were found in Jilin province yesterday. The two affected companies are the Ningxia Tiantian Dairy Co Ltd and Ningxia Panda Dairy Co Ltd, Ningxia’s regional government said in a press conference on Saturday. Ningxia police also found that another company outside the region paid the Ningxia Tiantian Dairy Co Ltd last July about 170 tons of milk powder – melamine-tainted products left over from the 2008 scandal that should have been destroyed – as debt payment.
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers? The Register
Google’s massively global infrastructure now employs a proprietary system that automatically moves and replicates loads between its mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. The distributed technology was first hinted at — in classically coy Google fashion — during a conference this summer, and Google fellow Jeff Dean has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month. The platform is known as Spanner. Dean’s presentation calls it a ’storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.’ This includes constraints related to bandwidth, packet loss, power, resources, and ‘failure modes’.
China to crack down on ‘thriving’ online gambling Xinhua
China will conduct a nationwide crackdown on online gambling from February to August, an industry the country’s security ministry has described as “thriving.” According to a statement from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) released Monday, the campaign will target “major and severe cases, arrest domestic and foreign groups that organize online gambling and severely punish criminals.” The campaign will also focus on underground banks and third-party payment platforms that provide banking services for the gambling groups. Website operators offering connection to the services will also be targeted. Online gambling has caused large amounts of money to flow out of China and disturbed the country’s social and economic order, the statement said. The ministry said illegal online gambling has continued to thrive despite authorities’ crackdowns.
Indie cinemas battle for Berlin’s spotlight The Local
Indie cinemas are a dying breed the world over… except in Berlin, home to nearly 60 small arthouse and neighbourhood venues. The fight for survival is brutal. But as Exberliner magazine’s Alice Harrison reports, some of them are even getting the red carpet treatment at the Berlin International Film Festival.
British Library to offer free ebook downloads Times Online
More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring. Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors. The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books.
Symantec hit with class-action lawsuit over auto-renewals Computerworld
A New York man has sued security software maker Symantec for automatically renewing his subscription to Norton Antivirus, alleging that the company did not notify him before charging $76 to his credit card. The lawsuit comes seven months after the New York Attorney General’s office fined Symantec $375,000 for the practice and ordered it to give notice before renewing any subscription.
The Fight Over Who Sets Prices at the Online Mall New York Times
On some pages of e-commerce sites selling products like televisions, digital cameras and jewelry, a critical piece of information is conspicuously missing: the price tag. To see how much these items cost, shoppers must add the merchandise to their shopping carts — in effect, taking it up to the virtual register for a price check. The missing prices are part of a larger battle sweeping the world of e-commerce. Wary of the Internet’s tendency to relentlessly drive down prices, major brands and manufacturers — and now, book publishers — are striking back, deploying a variety of tactics and tools to control how their products are presented and priced online.
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
February, 2010
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