Archive
Category: Weblog
Random assortments, selected for semantic content.
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EA Employees File Second Class Action against Game Publisher
An engineer working for leading electronic video game publisher Electronic Arts has become the second staff member to file a class action lawsuit against the company, seeking back pay, damages and penalties for unpaid overtime: Leander Hasty, who has worked for the firm since mid-2003, filed his suit yesterday against the company, arguing that a… Read more →
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Amazon Applies for Patent over Personal Search History
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued details of a recent patent application made by Amazon.com, which describes a method for persistently storing and serving event data. Essentially, this allows their search engine, A9, to store and remember personal search histories. The original application was made in 2003, but withheld from publication until… Read more →
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Not Guilty, Pleads Lynx User Accused of Hacking
A man has denied attempting to hack into a website designed to raise funds for victims of the December tsunami, pleading not guilty to a charge of ‘causing a computer to perform a function which intended to secure unauthorised access to a program or data held in a computer’: Daniel Cuthbert, 28, made a tsunami-relief… Read more →
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Users Circumvent Proprietary Coffee Machine DRM
Manufacturers of non-computer products are using rights management technology to restrict the supply of aftermarket services such as maintenance and consumables. The Senseo espresso machine is one such example; it utilises what its manufacturer calls ‘protected’ coffee pods that are only compatible with Philips’ own pod system – similar to the way DRM is used… Read more →
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‘This Is An Ex-Parrot!’
According to The Australian and the Globe and Mail, life is imitating Monty Python in this amusing recreation of the famous parrot sketch — only this avian dispute has ended up in court: An indignant Israeli is suing a pet shop that he says sold him a dying parrot, reports the Ma’ariv newspaper. Itzik Simowitz… Read more →
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Webmasters Defend Insider Sources against Apple Subpoenas
‘Apple has shown an increasingly litigious face in recent months, targeting news site Think Secret a week before the start of Macworld San Francisco last month, and going after two additional sites in December 2004 for their reporting on prerelease builds of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). In the case of the Tiger… Read more →
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Cover Your Tracks: EFF Releases New Log Deletion Tool
San Francisco, CA — Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (‘EFF’) released logfinder, a software tool to help people reduce the unnecessary collection of personal information about computer users. Often computer network servers automatically log information about who has visited a website and when, or who has sent and received email. Such data tells a lot… Read more →
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Microsoft Applies for Latitude/Longitude Patent
The United States Patent Office on Friday released details of Microsoft’s latest patent application, this time for ‘[a] computer-implemented method of reducing the number of characters required to represent coordinates within a geographically-oriented string’. In other words: latitude and longitude coordinates. If granted, this invention will join a number of other notorious US patents, including:… Read more →
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Accused ‘DDoS Mafia’ Go Free
Federal authorities in Los Angeles have dismissed a criminal complaint (PDF) filed last August against four men accused of performing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for hire. The defendants were originally accused of carrying out attacks on behalf of Jay Echouafni, a Massachusetts businessman who sold satellite TV gear via his website. At an August 26,… Read more →
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Napster Struggles for Marketshare, Adopts New Pricing Model
Los Angeles-based Napster, now a legal site for licensed music, has a mere 270 000 subscribers and struggles to attract new users. In an attempt to differentiate itself from Apple’s offering, Napster will relaunch its online subscription service under a flat rate pricing model. Users will soon be able to download as much as they… Read more →