In New Zealand, a man living in Queensland has been ordered to pay more that $16 million for running the world's largest illegal spam operation. Lance Atkinson, 26 years old from Christchurch, was living in Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had the entirety of his assets frozen just last…
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Is Wikipedia Out?
According to Monday's Wall Street Journal, volunteers have increasingly been quitting Wikipedia en masse for a variety of potential reasons. An excess of 49,000 editors left Wikipedia's English-language edition during the first three months of 2009, compared with only 4,900 for the same quarter a year earlier. This information is quoting Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega,…
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Accused Pedophiles Framed by Viruses
Internet viruses can do a variety of sinister things, but making someone an unsuspecting collector of child pornography is up there with the worst. Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on a computer by a virus — malicious programs better known for swiping credit card numbers. In this twist, reputations are stolen. An Associated…
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Google’s Dashboard Assists Users; But Does it Fix the Problem?
Today, Google took a vital step in helping to answer the question on everyone's minds: What does Google really know about me? The company unvailed Google Dashboard, which is designed to allow users to see and control the extensive amount of data that Google has stored in its servers about them. The company said that…
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IBM and Canonical Get Competitive
A few weeks back, IBM and Canonical, the head sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, announced a plan to deliver Linux desktops and software to Africa. The effort was originally announced over a year ago, in August of 2008 as the Microsoft-free PC Effort. The basic idea was to have a Linux operating system with IBM smart client applications…
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Google’s Big Plans
Google has always withheld the number of servers running in its data centers, but at a recent ACM workshop presentation, Google engineer Jeff Dean showed that the company is in preparations to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. One of the keynote speakers on large-scale computing systems, Dean discussed some of…
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LA Woman Sues Toyota for Scaring Her
A Los Angeles woman is suing Toyota for $10 million over a marketing campaign that she claims frightened her so much, she incorrectly believed she was being stalked. Filed Sept. 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, the lawsuit states that Amber Duick had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year, after…
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Tennesse Woman Arrested for Facebook Poke
A Tennessee woman was arrested last month for "poking" another user on Facebook, a digital greeting that has been described as the equivalent of waving at someone across a crowded room. An affidavit filed with the Sumner County General Sessions Court on Sept. 25 stated that Shannon D. Jackson of Hendersonville, Tennessee violated a legal…
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Google’s Neglected Library
In light of Google's recent push for a book settlement, their past is being considered and it's true to say that it's surprisingly unmarred. In this specific market however, Google has made mistakes. The worst of these is known as Usenet A massive internet and dial-up-based message board system brought to life in 1980. For…
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Recovery.gov Still Not Accessible
Recovery.gov, a heavily advertised government-run transparency site that relaunched on Monday after criticisms about it's actual content, still fails to meet the federal government's accessibility standards or and practices. The non-compliance issues relate mostly to display of data tables -- an essential point given the site's motto of "Data, Data & More Data." This is…
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