Should Websites Charge A Fee To Process Copyright Takedowns?
Every day copyright holders send out countless notices which order BitTorrent indexes, cyberlockers, forums, blogs and search engines to remove links to allegedly infringing content. The process is time consuming for everyone involved. So, since time is money, shouldn’t those being burdened by the actions of third parties be compensated for their work? One anti-piracy company says charging for takedowns amounts to extortion.
The publication last week of Google’s Transparency Report gave us a clearer idea of the pressures the search engine is under from copyright holders. The report revealed that in a single month Google was asked to take down an astonishing 1.2m links to allegedly infringing material. Read more...
Google Chrome 21 gears up for gaming
Google’s Chrome 21 will be on its way to the stable channel in about three months. When it finally arrives, Google’s ambitions to make Chrome the browser of choice for web-based gaming will be crystal clear.
There’s not much to see so far in the list of feature additions, but two items stand out. First, support for the mouse pointer lock spec has been switched on by default and it can now operate both in and out of full screen mode. It’s one of those seemingly minor tweaks that will make a big difference down the road, as pointer lock gives developers one more easy-to-implement feature that makes standards-based web gaming more like traditional desktop PC gaming. Read more...
Security problem in VMware vSphere 5
Security experts from ERNW have demonstrated the ability to break out of the virtualisation hypervisor of VMware ESXi 5.0 using crafted VMware images. If a provider offers customers the ability to run customer-supplied VMware images on its servers as part of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, a malicious user could access all data on the server, including other customers' user passwords and virtual machines. Read more...
Family robbed after teen posts photo of money on Facebook
On Thursday, a teenage girl posted a photo of a "large sum of cash" on Facebook. About seven hours later, two robbers arrived at her family's home. Unsurprisingly, this incident prompted local authorities to issue a warning about the dangers of posting photographs online. Read more...
PS Vita’s first real shooter plagued with day one connectivity woes
In my review of Resistance: Burning Skies I note that the multiplayer experience is by far the highlight of the package. This is important because a true, console-quality online shooter has never been achieved on a portable console. Unfortunately, while my pre-release multiplayer games were smooth and ran almost perfectly, today's launch of the game hasn't gone nearly as smoothly.
I attempted to connect to a multiplayer game earlier this morning and eventually timed out after failing to connect. I gave it a couple more hours and tried again, but the result was the same. After searching for certain keywords on Twitter I found that others were having similar issues, and it seems the game's multiplayer structure just wasn't quite ready for the influx of gamers wanting to play on day one.
Developer Nihilistic Software tweeted that it is aware of the issues and is working on the fix, though no further updates have been provided. We reached out for a more concrete answer, but haven't heard back yet.
A launch day server snafu is hardly unique, and titles from all the major publishers have stumbled out of the gate at one time or another. We can only hope that the issues are sorted out quickly, as the online multiplayer is undoubtedly the main reason most people picked up the game as soon as it hit store shelves.
(Source: news.yahoo.com)
Another Exec Departure At Nokia: Corp Relations EVP Esko Aho Is Going To Harvard
Nokia today announced it is losing another senior executive: Esko Aho, who had once been the prime minister of Finland and is currently EVP, corporate relations and responsibility and a member of Nokia’s leadership team, is leaving the beleaguered handset maker for Harvard University. There, he will be the Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School for public policy. He had been with Nokia since 2008 and a member of the executive team since 2009. Read more...
Apple confirms WWDC keynote for June 11
Apple today laid out the schedule for its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), and confirmed that it will, as usual, kick off the annual meeting with a keynote address, likely hosted by CEO Tim Cook.
The company also released a free iOS app that lets attendees track the conference events and plan their schedule.
Although Apple did not divulge who would lead the keynote, the company typically relies on its CEO for the duty. Last year, former CEO Steve Jobs, at the time on indefinite medical leave, made his second-to-last public appearance at the WWDC keynote.
This year's annual developers conference will be the first since Jobs died last October. Read more...
Attacks on Iranian oil industry led to Flame malware find
The sophisticated cyber espionage malware known as "Flame" was discovered after computers within Iran's energy industry were wiped clean of data, a security expert said today.
"This was discovered during the investigation of a wiping of Iran's gas companies' computers," Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response center, said in an interview Tuesday.
O Murchu was referring to reports out of Iran a month ago, when the country's oil ministry confirmed that servers at several companies had been attacked. Later, other officials there acknowledged that the attacks had been aimed at other government ministries and industries. Read more...
PayPal’s inStore mobile payment service hits the UK, launches with four major fashion retailers
PayPal has announced that its In-Store mobile payment service will be accepted at four major UK retailers – Coast, Oasis, Warehouse and Karen Millen — from tomorrow, as the payments giant bursts on to the country’s high street shopping space.
The agreement will allow UK shoppers to pay for items at more than 230 stores nationwide using their smartphone and the PayPal mobile shopping application. Read more...
Dropbox introduces support for Korean as the Samsung Galaxy S III launch edges closer
Dropbox is saying ’An Nyoung’ to South Korea after the company revealed that it is making the popular file sharing service available in Korean.
The Web-based portal and “selected” Android apps will be localized first, before apps for the Mac, PC and iOS follow suit, although no time frame for the additions has been disclosed.
The move to offer a localized service for Korea builds on Dropbox’s partnership with Samsung, and comes ahead of the launch of the Korean firm’s Galaxy S III smartphone, which has Dropbox storage integrated into it. Read more...