Microsoft has announced that it will be digitising books in what will be called Live Book Search. This service will include a partnership for publishers to provide books to Microsoft, and they will scan them for free to make portions of them available online through something called the Windows Live Read more…
In an unprecedented move for a large media organisation, Reuters is reporting that it will be reporting directly from Second Life. One should expect new reports on market values, the price of customised badger avatars and the latest gig in the Second Life archipelago. I find this piece of news Read more…
With the rise of the celebrity chef and the increasing amount of money spent on recipe books and all things food-related, I guess that it should not come as a surprise that intellectual property protection would not be far behind. One would believe that the possibility to protect culinary creations Read more…
We should all now be aware of messages with requests to input your bank details. But what about messages asking you to install updates? I have received the following from support@microsoft.com (links removed to protect the innocent): Internet Explorer 7 downloadsGet downloads for Internet Explorer 7, including recommended updates as Read more…
IceWeasel is a GNU browser (new, GNU, geddit?) based on Firefox distributed with Debian and Ubuntu Linux. Why does Ubuntu need a new browser, you may ask? As with so many things that have to do with the Free Software Foundation, it all comes down to their definition of free Read more…
A woman in Florida has won $11.3 million USD (¢6 billion Costa Rican colones) in an online defamation case. Sue Scheff has a company called Parents Universal Resource Experts, which provides assistance to troubled teenagers. Scheff filed a defamation lawsuit in her State against a Louisiana woman who posted a Read more…
Dire warnings about the future of the Internet from Nitin Desai, chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). According to Mr Desai, the web could be splintered in the not-so-far future into national firewalls, high-speed fiefdoms and limited consumer choice. We have become used to the world-wide network where everyone Read more…
Unless you are living under a rock (or don’t care about these sort of things), you will know that Google has purchased the popular video website YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion USD (about £880 million GBP in real money). Only The Guardian has picked up on one of the Read more…
Ars Technica has a summary of the visit from a group of brave Hobbits (Firefox developers) who visited Mordor (Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond) to have a look at potential interoperability issues between The One Ring (Windows Vista) and Narya, one of the three Elf rings (Firefox). You can also find Read more…
(via Video Game Blog). The Board of Appeals of the European Patent Office has allowed a number of claims in a European patent application by games firm Konami (EP20060013875). The application is for a “Video game system and storage medium for storing program for use in the video game system”. Read more…