Cell phones harbor thriving colonies of bacteria and viruses. Researchers say, for example, that cell phones are major carriers of superbugs in hospitals. Now, a new gadget helps you sterilize your phone! (You should also try to use a wireless Bluetooth headset.)
A few hours ago, certain sections of The Pirate Bay were flagged by Google as containing malware and were subsequently blocked. Similar warnings are being shown by Firefox, which states that the world’s largest tracker is an “attack site”. The Pirate Bay team are working on the problem now.
Aryabhata writes in with news that should chill the hearts of evil dictators and tax cheats everywhere: one of the last bastions of strong banking secrecy, Switzerland, is bowing to international pressure and agreeing to cooperate with some foreign investigations of wrongdoing. “…the Swiss government announced on Friday that it would cooperate in international tax investigations, breaking with its long-standing tradition of protecting wealthy foreigners accused of hiding billions of dollars. Austria and Luxembourg also said they would help. … The famed ‘numbered accounts’ that do not bear the owner’s name will still be available for clients willing to pay for added anonymity. … Over the past month, leaders have made similar promises in Singapore, Liechtenstein, Bermuda, the British islands of Jersey and Guernsey, and tiny Andorra… other ‘offshore’ banking centers are still available in the Caribbean, Panama, Dubai and elsewhere.”
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MJackson writes “The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published a draft set of proposals for tackling illegal broadband file sharing (P2P) downloads by persistent infringers, among other things. The proposals form part of a discussion piece concerning the role that a UK Digital Rights Agency (DRA) could play. UK Internet Providers will already be required to warn those suspected of such activity and collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers, though they could soon be asked to go even further. The new discussion paper, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked, or suspected users might find their service speeds seriously restricted.”
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I Believe in Unicorns writes “Red Hat’s patent policy says ‘In an attempt to protect and promote the open source community, Red Hat has elected to… develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. We do so reluctantly…’ Meanwhile, USPTO Application #: 20090063418, ‘Method and an apparatus to deliver messages between applications,’ claims a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match, which is an extension of the ‘unencumbered’ AMQP protocol that Red Hat is helping to make. Is this a defensive patent, or is Red Hat cynically staking out a software patent claim to an obvious extension of AMQP? Is Red Hat’s promise to ‘refrain from enforcing the infringed patent’ against open source a reliable contract, or a trap for the unwary? Given the Microsoft-Red Hat deal in February, are we seeing Red Hat’s ‘Novell Moment?'” Reader Defeat_Globalism contributes a related story about an international research team who conducted experiments to “quantify the ways patent systems and market forces might influence someone to invent and solve intellectual problems.” Their conclusion was that a system which doesn’t restrict prizes to the winner provides more motivation for innovation.
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FACEBOOK is launching a new redesign this week, and users are reacting with confusion. The social network’s official blog yesterday announced the start of changes to user’s home and profile pages worldwide.
What do you do normally on weekends? Find a way to get busy in something to refresh your minds? This post will make you busy on your weekends to spend your time in a more interesting way.
These 5 colorful JavaScript-only visuals extract meaning from SXSW-related tweets… the top words among SXSWers only, the best and worst parties, where people are tweeting about & what they’re gossiping about. No Flash!
volume4 writes “The switch has been flipped and Jaiku has been moved to App Engine. Google will no longer be developing Jaiku, so the code and the future of Jaiku is in the hands of the open source community. From the Jaiku blog: ‘Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.'” We discussed Google’s purchase of Jaiku in 2007, and their subsequent decision to halt development a few months ago.
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theodp writes “Just when you thought annual reviews couldn’t get worse, BusinessWeek reports that HR departments at companies like Microsoft and IBM are starting to use mathematical analysis to determine the value of each employee. At an undisclosed Internet company, analysis of (non-verbal) communications was used to produce a circle to represent each employee — those determined to generate or pass along valuable info were portrayed as large and dark-colored circles (‘thought leaders’ and ‘networked curators’), while those with small and pale circles were written off as not adding a hell of a lot. ‘You have to bring the same rigor you bring to operations and finance to the analysis of people,’ explains Microsoft’s Rupert Bader. Hey, who could argue with what Quants did for finance?”
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