It’s the loooong Thanksgiving Day weekend in the U.S. and that means that U.S. corporations, institutions and government agencies are pretty much shut down. For U.S. residents, that means a four-day break from the work-a-day routine, and the official start of the holiday shopping season. For the news business, it means a brief, almost surreal [...]

With money as tight as it’s ever been during any holiday season in recent memory, it’s more important than ever to spend your gift dollars wisely. With that in mind, Examiner.com, a popular news and review Web site, has surveyed this fall’s new computer game releases and offers its caveats about five titles which — [...]

From: Canadian Press / Yahoo.com — The legislature of the Indonesian province of Papua is considering a bill that would see the mandatory implantation of some HIV/AIDS patients there with tracking and identification microchips. Moreover, it appears that a majority of legislators are planning to vote in favour of the measure. News of the potential [...]

Portland, OR, City Water Commissioner Randy Leonard is savouring the sweet smell of success after a down and dirty exercise in entrepreneurialism. A new solar-powered public toilet, co-designed by Leonard, has been cleared to début on Portland streets by the end of this year. The prototype of the so-called Portland Loo cost about (US)$140,000 — [...]

This is Part 3 of a series on Marketing to Mommy Bloggers… *** The first time somebody offered me a free book to review on my blog back in 2006, I thought it must be some sort of scam. Free book? Seriously? I was so paranoid I had them deliver it to my work address. [...]

A television ad for Apple’s iPhone G3 has been banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) following complaints by users that the ads set unrealistic expectations among purchasers with regard to the speed of the device itself and the wireless service to which it connects. iPhone 3G: Not exactly as shown? The ad in [...]

Microsoft placed fifth in a new list of the world’s Top Ten spam hosts released this week by online security watcher Spamhaus.org. The preamble to the survey results notes: “Spam continues to plague the Internet because a small number of large Internet Service Providers sell service knowingly to professional spammers for profit, or do nothing [...]

Reports earlier this week that a Google GMail “vulnerability” was being used by cyber criminals to hijack domains have been revealed to be part of a scam, themselves. Google engineer Chris Evans explains, in a Google Online Security Blog post: “With help from affected users, we determined that the cause was a phishing scheme, a [...]

C’mom guys… You know you want one! YoYoTech House of Technology in the UK is offering what may be the ultimate gift for the computer geek on your list this holiday season: The Fi7EPOWER MLK1610 desktop PC. YoYoTech claims the MLK1610 is the fasted production desktop PC, with an INTEL Core i7-965 3.73 GHz processor, [...]

From: ZDNet — But nobody really expects him to pay up. In fact, the (former?) Montreal, Canada, resident has apparently gone in to hiding. And his spamming businesses is now out of business. Which, actually, was the point of the whole exercise. As ZDnet’s Elinor Mills reports, “The default judgment was issued in federal court [...]

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have developed a Star Wars-style “light sabre” that could fight cancer cells. In fact, the device “which measures only a few milimetres square” is claimed to be capable of targeting and puncturing individual body cells. “You could think of these as tiny light sabres, like they [...]

And you thought you had it tough, getting detention for chewing gum in class… The New Brunswic, Canada, Provincial Ministry of Education has banned access to the wildly popular social networking site Facebook on school computers during school hours. Schools spokeswoman Valerie Kilfoil told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) that the decision was made in [...]