Macworld.com reports that U.S. federal officials have charged a Michigan con man with fraud and money laundering after Apple apparently brought the guy to their attention by suing him over the use of the name ‘iPod’ in his company name, iPod Mechanic. The iPod famly as it was in when Woodhams was operating. Shuffle, far […]

Several Canadian provincial jurisdictions have instituted ‘enhanced’ driver’s licence cards at the urging of both the Canadian federal government and the U.S. government, which will accept the licences as valid ID for land-based border crossing purposes. But privacy groups are warning that the new licences, based on ‘contactless’ smart card technology, represent a dangerous risk […]

UK Home Office Security Minister Vernon Coaker this week announced that he feels the EU Data Retention Directive, which would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to record and store all Internet traffic data on their systems for a year, does not go far enough. Coaker is proposing that all communications on social networking sites such […]

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an online privacy rights group, has requested that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission grant an injunction that would halt all Google ‘cloud computing’ activities. The EPIC says Google online services including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other popular Google Apps should be shut down until the company modifies […]

Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the list isn’t official but bloggers and other ‘observers’ are having a field day with it, just the same. The list, containing 2395 Web sites supposedly to be to banned under the new Australian national Clean Feed initiative, was apparently leaked earlier this week. Conroy claims the ‘leaked’ list […]

The 2009 Symantec Online Living report is out and provides some interesting statistics on worldwide Internet use. Among the key findings: 92 per cent of Netizens use email to communicate with friends and family. 42 per cent use Web cams. 50 per cent of adults use social networking . 70 per cent access photos online […]

A legendary German mathematician was recently billed, at his home address in Berlin, by GEZ, the German state agency that collects television license fees. That would not be noteworthy in any way, except for the fact that Adam Ries bought the house in 1525 and died in 1559, centuries before television was even invented. It […]

Random groups of Yahoo! users were surprised last fall when they were involuntarily ‘upgraded’ to one of several beta versions of Yahoo!’s new home page. A resounding majority of ‘testers’ gave the new designs a thumbs-down. Among their complaints: It took too many mouse clicks to get to their mailboxes and the new layout was […]

Researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi have invented a new breed of polyester coating that they claim heals itself with no effort or added material. All it needs is an hour in the sunshine. Scientists Mark Urban and Biswajit Ghosh claim, in their recent paper published in the journal Science, that the coating would […]

A list of more than 8,000 stolen Comcast customer IDs and passwords was posted publicly on the Web for more than two months on the Scribd document sharing site before being discovered and removed yesterday. It apparently took a tip from reporter Brad Stone of the New York Times to wise-up Scribd to the situation. […]

If a case now before the British Columbia Supreme Court goes against the plaintiff, that’s a real possibility, according to legal experts watching the situation. A small BC search engine operator, ISOHunt Inc., has taken the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) to court to get an answer, once and for all, to the question of […]

Remember when batteries weren’t rechargeable at all? Some still aren’t but, increasingly, we’re relying on rechargeable cells of all sorts to power our increasingly popular portable devices. Remember when it took overnight to recharge your NiCad batteries? Then, several hours to recharge your Lithium ion batteries? Now, many cell phone batteries recharge in an hour […]