Tag: brides-cond

Google didn’t comply with Argentina’s request to remove NSFW video of president

In a newly released dataset covering the second half of 2012, Google reports a record amount of total government requests worldwide to remove content from the company’s sites and services. As usual, under the “ Notes ” section, Google provides some potentially humorous insight  on why governments want certain content to be removed. Google noted wryly: “We received a request [from Argentina] to remove a YouTube video that allegedly defames the [Argentine] President by depicting her in a compromising position. We age-restricted the video in accordance with YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” It didn’t take us long to find the video in question, by the Miami-based Argentine-Venezuelan rock band The Rockadictos. The band’s September 2012 music video (genuinely NSFW) depicts a CGI version of the Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, engaging in lewd behavior. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google didn’t comply with Argentina’s request to remove NSFW video of president

Apple supercharges R&D with extra $500 million spent in last six months

Apple product sales are flattening out a bit compared to last year, save for iPads. Casey Johnston Apple boosted its research and development spending by 33 percent in the second quarter of 2013 compared to the same period last year, according to a quarterly report filed with the Securities Exchange Commission. If the rate of spending continues, Apple could drop over $4 billion on R&D this fiscal year. During the quarter ending March 30, 2013, Apple spent $1.119 billion on R&D, compared to $841 million from a year ago. In the first six months of its fiscal year, Apple has spent $2.129 billion total on R&D, while it spent only $1.599 billion last year. Apple stated that the spending for the quarter was up 33 percent due to “an increase in headcount” and “expanded R&D activities.” The statement went on to say that the “focused investments” in R&D are “directly related to timely development of new and enhanced products that are central to the Company’s core business strategy. As such, the Company expects to make further investments in R&D to remain competitive.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple supercharges R&D with extra $500 million spent in last six months

Senate advances “online sales tax” by 74-20 vote

Your tax-free days of online shopping are numbered. If S743 , also known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, becomes law, the millions of Americans who have been able to avoid sales tax online will have to start paying it. Given the broad support shown by today’s US Senate vote, some version of it is likely to come to fruition. The bill will compel companies having annual online sales of more than $1 million to collect sales tax on those purchases. Interstate sales have long been exempted from sales tax, but brick-and-mortar businesses have just as long complained about the edge that online businesses have since they avoid collecting taxes. A key opponent of online taxation, retail giant Amazon, recently switched sides after losing some key legal and political battles over taxation. Amazon already collects taxes on sales in nine states , including California, New York, and Texas. Technically this wouldn’t be a new tax, since California residents who make purchases from an online company are responsible for paying those taxes. But there’s never been an efficient way to collect such taxes so it rarely happens. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Senate advances “online sales tax” by 74-20 vote

Japanese police ask ISPs to start blocking Tor

Erich Ferdinand Authorities in Japan are so worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime that they are asking the country’s ISPs to block the use of Tor . According to The Mainichi , the National Police Agency (NPA, a bit like the Japanese FBI) is going to urge ISPs to block customers if they are found to have “abused” Tor online. Since Tor anonymizes traffic, that can be read as a presumption of guilt on anyone who anonymizes their Web activity. The Japanese police have had a torrid time of late when it comes to cybercrime. Late last year a hacker by the name of Demon Killer began posting death threats on public message boards after remotely taking control of computers across the country. The police arrested the four people whose IP addresses had been used and reportedly “extracted” a confession, but they were forced into a humiliating apology when the hacker kept posting messages while the suspects were in custody. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Japanese police ask ISPs to start blocking Tor

Google to acquire Provo, Utah’s fiber, transform it into Google Fiber

Less than 10 days after announcing that Austin will be Google Fiber’s second city (Kansas City, KS and MO, and surrounding small towns  qualified as Google’s first), the company announced suddenly that Provo, Utah will become the “third Google Fiber City.” Interestingly, Google isn’t laying its own fiber this time, but rather purchasing an existing network. “In order to bring Fiber to Provo, we’ve signed an agreement to purchase iProvo, an existing fiber-optic network owned by the city,” the company wrote in a blog post . “As a part of the acquisition, we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber. Our agreement with Provo isn’t approved yet—it’s pending a vote by the City Council scheduled for next Tuesday, April 23. We intend to begin the network upgrades as soon as the closing conditions are satisfied and the deal is closed.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google to acquire Provo, Utah’s fiber, transform it into Google Fiber

Microsoft scores biggest patent licensee yet: Foxconn

Foxconn Zhengzhou facility, under construction in February 2012. Bert van Dijk / flickr One company—Taiwan’s Foxconn—makes a staggering 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronic devices. Starting now, Microsoft will be getting paid a toll on a large number of those devices. The company’s long patent-licensing campaign has landed its biggest client yet in licensing Foxconn, formally named Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Foxconn has agreed to take a license for any product it produces that runs Google’s Android or Chrome operating systems. The Redmond software giant has insisted for years now that any company making Android phones needs to license its patents. That campaign has generally been successful; so successful , in fact, that by 2011 Microsoft was making more money from patent licensing than from its own mobile phone system. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft scores biggest patent licensee yet: Foxconn

Pirate Bay co-founder indicted on charges of hacking, fraud

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. Nicolas Vigier On Wednesday, a Swedish court indicted Gottfrid “anakata” Svartholm Warg—the Pirate Bay founder who has been held in a Swedish detention facility for more than six months . “A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers ( personnummer ) of people with protected identities,” Swedish prosecutor Henrik Olin said in a statement . Gottfrid was indicted with three other co-defendants, and the four have been charged (Google Translate) with serious fraud, attempted aggravated fraud, and aiding attempted aggravated fraud. The trial has been scheduled for late May in Stockholm. Svartholm Warg’s defense attorney, Ola Salmasson, told Ars that he had not yet seen the specific indictment, so he could not comment. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

CloudFlare Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application. The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses. “These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

Microsoft tells Windows 7 users to uninstall faulty security update (Updated)

Microsoft has pulled a Windows 7 security update released as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday after discovering it caused some machines to become unbootable. Update 2823324 , which was included in the MS13-036 bulletin , fixed a “moderate-level vulnerability” that requires an attacker to have physical computer access to be able to exploit a targeted computer, Dustin Childs, a group manager in the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing group, wrote in a blog post published Thursday evening. The company has now pulled it from the bulletin and is advising at least some Windows users who have installed it to uninstall the update following the guidance here . MS130-26 was one of nine bulletins released on Monday to fix 13 separate vulnerabilities. “We’ve determined that the update, when paired with certain third-party software, can cause system errors,” Childs wrote. “As a precaution, we stopped pushing 2823324 as an update when we began investigating the error reports, and have since removed it from the download center.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft tells Windows 7 users to uninstall faulty security update (Updated)