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BritishColumbian writes "I'm thinking about setting up a Web site driven by user submissions. I was wondering which locations have the most liberal (i.e., libertarian) privacy laws. There are some great hosts in the US, however there have been so many FBI requests for user data that I don't want a server hosted under US jurisdiction. Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions as to a suitable jurisdiction? It doesn't look like Sealand's HavenCo is guaranteed to be privacy-friendly any more."

Inside The GPhone: What To Expect From Google's Android Alliance argues that you can predict what the GPhone(s) will look like very easily, simply by listing the technologies of the Open Handset Alliance partners. According to this theory, the phone will have a user interface from Sweden's TAT, VCAST-like multimedia capabilities powered by PacketVideo Corp., and an iPhone-like capacitive touch-screen, from Synaptics. Hardware-wise, it'll probably be built around Texas Instruments' OMAP processors, which enable a single-chip world phone (GSM/EDGE/GPRS). "While the GPhone won't be revolutionary, it'll connect the pieces in pleasantly new ways," argues author Alex Wolfe. Should Apple be concerned?

Researchers have created an electromagnetic system that can quickly bring a vehicle to a stop by sending out pulses of microwave radiation to disable the microprocessors that control the central engine functions in a car. A 200-pound unit attached to the roof of a police car can be used to stop fleeing and noncooperative vehicles. The average power emitted in a single shot is about 10 kilowatts at 100 hertz and since each radiated pulse lasts about 50 nanoseconds, the total energy output is 100 joules at a distance of 15 meters. One concern with the device is that it could cause an accident if a car is disabled and a driver loses steering control. The device could also disable other vehicles in the area so the most practical application may be for perimeter protection at remote areas. Criminals have a work-around too. Since electronic control modules were not built into most cars until 1972, the system will not work on automobiles made before that year.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops

Those price fixing allegations that AMD and NVIDIA were facing late last year may have vanished from the forefront of your memory, but you can rest assured that the legal teams connected to the two are still workin' overtime to clean things up. Apparently, NVIDIA has been slapped with as many as 51 civil complaints over "price fixing and anti-competitive agreements, among other things," and on its March 16th filing with the SEC, the firm states that "42 civil complaints as of March 14 were filed against it on the same allegations." Notably, the outfit did state that the "lawsuits are putative class-actions," and unsurprisingly felt that they were all lacking merit and would be fought vigorously. Tsk, Tsk.

[Via Gearlog]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/121043224/

While both Microsoft and an ISP have won multi-million dollar judgments against Robert Alan Soloway for spamming, he apparently kept on spamming. This time around, he might not have it so easy. Rather than a civil case from a company, he's now been arrested for sending out millions of spam emails over a zombie network he put together -- and it looks like the feds threw everything they could think of against him: mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Apparently, the identity theft part was for "taking over someone's domain" (though, it's not clear here if they mean falsifying an email address or for the zombie network). Either way, it's hard to believe that this will really have much of an impact. After all, other spammers have been arrested (and jailed) before and it's not like the spam has gone down. So it seems a bit ridiculous for the federal authorities who are going after the guy to claim that people should see the amount of spam they receive start going down due to this arrest. Someone else will simply step in and fill the gap pretty quickly.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070530/232149.shtml

Questions length of storage time before anonymisation

A letter from an influential group of privacy experts in Europe saying that Google's new privacy policies appear to breach the requirements of the EU's data protection regime was published today.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/31/data_protection_letter_google/

An anonymous reader writes "The upcoming release of Firefox 3.0 may include support for Vista Parental controls,

I question if the Open Source Community should help propagate Microsoft's attempts at censorship, Whats is next integrated DRM in Firefox? There seems to be a bit of overzealousness in making Firefox the new IE7. Is this really the right path for opensource, should we rather not present a better alternative? Looking at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Product_Requireme nts_Document it is interesting to note that Vista support is rated P1 Mandatory but Linux is only P2 Highly Desirable. Other questionable addtions to the codebase are support for group policies? and windows cardspace. Seems we might be better served by openid for example...

Does this all steam from the Firefox developer team visiting Microsoft? http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/10/04/Firef ox-Explorer-_2800_Or_3A00_ — Mozilla-is-Here_2900_. aspx as most of the new windows centric developments seem to be included afterwards.

Voice your opinions on this?"
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=parent+control+setting

Spinning Rims writes "Beryl 0.2.0, a new window manager for Linux was released last week, and Ars Technica has a guide to setting up and using Beryl, along with a lot of screenshots of it in action. 'Beryl's settings manager exposes a tremendous number of configurable settings, some with cryptic and confusing names. Beryl's prodigious flexibility can be intimidating sometimes, even for an advanced user. Fortunately, most of the important options are relatively easy to understand, and the default settings are reasonable enough to provide a good experience without requiring a lot of configuration changes.'"