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Submission + - T-Mobile staff sold personal data (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers, a spokesman for the firm has confirmed.
The suspected illegal trade emerged after the firm alerted the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham.
He said brokers bought the data and sold it on to other phone firms, who then cold-called the customers, as their contracts were due to expire.
A T-Mobile spokesman said the data was sold "without our knowledge".

Submission + - Alternative mobile browsers tested: Opera vs y'all (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate
CNETNate writes: Do Opera Mobile, Skyfire or Mozilla's Fennec have the power to take down the BlackBerry browser, IE on Windows Mobile or Safari on the iPhone? This lengthy test aimed to find out. Speed, Acid3 compliance, Javascript rendering capabilities and general subjective usability were all tested and reviewed. So was Opera Mini and the default Symbian browser actually, but these two were unable to complete some of the tests and benchmarks.

Submission + - Pirate Bay shuts down tracker (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by think_nix
think_nix writes: The Pirate Bay has shut down their bit torrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using DHT [torrentfreak] (Distributed Hash Table) to distribute the torrents. TPB Blog [thepiratebay] states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The local (thelocal se) reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of tpb owners, and may decide the outcome of the case.

Submission + - Pirate Bay Appeal Fines After Ditching Tracker (thelocal.se)

Submitted by newcaribou
newcaribou writes: The guys behind The Pirate Bay are arguing that their court-mandated fines should be declared null and void now that they've decided to ditch their BitTorrent tracker. The fact that peers were using the file sharing site's tracker to communicate with each other was cited by the Swedish court as grounds for fiscal punishment. The Pirate Bay is calling the decision to ditch the tracker 'the end of an era'. In light of the move, lead man Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has submitted an appeal to the courts claiming that he and his buddies should no longer have to pay their $73,400 fine. In the article, a lecturer in intellectual property law thinks they may just have a case.
Enlightenment

Submission + - NYT disables Firefox "right-click web search" (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It worked last week, but alas no more. The Old Gray Soul-Stealer has done it again. Presumably in search of more revenue to support an antiquated medium (newspapers), and somewhat ironically, nytimes.com appears to have disabled a feature that I use a lot in Firefox. Highlight some text on a web page, right click the highlighted text, and the context menu contains an entry labeled "Search Google for..." which will, as stated, search Google using the highlighted text. This is incredibly handy when, for example, I want to map an address or find the definition of a word.

What does this have to do with nytimes.com? Well, nytimes.com has a similar feature that is specific to the nytimes.com website. Highlight some text and a small blurb containing a question mark will be displayed. Click on the "?" icon, and a popup window displays search results for the selected text. Unfortunately, the search results are focused on NYT (and partner) content. You have the option of performing a web-wide search, but defaults to a NYT "Reference Lookup" search.

The problem: Highlighting text on a nytimes.com article displays the "?" icon, but now deselects the highlighted text, thus preventing me from using my own search methods. When reading nytimes.com, I used to have a choice about which search I wanted to use; both the Firefox context menu and the NYT "?" icon were displayed. Today I noticed that this is no longer the case; nytimes.com has disabled the context menu in favor of its own revenue generating approach.

I find it both ironic and sad that NYT has decided to limit the newer and more relevant media format (nytimes.com) in order to raise money to support and older, less relevant format (tree-killing).

Keep in mind that I am not anti-NYT, and I know that Google is quickly becoming the new "evildoer that will end the world with its capitalist-track mind. I don't care if Google or NYT gets the revenue, I just want robust search results and don't want to be stuck in the middle of a revenue war.

While this isn't quite on the scale of the market wars between IE/Netscape, AMD/Intel, or Apple/Microsoft, will this form of "revenue redirection", as picked up by other web content generators, ultimately prevent Google from financing plans for world domination?

Submission + - The European GPS Galileo 'pathfinders' take shape (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by oliderid
oliderid writes: After all the wrangling, the delays and the furore over cost, Europe's version of GPS is finally starting to take shape. Due for launch in pairs in late 2010 and early-2011, the "pathfinders" will form a mini-constellation in the sky. They will transmit the navigation signals that demonstrate the European system can become a reality. Discover an interesting video clip introducing the main feature of a Galileo's satellite.
Idle

Submission + - The Zoo versus the Internet (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate
CNETNate writes: If you thought the Internet was fast, think again. The world's top animals were pitted against an average ADSL broadband upstream connection over a one-mile course, transferring 32GB of data. If you put 32GB of data on a bite-proof USB key and strapped it to a cheetah, for example, it would be available to read at the destination 11 times faster than the Internet. The cheetah takes 30.9 minutes, the Internet... over 6 hours. The article is reminiscent of the story from a few months ago, in which an Australian pigeon was faster at transporting data than a local compay's Internet connection.

Submission + - German murderers attempt to censor Wikipedia. (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by Aequitarum Custos
Aequitarum Custos writes: Wikimedia is being sued by two convicted murderers in German to have their names removed for privacy reasons.

"In a written response to Mr. Stopp, Wikimedia questioned the relevance of any judgments in the German courts, since, it said, it has no operations in Germany and no assets there.

“We’ll see,” Mr. Stopp said in an interview. In an e-mail message after the interview, he wrote, “In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients’ names in your article.”
Idle

Submission + - Internet slower than rat, horse, rabbit, and dog. (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNET demonstrates that the internet is "actually slower than every major animal. It's even slower than the apocryphal tortoise over a mile." In order to prove this they "pitted the world's top animals against the Web over a one-mile course, transferring 32GB of data.". The results of the experiment showed the Internet to be the worst way to transfer data over short distances. "If you put 32GB of data on a bite-proof USB key and strapped it to a cheetah, for example, it would be available to read at the destination 11 times faster than the Internet. The cheetah takes 30.9 minutes, the Internet over 6 hours!" Pigeon, horse and dog also perform very well at transferring 32GB of data, and even the lowly rat is over 8 times faster than the internet. CNET suggests the internet "should hang its head in shame over its ranking in the one-mile speed test."

Submission + - BBC: 'reducing bit rate has no impact on picture' (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate
CNETNate writes: Erm. No. The BBC recently reduced the bit rate of BBC HD, leading to outraged complaints about the picture quality. The BBC has admitted that it has reduced the bit rate, but it also claims that its new, more efficient encoders make up the difference with increased efficiency. But in an interview, Danielle Nagler, the head of BBC HD, said that there's "no evidence that reducing the bit rate has had an impact on picture quality". Which strikes us as absurd.

Submission + - The sorry state of eBook readers today (cnet.co.uk) 2

Submitted by CNETNate
CNETNate writes: No ebook reader is worth buying yet. It's as simple as that. No ebook store is adequately equipped to fulfil your needs, and no one product has matured to the point at which it can be unquestionably recommended. This article explores the trouble ebook readers are having, which lies not only in a lack of support from publishers and distributors, but the age-old difficulty of digital rights management and incompatible competing formats.

Submission + - HTC WinMo 6.5 phone scores higher than Pre, iPhone (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate
CNETNate writes: HTC's new HD2 cell phone runs Windows Mobile 6.5, which is apparently such a drastic improvement it earned scores higher than the Palm Pre and the original iPhone in CNET's review. It's also the first Windows Mobile phone to use a capacitive touchscreen instead of a clumsy stylus (as seen on video). Is this the dawn of Windows Mobile being, y'know, not horrible?
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Project Natal release details emerge (criticalgamer.co.uk)

Submitted by scruffybr
scruffybr writes: Today the first information about the pricing and launch of Microsoft’s Project Natal. The pricing for the hardware will be much much lower than many had anticipated, coming in at around £50 when sold separately from the console. The idea being that it’s low enough that people will purchase on impulse.

Submission + - The founders of boo.com: Where are they now? (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by CNETNate
CNETNate writes: Possibly the greatest example of dotcom failure, boo.com ten years ago attempted to become the planet's most technologically sophisticated online fashion store. It exhausted $185m of investment in just 18 months, because it relied on the home broadband connections that didn't exist, and depended on a trust in online retail people didn't yet have. A decade later, where are its two founders — former model Kajsa Leander and entrepreneur Ernst Malmsten? It turns out they're both living very differently to how they were in 1999.

Submission + - Develop an iPhone app or die trying, step by step (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is a story about two people who joined the iPhone app goldrush and attempted to make a million dollars from a game called Twitch Origins. Developing for iPhone OS 3.0 requires huge amounts of patience and planning. But lead graphics developer Chris Stevens explains the process he and his team underwent, explaining everything needed to do to take an idea from a sketch on the back of an envelope to a fully grown, commercial iPhone app.

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