Network Neutrality Is Law In Chile: “An anonymous reader writes ‘Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission’s Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking.’
(Via Slashdot.)
Paul Allen Files Patent Suit Against Apple, Google, Yahoo, Others: “mewshi_nya writes ‘A firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit alleging 11 technology companies are violating patents developed at a Silicon Valley lab that Allen financed more than a decade ago. Named in the lawsuit: Apple, Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and Google’s YouTube subsidiary. The suit doesn’t name Microsoft, Amazon.com or other tech companies in Seattle where Allen is based, and it doesn’t estimate a damage amount. The suit lists violations of four patents (PDF) for technology that appear to be key components of the operations of the companies — and that of e-commerce and Internet search companies in general.’
(Via Slashdot.)
State of Virginia Technology Centers Down: “bswooden writes ‘Some rather important departments (DMV, Social Services, Taxation) in the state of Virginia are currently without access to documents and information as a technology meltdown has caused much of their infrastructure to be offline for over 24 hours now. State CIO Sam Nixon said, ‘A failure occurred in one memory card in what is known as a ‘storage area network,’ or SAN, at Virginia’s Information Technologies Agency (VITA) suburban Richmond computing center, one of several data storage systems across Virginia.’ How does the IT for some of the largest departments in a state come to a screeching halt over a single memory card? Oh, and also, the state is paying Northrup Grumman $2.4 billion over 10 years to manage the state’s IT infrastructure.’ Reader miller60 adds, ‘Virginia’s IT systems drew scrutiny last fall when state agencies reported rolling outages due to the lack of network redundancy.’
(Via Slashdot.)
Presidential Prank of the Day | WildAmmo.com: “Presidential Prank of the Day Posted by i.WA on August 24th, 2010 Posted in Images Tags: obama, prank View Comments 602 Share
(Via WildAmmo.)
Tundra Turmoil: How Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers Created an Opening for Democrats: “From: The Beat
John Nichols
As Republicans fly lawyers to Alaska for a fight with the Tea Party movement, the apparent upset of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski in a Republican primary could create an opening for Democrats to compete in a state where their prospects had been written off.
“
(Via The Nation: All Blog Posts.)
Many Hackers Accidentally Send Their Code To Microsoft: “joshgnosis writes ‘When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they’ll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rocky Heckman. ‘It’s amazing how much stuff we get.’ Heckman also said Microsoft was a common target for people testing their attacks. ‘The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second.”
(Via Slashdot.)
FTC Catches Rock Band Game’s PR Agency Faking Reviews:
The PR outfit that publicizes the Rock Band video game franchise settled with the Federal Trade Commission, which caught agency employees posing as customers to post positive reviews on the iTunes App store.
Reverb Communications agreed to remove the reviews in question and not post any reviews in the future without revealing the writers’ connection to the product.
The FTC intervention falls in line with the commission’s efforts to crack down on non-disclosed online paid endorsements of products.
How much do reviews matter to you when you’re trolling for apps?
(Via Consumerist.)
Rumor: Blockbuster Filing for Bankruptcy Next Month [Blockbuster]: “
The much-documented decline of Blockbuster is drawing to a halt earlier than expected, with key people involved in the movie business touting a bankruptcy notice for the big blue just next month. More »
(Via Gizmodo.)
