Digital Trends
An 80-year-old man from Paris is the latest to report a dangerous problem with his iPhone – in this case, a screen that cracked before his eyes.
"I took it out of my pocket and held it to my ear and saw the screen crack up like a car windscreen," Rolland Caufman told AFP.
There have been several similar incidents, including one where a man claims a shard from the screen hit his eye when it broke up. And all this has prompted an investigation by French consumer watchdog DGCCRF, which said:
Albert Gonzales of Miami might never have thought it, but he’s making history. The 38-year-old, along with two unnamed Russians, has been charged with the largest identity theft in history – stealing data from 130 million credit and debit cards.
The Department of Justice alleges that Gonzales used an SQL injection attack to breach firewalls and steal the information. His targets included 7-Eleven, Hannaford Brothers, and card payment processor Heartland Payment Systems. Two other companies are mentioned but not named.
The stolen data was sent to servers in California and Illinois, as well as to Latvia, Holland and the Ukraine from where it could be sold.
Once the kicking starts, everyone wants a piece, or so it seems. After being found guilty of copyright violation in Sweden, now file-sharing site Pirate Bay is under fire in Holland, too, according to the Guardian.
A judge there has given Pirate Bay 10 days to block Dutch users, or the founders will face fines of $43,000 a day, up to a maximum of $4.3 million. But as the court said, quite how it would enforce this is another question, since "the Pirate Bay is not a legal person who can be summoned, but a co-operative."
Italian authorities have been investigating The Pirate Bay file-sharing site, with a view to bringing charges of assisting copyright infringement. This comes just weeks after the four men behind the site were found guilty of the same charge in their native Sweden, where they were sentenced to a year in jail and a fine of over $3 million.
However, it raises interesting questions of jurisdiction, according to the Guardian. Although Pirate Bay is run from Sweden, its servers (which don’t host files) are reportedly in Holland. Three of the four men behind the operation are believed to live in Switzerland, with only one still living in Sweden.
Hacker Gary McKinnon is facing extradition from the UK to the US for breaking into a number of US military networks – NASA, the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense.
He’s exhausted a number of appeals, including the European Court of Human Rights, and is currently awaiting a decision by the Home Secretary on when the extradition process will begin. If he’s convicted in the US, he potentially faces decades in jail and millions of dollars in fines, the BBC reports.
In both Japan and Holland, courts have come to decisions, imposing real life penalties on those who have committed crimes in virtual worlds.
In Japan, a woman who hacked into a man’s account and killed his avatar after he ended their virtual marriage in the role-playing game Maple Story, faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data. She hasn’t yet been charged, but if found guilty, it could result in five years in prison as well as a $5,000 fine.
A police official in the city of Sapporo quoted the woman as saying:
You can get excitement at trade shows, but usually nothing like this. As the CeBIT Expo was getting ready to close on Sunday, it was raided by German police, according to AP. With 180 officers in the building, 51 exhibitors were targeted. Police claimed the raid was in response to the "number of criminal complaints by the holders ofpatent rights in the run-up to CeBIT has been rising for years". AP reported that 24 of the raided stands were from Chinese companies, 12 from Taiwan, nine from Germany, three from Honk Kong,with one each from Poland, Holland and Korea.
The police took away 68 boxes of items, including digital picture frames and mobiles phones. The alleged patent infringements cover MP3 and MP4 and DVD players, among other things.
CDs sales are down and major labels complain that digital sales haven’t made up the shortfall. EMI, now in the hands off an equity company, is laying off2,000 people and artists are threatening to go elsewhere. The old guard is crumbling, and the way business is done needs to change. That seems to be ably demonstrated by the fact thatnew-style music labels like Sellaband and Sliceofthepie are doing so well. Both operate online, and raisesmall sums from a large number of investors to finance the recording of albums by new artists. And both have proved remarkably successful. Sellaband has negotiated a deal with Amazon giving it its own store, while Sliceofthepie has raised $300,000 in just six month, and plans to sign more new acts that most of the majors, Vnunet reports. Sellaband released 11 albums in 2007, each one costing $50,000, with profits – so far $25,000 – split between artists and investors. "Two years after leaving the business I went to a conference on the future of music," said Sellaband boss Johan Vosmeijer, former head of SonyBMG in Holland. "I heard speeches frompeople in the know and those still in power and nothing has changed. I drove away with smile on my face knowing that we have nothing to fear from them. It is a pity, because there are great peopleworking for record companies. It’s just that the top level isn’t listening."
You’ve heard of lawsuits to close illegal download sites. But in raids in England and Holland, police arrested the man believed to be behind the file-sharing site site OiNK and closed down its servers. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Oink. You needed an invitation to become one of its 180,000 members, and that invitation was only forthcoming if you had a “donation” of music to share – as well as money to pay for downloads. In fact, OiNK was one of the main sources of illegal pre-release music. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the site has leaked 60 major pre-release albums this year, often weeks before their official release date. Oink members distributed recordings in the torrent file format to other OiNK members, and had to keep posting such music to the site to maintain their membership. Once an album had been posted on the site, the users that downloaded it then passed the content to other websites, forums and blogs, where multiple copies were made. In a statement, Jeremy Banks, Head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, said: “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online. This operation was a classic example of how the recording industry can work with law enforcement agencies to prove that illegal operations on the internet are not immune from detection.” The man arrested was an unnamed 24 year-old IT worker from Middlesbrough, England. According to the BBC, he worked for a multi-national company, whose offices were searched, along with the home of the man’s father. The site’s servers in Amsterdam had been shut down last week. The arrest was the culmination of a two-year investigation by Interpol. Police are now trying to trace the money involved, which is believed to amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A new study has examined online usage and penetration in Europe, revealing that the average European spends 24 hours a month surfing the Web, and goes online 16 and a half days during the month. More than 122 million Europeans over the age of 15 go online every day. The survey was carried out by comScore to examine the online habits of people across the continent, and reveals just how pervasive online usage has become. Leading the pack for numbers online is Germany, where over 32 million people go online each month. But Brits were the most active online. At a peak almost 22 million of them were online during the day, spending over 34 hours online each month. Favorite online destinations were tracked for the survey, with Google the most popular, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo, showing that the big three’s dominance easily extends across the Atlantic. Internet penetration continues to grow, too. It’s highest in Holland, where over 80% of the population is online, and through Europe, only three countries (Russia, Spain, and Italy) are below 40%, with Russia lagging seriously, where only 11% of people go online. However, although the survey offers a good snapshot of European surfing habits, comScore Europe managing director Bob Ivins noted, “While the study reflects average net usage and penetration, 20% of users account for 60% of usage, with some people spending hundreds of hours online each month.” He predicted that the line between on- and offline will blur as more people take to watching television on their PCs. As a comparison with Europe, in the U.S. an average of 121 million people are online each day.
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