Tag archive: Wales

Facebook commerce company Milyoni, which “helps entertainment and lifestyle companies convert Facebook fans into customers,” has teamed up with Ridgeline Entertainment to produce what will be the first ever global pay-per-view broadcast to  take place on Facebook. The event being shown is the Michael Jackson ‘Michael Forever’ tribute concert, which takes place at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on October 8. To watch the concert… Read More

According to Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, the accoutrements of the digital life – social networking sites, texting, and e-mails, are undermining community life. Talking to the Sunday Telegraph, he said that friendships were becoming more “transient,” with quantity valued over quality, and claimed that was a key factor in suicides among young people.… Read More

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Jane’s Police Review has obtained information showing that eight officers of Strathclyde Police in Scotland claim Jedi as their religion on diversity forms. Additionally, two civilian staff claim to follow the Star Wars religion. That’s from a total of 8,200 police officers and 2,800 civilian staff. No other UK force had Jedi members. Jane's Police Review editor Chris Herbert told… Read More

Jimmy Wales is best known for his role in founding Wikipedia—and for bringing some controversy to the foundation for personal expenses and alleged payment-for-edit actions. However, Wales has also been involved in the startup Wikia, which has been operating since 2006. The idea behind Wikia is to apply community-driven services and so-called crowdsourcing to everyday Internet tasks, following the principle that the “wisdom of… Read More

Normally it’s 100 years before a British census is available, to ensure none, or very few, of those mentioned in it are still alive. However, a 2006 ruling by the Information Commissioner has meant that the census information for England and Wales has become available from the National Archives sooner than the projected January 2012 release date. Although searching the census – the first to have data written by the participants themselves – is… Read More

It’s beginning to seem as if some Brits don’t take the idea of data protection very seriously. There have already been several losses of data this year, and now a memory stick containing data on 10,000 persistent offenders and all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales has gone missing, the BBC reports. Even worse, the data on the stick, which was held by the company PA Consulting, not a government agency, was unencrypted. The… Read More

The BBC has reported that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been accused by Jeffrey Merkey, the former chief scientist at Novell, of agreeing to editMerkey’s Wikipedia page in exchange for a $5,000 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. On a mailing list, Merkey published as statement he’dreleased to AP. "Wales agreed that in exchange for a substantial donation and other financial support of the Wikimedia Foundation projects,… Read More

One of the problems with publicly-editable reference project like Wikipedia is that any subject is fair game, from the politics of how the organization is run to the private lives of its founders. James "Jimbo" Wales, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, is finding himself again at the center of controversy following an ugy breakup with Canadian political pundit Rachel Marsden. Wales is currently going… Read More

A 1000-page report compiled by Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center has revealedconcerns about privacy and surveillance during 2007.   The reports fins that privacy protection has “worsened” and that in more societies than ever, surveillance has become“endemic.”   Of the 47 countries ranked, only Greece, which topped the table, had "adequate safeguards against abuse."… Read More

We judge politicians on a lot of things – voting records, where they stand on policies, and other burning topics. But we don’t usually judge them on their websites.   Last week,however, British Members of Parliaments were judged on just that, in the British Computer Society MP website awards. The overall winner was Adam Price, MP for Carmarthen East in Wales.   'It's an honour to win the award but it's a… Read More

The man who tore down the ivory towers of academia with an encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone plans to take a similar approach to searches with a new open-source search tool that he hopes will directly challenge Google. Jimmy Wales announced on Friday that his company Wikia is working on an open source search client that uses individual computers to index the Internet. The new search project is based on Grub, an existing platform… Read More

Three men have been jailed in Britain for inciting terrorist murder on the Internet.   Younis Tsouli, 23, Tariq Al-Daour, 21, and Wasemm Mughal were all found guilty at Woolwich Crown Court in London. Moroccan-born Tsouli, a computer expert who worked with Al-Queda, received 10 years. Al-Daour, a British citizen born in the Arab Emirates, was given six-and-a-half years, while Mughal, who has a degree in chemistry from Leicester University,… Read More

On its surface, Wikipedia seems like a tremendous thing: create a globally accessible online encyclopedia, constantly expanded, updated, and corrected by the entire Internet community. And, indeed, the project has gained substantial momentum over the years, sprouting innumerable localized versions and finding the accuracy of its science articles favorably compared to the famed Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet the collaborative nature of… Read More

Digital mapping company Tele Atlas announced today that the newly-available Pioneer AVIC Z1 in-car GPS-based navigation system on the TomTom Go 910 incorporate new phonetic data from Tele Atlas to improve the quality of speech technology used by the systems. If you've ever used an in-car GPS or similar device with speech synthesis capabilities, you've probably had a few laughs

From LGE's press release: LGE is poised to release new digital TVs that adopt the XD Engine, a chip developed to enhance picture quality, as well as to promote the XD Engine as its premier global technology brand. The full lineup of digital TV's will enable LGE to broaden its related domestic market base. The XD Engine has improved on the XDRpro, the previous chip that the company developed to enhance picture quality through… Read More