Normally when we buy products we don’t check to see if any of them have caused cruelty to animals during the testing and manufacturing of the items but it seems according to a new study that consumers misunderstand what the term “cruelty-free” means anyway.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri and Oregon, found while consumers may care if the products they are buying exploit child labor or cause harm to animals the term “cruelty-free”; while a great way to appeal to consumers, is sometimes misused by companies.

This is especially prevalent in the pharmaceutical, fragrance, cosmetic, and shampoo industries as the researchers found that even though those companies used the cruelty-free label there is some animal testing done ‘somewhere’ in the manufacturing process.

The study found that in general consumers got a positive feeling about products that carried such a cruelty-free statement but this quickly changed when they were told of the ambiguous nature of the label due to the wide range of definitions that exist for cruelty-free products.

Sheehan and Lee say their findings are concerning in regard to consumer protection. They say that because they have shown that consumers are willing to spend money on products that are cruelty-free, even if they don’t understand that those products aren’t always completely free of animal testing, the door is opened for product unethical business and advertising practices. Sheehan and Lee believe there should be a legal definition for what constitutes a cruelty-free product to help protect consumers.

via PhysOrg

Why anyone should be surprised by this finding is beyond me.

“Cruelty-Free” Label Misunderstood By Consumers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Mobile companies are making lots of money, as anyone with ridiculous cellphone bills will rant about, but not much is said about how, even with all those profits, those same companies are also losing money.

According to a new study courtesy of Juniper Research these losses are no small amounts either, but in fact can possible add up to billions of dollars, like $58 billion if the study is accurate.

Surprisingly the root cause for these losses are the very mechanisms used to calculate how much you owe them each month. With the ever increasing use of mobile devices and the ever increasing variety of those devices is cause a huge headache for the billing systems used by mobile companies.

As Windsor Holt said, study co-author, when asked by Sean Ludwig from VentureBeat the current systems in place right now can’t accurately identify how the traffic going through the company’s networks is being processed.

That $58 billion in losses equals only 6% of the industry’s total revenue but if things keep up the way they are the study suggests that amount could climb drastically by five times by 2016; which by anyone’s standard would amount to a lot of money.

It is suggested by the study that carriers really are in danger of undermining revenue with their rust to add as many value-added service as they can without first investing in solutions to be able to track data in real-time.

Mobile Carriers Lose $58B From Problematic Billing Systems In 2011 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Personally I had never thought that cars with the exception of the muscle cars of the 70′s and 80′s (there were a few) was ever broken down to a male female demographic. Sure there is the old married and single demographic but apparently the female car buying demographic is a real thing that is closely monitored. I guess that can explain why I suck at marketing, well partly anyway.

To highlight that demographic Inside Line has released their list of 2011 car models and included with that was a the top 10 choices favored the most by women. While some of the favorite really shouldn’t come as any surprise I didn’t recognize a few of the names on the list, like: the Rogue and the Eos, or the Matrix for that matter which was the number five pick for 54.1% of women.

Anyway here is the complete Top 10 2011 car models with the highest proportion of women buyers.

1. Volvo S40 – 57.9%
2. Nissan Rogue – 56.9%
3. Volkswagen Eos – 56.4%
4. Volkswagen New Beetle – 54.6
5. Toyota Matrix – 54.1%
6. Hyundai Tucson – 54%
7. Honda CR-V – 53.4%
8. Toyota RAV4 – 54%
9. Nissan Juke – 52.7% (tie)
10. Jeep Compass – 52.7% (tie)

via AutoBlog

The Top 10 Cars That Are A Favorite With The Ladies is a post from: The Inquisitr

Anyone who has played Gears of War or Mass Effects will probably recognize the name Unreal Game Engine as that is the powerhouse gaming engine that powers two of gaming’s biggest titles, and it seems that it will be now powering software to be used by FBI trainees.

In a deal with Virtual Heroes, a Raleigh, North Carolina, based interactive learning simulation company, the Unreal engine, though the just launched Unreal Government Network (UGN) initiative from Epic, will used by various agencies and units of the United States and allied governments.

There are already several projects underway that fall under the UGN with the FBI Academy using the Unreal Engine 3 to create a multiplayer crime scene simulator for its cadets.

As well a “top-five defense contractor” and a “national laboratory” will be using the technology for custom-made integrations and visualization.

Add to that growing list the HumanSim platform is in development and is aimed at medical education training as is a new platform being developed by VirtualHeroes and Duke University for anesthesiology training for Army physicians.

This of course is really just a natural expansion of the work that VirtualHeroes has done for the Army as they were the company behind the popular video game America’s Army, which also uses the Unreal engine.

via GameSpot

The Unreal Game Engine Being Used By The FBI In Training Software is a post from: The Inquisitr

Here’s some news that should send terror into the hearts of every student who uses Twitter without considering what they are posting to the service for all the world, oh and their friends.

It seems that Austin Carroll at Garrett High School in Garrett Indiana was minding his own business and talking with friends on Twitter and as kids will the language being used was filled with the proverbial F-Bomb. So imagine his surprise when he went to school the next only to find out that he was being expelled for the use of profanity.

The school claimed that the tweet was made on school property during school hours however the only problem with that claim was that when looking at the details of the tweet that he was supposedly expelled for carries a timestamp of 2:30 AM which means that there is no way that this could have been written as the school claims.

Here is the tweet that got young Carroll in trouble (contains strong language):

“Fuck is one of the fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and still fucking makes sense.”

via Techdirt

Has the problem with this whole thing registered yet?

How did the school know what he had written and why are they trying to punish a kid for something that has absolutely nothing to do with the school, even if he wrote it while he was at school.

Well it turns out that the school is monitoring all student Twitter accounts:

The principal at Garrett High School claims their system tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in, meaning even if he did tweet it from home their system could have recognized it when he logged in again at school.

via Indiana News

Keep in mind as well that he wasn’t just given a few days off from school to consider his actions but rather he has been expelled from the school for the rest of the school year in his senior year and with only three months to go.

Someone care to tell me how fair is this reaction by the school especially after violating his rights in the way that they did.

School Principal Admits To Tracking Student Tweets After Expelling Student For Profane Tweets is a post from: The Inquisitr

Botnet’s are a curse on the web as they are used to spam us with emails and to help spread malware. In the last couple of years Microsoft has taken some interesting steps to try and get the bigger botnets taken out of action. Using the court and laws that already exist on the books they have been waging a quiet war against the people running these botnets. A good example of that is when they took down the Rushstock botnet back in March 2011.

The most recent move by the company took advantage of anti-racketeering laws in order to go after another botnet that was being used to expand the original botnet and to spread the Zeus malware package.

The effort was called Operation b71 and for the first time involved other companies, Financial Services – Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and NACHA, in order to obtain warrants for the server seizures through a federal lawsuit based in part on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

The actual seizures, done by Microsoft employees backed up by US Marshals, happened at two web hosting centers in Scranton, Pennsylvania and Lombard, Illinois and also involved seizing hundreds of domain names.

This was also the first time that Microsoft moved against more than one target simultaneously.

via Ars Technica / Naked Security

Microsoft And US Marshals Take Down Botnet [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Back at the end of February I passed along the news that after the Supreme Court had given the FBI a little bit of a smack down with it came to warrantless GPS tracking that the FBI claimed that they would have to shut off some 3,000 GPS tracking units already in play.

Now we have the NPR reporting that the FBI is still whining about the Court’s decision and that they had to scramble for weeks in order to get the search warrants they needed to turn those ‘needed’ GPS tracking units back on.

When he appeared before a Congressional hearing last month FBI Director Robert Meuller said that the ruling “will inhibit our ability” to do GPS tracking when it comes to a “number of surveillances where it has been tremendously beneficial”.

During his testimony Meuller also said that in case where the FBI didn’t have probable cause they had to deploy teams of six to eight agents in order to track suspects the old fashioned way.

It turns out that out of the 3,000 GPS tracker that were in use at the time of the ruling 2,750 of them have been turned back on with only 250 devices that they couldn’t turn on.

However what a FBI lawyer said in relation t o this to the NPR should really make the average American worry:

“If you require probable cause for every technique, then you are making it very, very hard for law enforcement,” an FBI lawyer told NPR.

via Ars Technica

Let that settle in for a minute.

“If you require probable cause for every technique….”

Isn’t that the whole point of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment – to protect the citizen from government and law enforcement from over stepping their power. What the FBI would apparently like is for the Fourth Amendment to disappear because screw the citizen the needs of the FBI are more important.

It should be up to the government and all law enforcement agencies to be able to prove beyond any doubt that a crime had been committed before search warrant and new technologies like GPS tracking are permissible.

FBI Claims That The Recent Supreme Court GPS Ruling Is Too Hard On Them is a post from: The Inquisitr

There is no getting around – we hate call centers, especially those that are run by companies in foreign countries; but now it seems that we might also have good reason to lower our trust level even further when it comes to dealing with them.

Reporters for The Sunday Times went undercover in India recently and discovered that there are some people at these call centers who have no qualms about selling private information for pennies on the dollar.

When the reporters met with two purported IT workers they were offered 45 different types of data that had been gathered from victims. This information included names, phone numbers, credit card details, and addresses which could be made for as little as 3¢ for each record.

As one of the data thieves bragged:

“These [pieces of data] are ones that have been sold to somebody already. This is Barclays, this is Halifax, this is Lloyds TSB. We’ve been dealing so long we can tell the bank by just the card number.”

via Naked Security – Sophos

Much of the information was also claimed to be no older than at least 72 hours and included information on insurance policies, mobile phone contract, mortgages and more.

Police in India claim that it is difficult for them to investigate this kind of data theft because the companies involved are unwilling to go public and admit that customer data has been compromised this way.

Call Center Workers Caught Selling Private Consumer Information For Pennies is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to researchers at the University of California, who teamed up with researchers at Yahoo! in Spain, Twitter enables us to read patterns within Twitter streams that might be able to let us predict trends in stock prices.

Where most other studies that have looked at this question by measure the correlation between Twitter and stock prices based on sediment the UoC study ignored sediment and instead looked at the volume of tweets and how they were linked to each other.

The idea was to look at Twitter more as a network of data rather than a bunch of people talking about stocks. By using this method the researchers were able to beat out other baseline strategies by between 1.4 and more than 10 percent, as well as the Dow Jones Average over a four month period.

This was done by gathering the daily closing price and number of trades for 150 randomly selected stocks for the Standard & Poors 500 during the first half of 2010. At this point they created a program to filter in those tweets that were relevant to those companies during that period of time.

Their findings were nuanced: the number of trades seemed to be correlated with the number of tweets they labeled “connected components” – the number of distinct topics (such as the CEO’s actions, a new product and someone leaving the company) being discussed about that company that day – rather than the sheer volume of tweets. And they found that stock prices were slightly correlated with “connected components” as well.

via All Twitter

It is also good to remember that one of the first people to really get the power of Twitter were the people who play for real in the stock market and that StockTwits was one of the first third party services built on top of Twitter that took off like crazy.

Study Says Twitter Able To Predict The Stock Market is a post from: The Inquisitr

Some days it seems like there are tidal shifts in technology and how it is used when it comes to the law and today was one of those days when we see a huge shift in the law because of one judge’s rulings.

One of the things that has always been in contention when it comes to dealing with copyright infringement lawsuits is that anything to do with copyright is governed by federal law. The states have no say – legally – when it comes to copyright case, except; and you had to know there was an ‘except’ coming, when it comes to the State of Florida.

By exploiting a loophole in the law copyright troll could bring a case before the state courts based on ‘the pure bill of discovery’ which allowed them to demand subpoenas that they could then send to ISPs without having to provide one iota of evidence.

Well if seems that Judge Marc Schumacher has had enough of this nonsense, or as he put it – fishing expeditions and has issued what is being called a landmark ruling.

He begins by noting that many federal courts have been dismissing Bittorrent cases with the basis of those dismissals being that these ‘copyright trolls’ (the judge’s words) are violating Bittorrent users’ right to anonymous speech, which is a right protected under the First Amendment.

“The Supreme Court often has recognized that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech. Other federal courts have held that Internet users sharing copyrighted works via the BitTorrent application are themselves engaged in anonymous speech that warrants First Amendment protection,” the judge writes in his order.

Judge Schumacher goes on to explain that because he has no jurisdiction over copyright matters, he cannot establish whether the claim of the copyright holder trumps the anonymity of the defendants. Thus, it is impossible for a state court to conclude whether the copyright holder’s request to identify the file-sharers is legitimate or not.

via TorrentFreak

The premise here being that a Bittorrent users’ right to anonymous speech shields them from being exposed by state court lawsuits. In addition the judge ruled that the ‘pure bill of discovery’ cannot be used in the case of mass-Bittorrent lawsuits because they are intended for the defendant to be the target, not third parties like ISPs.

Chalk one up for the consumer – well for today anyway.

Landmark Ruling Says BitTorrent Downloads Are Protected Anonymous Speech is a post from: The Inquisitr

The other day I wrote about how the Pirate Bay was seriously investigating the use of GPS controlled flying drones to act as file servers for the Pirate Bay site. Well, it seems that this has already been done, and quite successfully it would seem.

After reading about what the Pirate Bay was planning Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, let the folks at TorrentFreak know that this wasn’t anything new.

Liam was part of a team that put together a project called “Electric Countermeasures” and its intent was to create something like an ‘aerial Napster’, or if you like an ‘aerial Pirate Bay’ but as they progressed with the project it has turned out to be something much more.

The idea was to use programmed drones to be part robotic swarm and part infrastructure that could gather in one place, create their own local WiFi network that anyone within range could connect to, and then disperse so that they could escape detection.

“The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with,” the creators explain.

via TorrentFreak

The “Electric Countermeasures” would be much more expensive that what is proposed by the Pirate Bay but that is to be expected given that their hardware requirements would be a lot higher. Each of the drones that would be a part of the swarm type network would need to be powered by 2x 2200mAh LiPo batteries with the lift required being provided by 4x Roxxy Brushless Motors that would run off a GPS flight control board. The master control systems would run through XBee wireless modules.

The group already has some demo drones which you can see in action in the video below.

Electronic Countermeasures @ GLOW Festival NL 2011 from liam young on Vimeo.

Those Pirate Bay Flying Drones As Servers – It’s Already Being Done [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Beside being a great country that can infringe on copyrighted material quicker than you can change your pants China is also well known for its love of anything technology based but especially for its love of apple and its products, when they are making copies of those products that is.

Which means with the release of the new iPad, and due to the hard time of getting government approval to import them, smugglers have fired up their own lines of access and have been smuggling the new iPad into China and people eager to snap them up regardless of the cost.

Tech In Asia is reporting that to date there has been over 200,000 of the new iPads that have been smuggled into the country with most coming in through the main city of Shenzhen. The ease of smuggling through Shenzhen is primarily due to it bordering Hong Kong so many of the smuggled iPads are literally being walked into the city.

Along with that there is also a steady stream coming directly from the US via Chinese immigrants and overseas Chinese students who are lining up to buy the iPad at the Apple stores in the US and then getting them into the hands of the “grey importers”.

How much is this worth to the gadget mules? Those in the US are reportedly netting about US$20 for each iPad they buy and pass on to the smugglers. In Hong Kong, the fee is a lower 80 RMB ($12.65). But that still can represent a very lucrative business for the cross-border carriers, who are often mainland Chinese who would very likely earn less per day doing a conventional job. The rest of the price mark-up that gets passed onto consumers is dictated by the main grey import agents depending on the balance of supply and demand. It’s conceivable that some of the very first smuggled new iPads into mainland China will change hands for as much as 10,000 RMB ($1,580), before the price settles down to a more routine level that’s only, say, 500 RMB above the proper retail price.

As the old saying goes – where there’s a will there’s a way, especially when it comes to Apple products it seems.

Over 200,000 New iPads Reportedly Already Smuggled Into China is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay, things just got interesting.

For those of you not keeping up with the whole Megaupload and Hotfile court cases suffice it to say that while Kit Dotcom gets a reprieve of sorts in New Zealand, Hotfile was taken to court by the usual entertainment industry trade group.

Well it seems that Hotfile, and indirectly Megaupload, just found itself a friend in court as Google has filed a brief in federal court defending the file-sharing company in its case against the MPAA. According the the brief Google is accusing the movie companies of misleading the court and that contrary to the claims of the MPAA Hotfile is in fact protected under the DMCA’s safe harbor provision.

By using this argument much of the points being made by Google are also relevant to the criminal charges against Megaupload. As Google points out in the brief services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia still exist in part because of the DMCA safe harbor clause but if it was up to the MPAA those services would be shut down as well.

“Without the protections afforded by the safe harbors, those services might have been forced to fundamentally alter their operations or might never have launched in the first place,” Google writes in the brief.

[...]

“The case-law uniformly rejects efforts to deprive service providers of the safe harbor based on generalized awareness that unspecified (or even ‘rampant’) infringement is occurring on their services,” Google writes.

via TorrentFreak

The whole argument as put forth by the MPAA that Hotfile is predominately about storing and sharing copyright infringing files doesn’t matter, regardless to the number of infringements that there may be lodged against them. As long as the DMCA exists the only problem Hotfile would have would be if they knew about every single infringing file and didn’t have some mechanism in place to have them taken down – which they do.

Google also points out in its brief the fallacy regarding the charge by the MPAA that Hotfile only removes the links to supposed infringing files instead of actually deleting the files.

“But, in this respect, Hotfile did exactly what the DMCA demands, and plaintiffs’ takedown notices cannot be used to charge the service with knowledge of allegedly infringing material that those notices did not specifically identify.”

This is an interesting observation that does indeed make sense. While Google doesn’t mention it, removing the actual files would indeed be overbroad and wrong. For example, if an artist stores his files on Hotfile but wants to take unauthorized copies offline, he or she would not want Hotfile to delete the original as well. The same is true for YouTube videos and a variety of other content.

via TorrentFreak

While some would have thought that the case against Hotfile was an open and shut one the fact is that now that one of the big boys, with a lot more to lose, has stepped into the party the landscape of this case has changed; and at the same time may have just give Megaupload a new lease on life.

Hotfile, And Indirectly Megaupload, Get Some Surprise Help From Google In Court is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay, I admit it, this is a new one on me as the last thing I would think would be occurring while a woman is exercising is that she could actually be having an orgasm; but it seems it has taken a scientific study to confirm something that women have known for some time (and you thought she was smiling at you).

According to Indiana University health researchers Debby Herbenick and Dennis Fortenberry the whole “exercise induced orgasms (EIO)” is something very real, or at least that is what the results of their study of hundreds of women has concluded.

Here’s the thing though – most of the women weren’t even thinking about anything sexual when they had their orgasms. It seems that just the exercising in of itself is enough of a trigger.

In order to really understand what was causing this Herbenick and Fortenberry looked into what types of exercise might be causing these EIOs

Diverse types of physical exercise were associated with EIO and EISP [exercise-induced sexual pleasure]. Of the EIO group, 51.4 percent reported experiencing an orgasm in connection with abdominal exercises within the previous 90 days. Others reported experiencing orgasm in connection to such exercises as weight lifting (26.5 percent), yoga (20 percent), bicycling (15.8), running (13.2 percent) and walking/hiking (9.6 percent) . . . ab exercises were particularly associated with the “captain’s chair,” which consists of a rack with padded arm rests and back support that allows the legs to hang free. The goal is to repeatedly lift the knees toward the chest or toward a 90-degree angle with the body.

via io9

Being serious here for a moment I sure am glad that this type of thing doesn’t happen to men while their exercising – seriously glad.

Women Plus Exercise Could Equal Orgasm Say Scientists is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is a poster child for the fight against piracy it would have to be the constant attacks against The Pirate Bay by the entertainment industry and their trade group flacks around the world. They have tried everything from arranging to have the groups servers seized to trying every trick in the book to have the ISPs pull their access; and yet the site still lives.

However The Pirate Bay is not one to just sit and do nothing as we have seen them have their servers located in subterranean vaults to condensing the code running the site down to a point where it can fit on a flash drive.

Well it seems that they are investigating one more way to make it even more difficult for the entertainment industry to shut them down. TorrentFreak, an excellent blog that covers this type of stuff all the time, has a post up saying that The Pirate Bay is looking at using GPS controlled drones to handle their hosting.

“Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak. We were further informed that the first drone will probably fly above international waters.

“We’re already the most resilient and the most down to earth. That’s why we need to lift off, being this connected to the ground doesn’t feel appropriate to us anymore,” TPB told us [TorrentFreak].

As silly as the idea might sound the reality is that technology needed t o do something like this is pretty well off the shelf type of stuff now. Taking into account that the computers needed for something like this are now the size of the Raspberry Pi; which only costs $35, and that far-reaching radio equipment is almost as cheap the idea of putting together a skybourne network isn’t all that far-fetched.

Right now the folks behind The Pirate Bay are only investigating the possibilities but seriously I wouldn’t put it past them.

The Pirate Bay’s Next Servers Could Be GPS Controlled Drones is a post from: The Inquisitr

While most everyone will know a little something about World War II not many people, especially the younger generations, will remember that there was an actual Nazi Party in the United States during the lead up to war and during it; although they weren’t that vocal during the war.

It also turns out that the American Nazi Party was so sure of Hitler’s success in beating America that they spent millions in the 1930′s to build him a deluxe compound for when Hitler took up residence in the United States.

The bunker was equipped with a diesel power plant, giant meat locker, 375,000 gallon concrete water tank, 22 bedrooms, and of course its own bomb shelter.

Today however the buildings have become canvas’ for graffiti artists as the property waits to be bulldozed into oblivion and to make way for a picnic area for hikers.

Here’s a few more pictures of what was once a home to be for Hitler.

via Daily Mail

The Hollywood Bunker Built For Hitler – Just In Case is a post from: The Inquisitr

I never understood how on one hand airplane pilots could now be using Apple iPads as their log books and other flight information but passengers couldn’t use one during taxing, take-off, and landings.

It seems that the FAA might finally be wondering the same thing as word is popping up on the web that the agency is going to take another look at their list of personal electronics and when they can be used on airplane flights.

The last time they revisited this issue was back in 2006 and well before the explosion of tablets so they apparently feel that maybe the time has come to rethink their policy.

Laura J. Brown, deputy assistant administrator for the public affairs for the FAA had this to say about the decision:

With the advent of new and evolving electronic technology, and because the airlines have not conducted the testing necessary to approve the use of new devices, the FAA is taking a fresh look at the use of personal electronic devices, other than cellphones, on aircraft.

Th reason that the airlines haven’t done this is because of what they consider to be an onerous cost to them. For example and airline would need to test every generation of the iPad, as well as any other tablets, on every single model plane in their fleet in order to get FAA approval and all that testing costs a lot of money.

Wit the FAA doing the testing, or making it easier on the airlines, we could see those silly “turn off all electronic devices while landing” announcements, which I am sure will make some folks very happy,

via Ars Technica

FAA Reported To Be Revisiting List Of Allowed Personal Electronics On Flights is a post from: The Inquisitr

I am a sucker for good action movies. They give you some time to basically unblock your brain, chill out, and enjoy all kinds of mindless mayhem.

While I’m personally waiting for the next installment of Riddick (oh be quiet you haters) the upcoming release on April 13 of the space prison movie Lockout is one my list of mindless fun to enjoy; and to tease us even further a new trailer has been released.

The movie revolves around the rescue of the President’s daughter, played by Maggie Grace, from the orbiting prison known as Maximum Security One by the roguish federal agent played by Guy Pearce.

So without further ado here’s another five minutes of Lockout for you to enjoy and help hold you over until April 13.

via io9

Five Whole Minutes Of Awesome Action From Space Prison Movie Lockout [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Path made the news big, and not how they would have liked, when it was found out that they were upload users mobile address books from their smartphones to Path servers without asking permission. While Path worked quickly to rectify the situation, and Apple stepping in to further clarify what Apps could and couldn’t do without a user’s permission it appears that this hasn’t satisfied some people.

Apparently 13 individuals are bringing a class-action lawsuit against 18 of the biggest names in tech over the issue. The names include:

• Path
• Twitter
• Apple
• Facebook
• Beluga
• Yelp
• Burbn
• Instagram
• Foursquare
• Gowalla
• Foodspotting
• Hipster
• LinkedIn
• Rovio
• ZeptoLab
• Chillingo
• Electronic Arts
• Kik Interactive

The claim is that it was discovered in February that these companies were actively accessing a user’s mobile address book and transferring it to company servers.

The reason that this was done claim companies is to be able to provide better friend recommendations but because they weren’t clearly stating exactly what they were doing and asking permission to do so the companies were violating the user’s rights.

“The defendants—several of the world’s largest and most influential technology and social networking companies—have unfortunately made, distributed and sold mobile software applications (“Apps”) that, once installed on a wireless mobile device, surreptitiously harvest, upload and illegally steal the owner’s address book data without the owner’s knowledge or consent,” the plaintiffs say in the filing.

via VentureBeat

The group involved in the lawsuit claim they’ve experienced damages such as loss of privacy, diminution of address book data value, process and battery life while the address books were being transferred as well as out of pocket expenses. They are suing for $12,000 or more from each of the offending companies along with any profits that was made from the use of those address books.

Class-Action Lawsuit Launched Against Path, Apple, Facebook Over Privacy is a post from: The Inquisitr

Now before all you Mac fans start beating your chests and repeating the pointless mantra of Mac’s don’t get viruses or trojan let me calm you down by letting you know that this new malware, while being targeted directly at Macs has not been seen out in the wild.

The warning comes from security firm Intego, a company that specializes in Mac-related software, and they say this this new malware is a variant of the Imuler.C trojan and it works by playing on a default action on Macs where files extensions are not shown.

The trojan works by trying to convince the user that the file they have downloaded and is about to open is an image file when in fact it a zip archive named Pictures and Article of Renzin Dorjee.zip or FHM Feb Cover Girl Irina Shayk H-Res Pics.zip.

From Intego’s post on the malware

The malware installs a backdoor at /tmp/.mdworker, along with other files in this directory. A process called .mdworker then launches; the mdworker process (not the absence of the . before the name) is a processed used by Spotlight to index files.

A launchagent file is also installed at ~/library/LaunchAgents/checkvir.plist, along with an executable in the same folder, ensuring that the malware launches when the user logs into his or her Mac, or starts it up. After a restart, the .mdworker process is deleted, and the checkvir executable launches.

via Intego

Once that is done the malware searches for user data which it then tries to upload to a server. As well the malware will take screen shots of the desktop and upload those as well.

As I said at the start – this beastie hasn’t been seen in the wild yet and Intego considers it to be a low risk piece of malware at this point.

via Redmond Pie

A New Mac OS X Malware Discovered is a post from: The Inquisitr

Just as we have the “so-called” video game awards courtesy of Spike TV so do the British courtesy of their British Academy Video Games Awards (BAFTA), sort of the exact opposite in quality to the silliness we are subjected to every year on this side of the big pond.

Yesterday BAFTA announced their choices for winning video games but unlike Spike’s picks Skyrim was shut out of the awards with no wins at all. The other big favorite on this side of the ocean was Bastion but it also saw no love at all from the Brit judges.

Here’s the list of award winners from the BAFTA show:

• Action: Batman: Arkham City
• Artistic Achievement: Rayman Origins
• Audio Achievement: Battlefield 3
• Best Game: Portal 2
• Debut Game: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
• Design: Portal 2
• Family: LittleBigPlanet 2
• Game Innovation: LittleBigPlanet 2
• Mobile & Handheld: Peggle HD
• Online – Browser: Monstermind
• Online Multiplayer: Battlefield 3
• Original Music: LA Noire
• Performer: Mark Hamill – Joker in Batman: Arkham City
• Sport/Fitness: Kinect Sports 2
• Story: Portal 2
• Strategy: Total War: Shogun 2
• Game Award of 2011: Battlefield 3

Now I have to admit thaty I haven’t even heard of some of the games that made the list but hopefully one or two of your favorites racked up a win or two.

via PikiGeek

British Video Game Award Winners Announced is a post from: The Inquisitr

The whole file-sharing business is the big target these for entertainment industry and now book publishers with every day bring new reports, and court decisions, of how the business is under attack and being painted as the worst thing to happen on the web since .. well … Napster.

The newest target that has gotten itself hit with what has to be an onerous decision is Swiss-based RapidShare, regardless of the fact that the company has been trying extremely hard to work with all the various rights holders and deal promptly with any copyright infringement claims.

As for the decision that was handed down by the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg it puts RapidShare in the position that it now has to monitor all user uploads in order to ensure that now copyright material is being stored on their servers.

One of the groups celebrating this decision is the German Booksellers Association, even though there has been no written copy of the court’s verdict made public yet.

“Internet sites can no longer avoid their responsibilities, and profit from copyright infringing uploads of anonymous users,” says Alexander Skipis, chief executive of the German Booksellers Association.

via TorrentFreak

However, as with all legal decisions there is always the problem with unintended consequences and in the case of decisions going against file-sharing or file locker sites one has to wonder when the companies behind cloud based file storage are going to start being affected. Companies like Dropbox and efforts like SkyDrive from Microsoft are all basically the same idea which means they could see themselves facing the same types of court battles in the future.

RapidShare Under Court Order To Filter User Uploads – All Of Them is a post from: The Inquisitr

As the value of homes continue to slide downward to the point that the homes that people purchased on good faith, and with large mortgages, are worth drastically less than when they bought them; or as the popular term goes – they’re underwater.

Following the collapse of the housing and mortgage markets the banks that handed out mortgage money like bottles of vodka at a bachelor party tried to place the blame for all the bad mortgages on low-level employees.

In a report just published this assumption is tossed out like yesterday’s garbage and according to David Montoya, Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the managers responsible for mortgages were more than aware of the problems but did absolutely nothing to correct them.

One of the examples cited came from two employees at Bank of America who testified that they had try to raise concerns about whether documents were being properly notarized but were told by managers to keep quiet and keep on doing what they were told to do – process paperwork.

One vice president said documents in her department were checked only for “formatting and spelling errors,” not the underlying figures or facts in the case.

“Bank of America did not establish effective control over its foreclosure process,” according to the report, to be released Tuesday. And as foreclosure cases multiplied, Bank of America’s management turned up the pressure on employees to move faster. “Despite management representations to the contrary,” the report says, “employee performance reviews demonstrated that Bank of America used defined goals and metrics to evaluate performance-based production in its document execution group.”

via New York Times

Of course Bank of America wasn’t alone in doing this as there are also employees from Wells Fargo where made up job titles like “vice president of loan documentation” and how one employee became a vice president based on his previous job of working at a pizza restaurant.

All in all it would seem that this abdication of responsibility was prevalent through out the banking industry and as result has ruin the lives of more people that we can possibily image; and yet they get bail outs and face no criminal charges. It’s no wonder people have no faith whatsoever in the banking industry.

New Report Suggests that Banking Managers Knew Full Well About Foreclosure Errors is a post from: The Inquisitr

As much as we might rail against things like same-sex marriage or the fact that women have become the new morality political football our problems seem so inconsequential when compared to what women in foreign countries are forced to deal with.

For all the confusion around how laws in our country deal with women they pale in comparison to the laws, mostly based around religion or family name and reputation that exist in countries elsewhere in the world.

Case in point is the story of a young Moroccan girl who was raped by an older man and then forced to marry her rapist. The Moroccan law states that anyone who rapes a female under the age of 18 can receive immunity from criminal charges as long as they marry the minor girl that they raped.

It has been noted by some in the country that under Moroccan law no-one can be forced into marriage against their will but that didn’t stop stop young Amina from ingesting rat poison on the weekend as the last resort open to her in order to escape being married to the man who had raped her.

What is being suggested is that the girl’s family, along with the family of the rapist, came to an agreement that the two should marry even though he was ten years her senior. The deal was made in order to preserve the “honor” of the family of the daughter who had been raped.

So in this case it was a combination of an age old unspoken law and the desire to protect family honor that resulted in a young girls being put into a position where her only way out was by committing suicide.

via BuzzFeed

Forced To Marry Her Rapist A Moroccan Girl Commits Suicide is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember the hyperbole that came out of the Department of Justice (DoJ) and entertainment industry trade groups when they successfully, and highly questionably, shut down Megaupload?

Here at The Inquisitr we covered the story pretty extensively and it hard to not see the totally glee of the trade groups when they managed to get Kim Dotcom, CEO/Owner of Megaupload, arrested and all of his assets seized. They didn’t care that there where probably thousands upon thousands of legitimate users of the service who lost access to their legal files.

While efforts are still ongoing to try and rectify that part of the whole thing something rather interesting has come out of this outcry on behalf of the legal users of Megaupload.

It seems that there were a great number of account on Megaupload for government officials, including US Senators and employees of the Department of Justice.

So here we have a government agency who used the claim that Megaupload was nothing more that a harbor for pirates and copyright infringers; and yet employees of the DoJ have no problem in using the service to host their own files. The same goes for the members of the US Congress, which if played right in court can only make the case against Megaupload a lot harder – as it should be.

The extent to which it is damning is that it sort of makes it tough for the DoJ to make the argument that MegaUpload was nothing but a pure infringement engine without admitting that they were part of it. Granted, this could be overcome with a little hypocrisy and refusal to address the existence of those accounts and what that means, a tactic which is far from out of the question.

via Geekosystem

I really hope that this type of information comes pack to bite the government prosecutors in this case on the ass.

It Turns Out The DoJ Was A Big Fan And User Of Megaupload is a post from: The Inquisitr

On this side of the Atlantic we don’t know much about ‘collection societies’ as they are primarily a European group of entertainment organizations whose whole purpose to travel around and find businesses, and people, who are using copyrighted material in one way or another but have paid for a license to do so.

Some of the groups are a little more hardliner than others but as a whole these groups are proving to be nothing more than what amounts to extortion rackets that have tried to force ISPs and social networks to setup and enforce monitoring systems in order to combat copyright infringement.

One of their other popular past times is to harass small businesses and organization in to paying high fees for using, or playing, copyright material. We have seen in the past where they have gone after hairdressers for having a radio playing in the salon and owners of riding stables who play music in the background to help keep the animals calm.

The newest effort for extorting money comes to us via a post on The Next Web by Robin Wauters about the efforts of the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, SABAM, and his hometown library.

It seems that SABAM has decided that volunteers reading library books aloud to children is something that they should be getting money for. The library in question is in the town of Dilbeek and one of their regular events is that twice a month the library welcomes about 10 children to a reading session, the reason being is that it another way to encourage young children to take up reading.

Due to the fact that the library doesn’t have the funds to pay people to read the books to the kids they rely on volunteers to come in and give of their time to read the books aloud to the participating children. However according to SABAM this isn’t kosher and if the libraries want to continue to do this for the children the library needs to cough up $320 per year to SABAM.

There is no word yet on what the library is going to do but I seriously hope that there is enough of an uproar to make SABAM think twice.

Libraries Being Told To Cough Up The Cash If They Want To Read Aloud To Kids is a post from: The Inquisitr

As anyone who has to fight their way through their inbox on any given day the week will tell you, the worst offenders when it comes to spam has to be all those pharmaceutical companies trying to sell you everything from Viagra to cancer cures.

What you might not know though is that over some of those hundreds of emails that pile in to your already overflowing email inbox come through domains being hosted by companies that know exactly what is going on; and regardless of the legalities they let those site that are the source of those emails to continue doing business.

Researchers at a company by the name of LegitScript, a group that tracks unlicensed sellers of prescription drugs, decide to see what they could find out about the domain hosting companies that let these sham companies conduct their business.

As it turns out LegitScript discovered that two domain registrars play host to over 50% of those ‘rogue’ prescription sites in the world. Of the two registrars the biggest is Internet.bs which has registered 33 percent of those sites with ABSystems coming in second with 17% of the rogue sites registered through them.

Internet.bs currently identifies itself as having about 450,000 domain names –– that’s just about 0.2% of the total 225 million that Verisign recently estimated exist. But about one in three rogue online pharmacies in LegitScript’s database are registered with Internet.bs. If anything, our figures may be low: an analysis of the “not recommended” online pharmacies listed by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy indicates that nearly 44% of those that are active and still online are with Internet.bs.

via LegitScript

The amazing thing was that no matter how LegitSCript tried to make its front company, Pay-Rx.biz, seem like it would do anything illegal it could in order to get customers and make money when it approached Internet.bs to register their domains with them the registrar didn’t blink an eye. In fact the people at Internet.bs did everything they could to get the business – regardless of legalities.

It’s no wonder we are constantly being pummeled by these ‘rogue’ drug sites when registrars like Internet.bs and ABSystems not only turn a blind eye to any illegalities but actively encourage the behavior.

via Ars Technica

Over Half Of The Worlds ‘Rogue’ Drug Domains Issued By Just Two Registars is a post from: The Inquisitr

By now we are all pretty well familiar with things like the Predator drones used by the military for everything from surveillance of enemy troops to killing terrorists but what isn’t as well known is the fact that drones are becoming a favorite for law enforcement as well.

While drones being tested out by various local law enforcement agencies, or being used in places like the Mexico – US border, don’t come with the ability to carry a deadly payload there is talk about them being able to carry a non-lethal payload – sort of like pepper spray from the air.

Currently the drones, like the ShadowHawk that Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office is spending $300,000 on, are primarily used for pursuits of suspects but there are reports that non-lethal type weapons like rubber bullets, tear gas, and even tasers.

While Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel says that the sheriff’s department is always open to new ways to use technology in fighting crime the opposite side of the coin is voiced by Kirsten Bokenkamp of the Houston ACLU that suggests that the same care and control when decided on levels of force to use don’t exist when using a drone.

According the the company that supplies the ShadowHawk, Vanguard Defense Industries, says that there has been no requests to date to include these types of non-lethal weapons on drones being ordered by police departments.

via SlashGear

Police Could Be Getting Drones That Come Equipped With Non-Lethal Weapons is a post from: The Inquisitr

It is a moment that we all dread, and is sure to happen to each of us at some point, that being when you realize that your smartphone has either been stolen or you’ve lost it somewhere.

That rush of panic is because these smartphones have become an integral part of our lives and much of our personal information lives on those phones. So when it is stolen or lost everything about us suddenly has the potential to be in someone else’s possession and all that personal information now belongs to them to do with as they wish, or at least until you can remotely wipe it.

However do we really know what happens with that phone you have lost?

This was the question that the folks at Symantec decided to try and find out and is the reason behind their Smartphone Honey Stick Project. Teaming up with Scott Wright from Security Perspectives Inc they seeded 50 smartphones with all kinds of data and apps, and then they “lost” them.

The phones were dropped in five different cities: New York City, Washington D.D., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Ottawa Canada. Leaving the phones in very high traffic areas they sat back and waited to see what would happen and needless to say the results were not the most encouraging.

It turns out that even the few people who tried to return the phones also tried to access the data on those phones. In fact 96 percent of the lost smartphones had some sort of attempt made to access the data on them.

Here’s a few more things that they found out:

• 6 out of 10 finders attempted to view social media information and emails
• 8 out of 10 finders tried to access corporate information including files that were clearly marked “HR Salaries”
• finders also tried to use apps that were clearly marked “Remote Admin”
• nearly 50% of finders tried to access any banking information on the phones

This is definitely not reassuring at all and as they point out in the post securing your phone should be a primary purpose rather than an afterthought.

The Symantec Smartphone Honey Stick Project – What Happens When You Lose Your Phone? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Much of the news in tech lately has been about the take down of Megaupload and the pending attack by the Department of Justice against a Megaupload clone Hotfile, or at least according to the DoJ it is. However as expected, and predicted by many of the people who keep an eye on this area of technology the overall impact of these shutdowns is extremely questions.

As hard as the entertainment industry trade groups like MPAA, using the DoJ as their law enforcement proxy, try to close these file-sharing sites down human ingenuity will always find a way to circumvent these actions.

This is the whole idea behind a project by NYU art professor David Darts and his PirateBox project, the idea being that you could create a private WiFi based file sharing network that could be started at the drop of a hat and any time or any place.

The original PirateBox was housed in a fair sized metal ‘lunchbox’ type case and cost around $100 to set up and get running.

The newest incarnation is much smaller and costs a lot less at $50.00 which puts the PirateBox in the price range that anyone, including your grandmother, can afford.

The huge price cut has been made possible by using new hardware, specifically the TP-LINKTL-MR3020 3G Wireless N Router, available from Newegg at just $39.99. Once obtained, all people have to do is follow the PirateBox installation instructions here, insert a USB stick full of files and power on.

via TorrentFreak

Here is a demo of the new version of the PirateBox in action.

DIY File-Sharing Gets Smaller And Cheaper With New PirateBox [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Smartphone apps are all the rage these days as developers from around the world try their hand at creating the next great app and cashing in on the possible riches that come from being a top app. The problem is that in many cases the users of those apps have no idea where their valuable data could be ending up as most people don’t think twice about that kind of thing as they download and use all those cool apps.

The UK’s The Sunday Times decided to do some app data investigation and track down just where you data being used to sign into those hot apps, or being created by them, is ending up and came up with some surprising finds.

To be clear we are discussing the UK and by default the European Union, which has totally different rules that need to be followed when it comes to your data. As well it is understood that a large degree of smartphone app require you to agree to some sort of data transferring but you can be assured that the majority of people using these apps pay very little, or no attention to what they agree to when they start using these apps.

In many cases it is just a matter of hitting the Accept button or clicking on the Next button with little regard to what they are agreeing to, until things like this come along of course then all hell breaks loose. There are times though when this type of social engineering masks the fact that some of these apps are performing questionable actions with your data.

For this exercise the Sunday Times testers picked 70 basic smartphone apps and using a piece of software called “MiddleMan” they were able to monitor the app data transfers. Out of those 70 apps twenty-one transmitted the phone number, six sent out email addresses, six shared the exact co-ordinates of the phone, and more than half passed along the phones ID number.

When actions like these are taking place within the EU this raises some big concerns given where some of this data is ending up. In order for this type of action to take place and be acceptable under the EU’s privacy laws the destination countries for your data must be on the EU’s list of approved countries, which is very short. As long as your data is heading to servers in one of the listed countries then this is considered to be a free flow of data.

However two countries not on that list are China and India both of which have a large amount of data being sent to them via those cool apps on your smartphone, and in the eye of the EU this not a good thing.

When EU data travels outside the European Economic Area borders, it is said to travel to “third countries.” This can post new risks to the subject’s privacy, and the data enters a minefield of complex legal regulation.

One such regulatory divide is found in Article 25 of the Data Protection Directive (DPD). It demands that the European Commission determine when “third countries” are providing DP standards equivalent to the EU’s DPD.

via Sophos – Naked Security Blog

Your Smartphone Data Could End Up On Servers In Countries Like China And India is a post from: The Inquisitr

When it comes to most studies these days we are used to them usually being conducted with a narrow time frame with anything beyond 10 years being pretty rare, especially when it comes to drug trials it seems. So when you hear of a study that is conducted with data collected over a 145 year period you can be pretty sure that the researchers have plenty of data to deal with.

This is the case Ball State criminal justice professor Kiesha Warren-Gordon, along with criminal justice faculty Bryan Byers and Stephen Brodt, collaborated to produce a study on murder suicide titled “Murder Followed by Suicide: A Newspaper Surveillance Study Using The New York Times”, and published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. In the examination of 166 murder-suicides reported by The New York Times from 1858 to 2003 found that most murder-suicides involved a male perpetrator using a firearm.

“Murder-suicides are rare but are usually highly publicized by the media,” she said. “It is not surprising that males use a gun to kill. These are fairly easy to obtain, can be used at close range and are particularly lethal. In fact, research has shown us that males use a gun to commit suicide in the majority of cases.

“In nearly every case, such acts include people who are very well known to each other. It is usually a husband or boyfriend who shoots his wife or girlfriend. This usually happens in a private residence or home, allowing for the murder-suicide to occur in relative privacy.”

via PhysOrg

Some of the other interesting that the study found include:

• The majority of murder-suicides occur in December, followed by August and then September
• Firearms are used in about 78 percent of the murders and 77 percent of the suicides
• In contrast knives are used in about 9 percent of the murders but only 6 percent of the suicides
• 77% of the victims are women and if there are multiple deaths the victims are typically children
• 80% of the time a private residence it the location of the murder-suicide with businesses accounting for 9 percents and 7 percent in a public place.

Murder-suicides Occur At Home In Close Relationships Says Study is a post from: The Inquisitr

I heard the other day that Apple was coming out with a slightly heavier, slightly thicker, and numberless version of their iPad and it has me wondering just what is so new about it and if it something that I would even be interested in.

Of course that would mean that I have gone and taken out a new mortgage on the house, sold a few pints of blood, and hacked off a few pound of excess flesh – needless to say I have done none of the above which means I won’t be standing in any line-ups for this “new” iPad.

However that doesn’t mean that you or someone you know won’t be willing to pony up for the newest and most awesome offering from Apple. To help you decide if this is actually something you should seriously consider the folks at Drippler.com have put together this infographic to help walk you through your decision making.

You can thank me later.

via visual.ly

So, Is That New iPad For You? [Infographic] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Oh man I wouldn’t want to be the person who last had this laptop in their possession and then had it stolen from them but one would have thought that, or at least hoped, that NASA would be keeping better control over their laptops.

It might not seem all that important but NASA has confirmed that the laptop that was stolen last year contained the control codes for the International Space Station.

Now before you go thinking that this might not be all bad because even NASA would be smart enough, and security conscious enough, to make sure that all the data on the laptop was at least encrypted – it wasn’t.

So somewhere out there is someone with a laptop that belongs to NASA and they have easy access to all of the data on that laptop, including the control codes. It also appears that this is not an isolated incident as NASA has also reported that between 2009 and 2011 some 48 NASA laptops have been reported stolen or lost.

In light of this news NASA Inspector General Paul Martin noted that in the last two years there has been more than 5,000 computer security incidents involving unauthorized access to NASA’s systems as well as malware infections.

via Geek.com

Stolen NASA laptop very capable of controlling the ISS is a post from: The Inquisitr

I can safely say that I have never ridden on a rollercoaster and I will never ride on one no matter how badass it might be but I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that when this monstrosity opens up to the public that people will be lining up halfway around Britain to ride it.

I am of course talking about a new rollercoaster coming to Thorpe Park in England called “The Swarm”, which apparently toss you around like a rag doll at speeds up to 62 mph. It seems that during testing of The Swarm the test dummies that they used came back from a spin around the rollercoaster missing some of their limbs.

No you will never catch me on this but you decide for yourself after watching the video how you feel about it.

via Obvious Winner

A UK rollercoaster called “The Swarm” is so badass it can take your arms off [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

And here you thought it couldn’t get any worse than SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, well guess again folks because the US Trade Representative wants to annihilate one of the most fundamental rights of consumers – the First Sale Doctrine and it is using a secret trade agreement to do it.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept of First Sale Doctrine here’s a blurb from Wikipedia on it

The first-sale doctrine is a limitation on copyright that was recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1908 (see Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus) and subsequently codified in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 109. The doctrine allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell, lend or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been obtained. This means that the copyright holder’s rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy ends once ownership of that copy has passed to someone else, as long as the copy itself is not an infringing copy. This doctrine is also referred to as the “right of first sale,” “first sale rule,” or “exhaustion rule.”

In basic terms this means for example that right now you can walk into a store and buy a book and then even ten minutes later turn around and sell that book yourself to say a friend or a used book store, who in turn could then resell it, and there would be no repercussion – you wouldn’t be breaking any laws.

What the United States is trying to do is to basically drive a stake into that First Sale Doctrine via something called the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP); which is being negotiated with partner counters in total secrecy. While there has been one leaked section of the agreement the real extent of the intent of the TPP wasn’t really known until recently.

If you want a really in depth and excellent look into what the TPP is and its ramifications are then you should make reading John Mitchell’s post mandatory but this little tidbit from the post should give you an inkling of the disaster that will happen for consumers if this thing goes through.

The current draft of the TPP has a provision that the major college textbook publishers could not have drafted any better themselves, as it mirrors the outcome advocated in their briefs. It would require treaty parties to codify the Ninth Circuit’s damaging ruling, thereby creating a huge loophole for U.S. copyright holders to take control all secondary markets for their works, as well as to control primary markets, by requiring all retailers to obtain a copyright owner’s “license to sell” in addition to outright ownership of noninfringing copies – if those copies are made abroad.

The thing is we aren’t talking about just books here – we are talking about all goods. WE are talking about the total disappearance of the legal second-hand market place. We are talking about it being basically illegal to buy and sell and goods that have already been sold by the originator of the item.

Sure I imagine the whole idea is to make it so that who ever is doing the reselling would have to – by law – pay the original maker of the item a royalty; or some such monetary remuneration, which would then get passed on to the consumer, thereby increasing the cost to probably close to what the price of a new item is.

As bad as SOPA, PIPA and ACTA might be this latest effort is even worse because it goes far beyond just entertainment and affects everything we buy.

Everything.

via Techdirt

US wants to use secret TPP agreement to wipe out First Sale Doctrine is a post from: The Inquisitr

When the Federal government, under the auspices of the Department of Justice and ICE, get it in their head that they are going to seize some website they don’t mess around. They are neither happy with taking down just one, as we saw when they seized almost 12 domains in one swoop recently; and it would seems that aren’t to worried about when they seize the wrongs ones.

They especially get all worked up when it comes to those disgusting and nasty poker sites out there that they have decided are illegal regardless of the fact that the sites in question don’t use servers based in the US and aren’t even registered US business. Their nasty and illegal and that is all there is to it so they have to go.

The problem is that if you are going to flex your seizing muscle it would be wise to make sure that the site you are seizing is the right one but someone seemed to have missed that memo when it came to the seizure of the Bodog.com domain. To be fair I guess it should be noted that Bodog.com was at one time a poker site but they moved the poker game part of the business away from that site years ago – long before the claims in the affidavit used to seize the site.

As for Bodog.com? It had become the face of the “Bodog Brand” and was used for licensing the Bodog name, but wasn’t itself a gambling site in ages. The affidavit for seizure (pdf and embedded below) claims that federal agents set up accounts and gambled on Bodog.com, but I really wonder if they didn’t miss the fact that they were redirected to another site. Checking the internet archive, it certainly looks like Bodog.com was pretty much out of commission long before the feds claimed to have set up and used accounts there. Either way, the seizure seems unlikely to do much to stop gambling on Bodog sites, considering that the actual gambling was happening on sites, other than Bodog.com, which likely are still perfectly operational.

via Techdirt

Way to go guys.

With another poker site seizure the Feds once again show inept they are at this is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to search for stuff using Google I am pretty much still a search n00b unlike some of my friends who can slice and dice a search string with enough awesomeness to make me want to throttle them so when I saw this goodie show up in my Google Reader I grabbed it.

Of course being the sharing type of guy I am I figured that if this is something that a search n00b like me might find useful then there are bound to be others out there who just might find it useful as well.

So here you go my fellow Google search n00bs – some tricks and tips on how to better use Google t o find all those hard to find bits of information that you’ve desperately been hunting and pecking for.

You can thank me later.

via Geeks are Sexy

Some simple tips to become a Google search ninja [Infographic] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Another day and another security problem for Apple but this time they aren’t alone as the recently discovered vulnerability also affects both Android and Blackberry. The reason why all three are susceptible is because the browsers used on the three platforms all use the same engine: WebKit, an open source browser rendering engine.

The vulnerability was discovered by security firm CrowdStrike and they will be releasing the full details of what they found at the RSA conference that starts this coming Wednesday but from what has been released so far it would appear tha tthe exploit could allow for the remote execution of code on any infected system and that a device can be come infected with a simple click of a web page link.

Of course this would mean that there would have to be some sort of payload waiting to be delivered and installed when the link was clicked. When it comes to that aspect CrowdStrike has said that they have been able to modify already existing Android based malware to be delivered via the exploit that they found.

If this is indeed the case it would seem that the Android platform could be facing a wave of malware attacks before the other two platforms but that doesn’t mean that Apple and Blackberry can afford to be unconcerned if the exploit discovered by CrowdStrike proves to be a valid claim.

via Redmond Pie

iOS, Android and Blackberry hit with new browser vulnerability is a post from: The Inquisitr

Today Eric Schmidt of Google fame said in a speech at the Mobile World Congress that government regulation, especially in Europe, was stifling innovation. This kind of grated me the wrong and I said on Google+ that it is too bad that he couldn’t address the real cause of innovation in technology these days, that being patents and copyrights.

After all when you get companies like Google who create something like Street View; which has done more to spur online map innovation, the idea that some company; after all the years that Street View has been around, can suddenly show up out of nowhere and sue Google as well as Apple over some technology used in Street View is ridiculous.

However such is the case with a new lawsuit being filed by a company out of Florida called PanoMap where they allege that both Apple and Google are violating one of their patents, specifically U.S. Patent No. 6,563,529, which is described as an “Interactive system for displaying detailed view and direction in panoramic images.”

My first question about this is if they held this patent what have they waited until now to sue Apple and Google, especially Google since the company originally launched Street View in 2007 and this patent was granted in 1999. Why wasn’t Google sued the day after Street View was launched.

The answer – PanoMap bought the patent from the person who it was granted to – in other words they are being nothing more than a patent troll; and that folks is the problem with patents today and why they are increasingly killing any innovation in technology.

PanoMap only purchased the patent in order to sue. They never had any intentions of using the patent for any other reason and that alone should invalidate the patent but we all know that won’t happen and chances are that both Google and Apple will pay PanoMap their patent blood money because that’s cheaper than even trying to fight.

via TechnoBuffalo

Yet another patent lawsuit and this time it’s Google and Apple being sued over Street View tech is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay I will admit that a snowboarding game might not be my cup of tea but the idea that EA is going to be utilizing NASA data to create some crazy “over the top” course using real mountains for around our planet is kind of cool.

This is because of a little know project between NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry back in 2009 that saw the release of a detailed topographical model of the Earth’s surface. Of course one can safely assume that they didn’t envision their project data being used by a video game company but players of SSX will be glad one EA did.

As EA Sports producer and creative director Todd Batty retells it

EA Sports producer and creative director Todd Batty still remembers the first time one of his creative directors pulled him into the office to show him just how easily the ASTER topography data (named after the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer that collected it) could be used to make playable, virtual mountains.

“He was like ‘Name any mountain on Earth,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, Mount Everest.’ So he goes on Wikipedia, gets the latitude and longitude coordinates… and in about 28 seconds, delivered a 3D model of Mount Everest and all the surrounding mountains in that grid from the data. He’s like, ‘If you give me a couple of days we can take it for a ride…’”

via Ars Technica

While they still needed to do some cleaning up and adding of things like trees and other details Batty said the ASTER data gave them a huge head start.

As for the courses Batty says that the real world in many cases provided more over the top and ridiculous snowboarding courses than even their course designers could come up with, they just had to dress them up.

If this proves to be successful I wonder how many other company, as well as EA, will start using this freely available data as a start point for their games in the future.

EA’s next SSX to bring ‘over the top’ courses thanks to NASA is a post from: The Inquisitr

It seems lately that as soon as Apple gets over one embarrassment another one comes along as the newest out today has Apple’s iOS platform enabling app developers to be able to access all of your photographs on your iOS device.

Last month it was address books being able to be copied and then uploaded to the developer’s servers but according to a New York Times report the same sort of thing can be done with all your images and without your knowledge or consent.

It seems that if you enable apps to have access to your location data those apps are then able to upload your entire photo collection on the device without any further notification or without your explicit consent. This happens apparently because when you give the app permission to access your location data it also is able to access the images for their encoded location data.

“Conceivably, an app with access to location data could put together a history of where the user has been based on photo location,” said David E. Chen, co-founder of Curio, a company that develops iOS apps. “The location history, as well as your photos and videos, could be uploaded to a server. Once the data is off of the iOS device, Apple has virtually no ability to monitor or limit its use.”

Of course this means that the countdown to the outrage over this will start almost immediately.

via SlashGear

Here we go again – Apple iOS nailed as it lets developers access all your photos is a post from: The Inquisitr

The other day the InterWebs broke out into an uproar, again, over the posting of and image of what was suppose to be the restaurant receipt where the person paying had left only a $1.33 tip for a $133.54 bill along with their own tip of “Get A Real Job”.

Fellow colleague here at The Inquisitr, H. Scott English, wrote about it when a report surfaced where the purported he originator of the image said that he worked for the person who had left the tip, and that yes he was a 1% douchbag. Hell the story even made it to the morning show on CNN but as will all things on the Internet it was – a Hoax.

Yes folks I hate to break it to but while there still might be 1% douchebags out there this is not an example of one spotted in the wild. The folks over at That’s Nerdalicious have a post up with the news that the restaurant where the bill is from, The True Food Kitchen, did a bit of an investigation into the matter and have reported back:

We’re glad to respond to the news stories about a tipping incident at True Food Kitchen in Newport Beach.

Our first concern upon learning about this situation was our staff. We are very fortunate to have employees that are talented, bright, and undoubtedly, some of the best in the business.

However, we would like to report that there is misinformation circulating about this situation. The dining receipt that was originally posted on the blog, Future Ex Banker, and then republished by various websites, was, in fact, altered and exaggerated. We’d also like to assure people that the receipt was not posted and altered by anyone on behalf of True Food Kitchen. We respect our guests’ privacy and take it very seriously; we would never share personal information.

So there you go, yet another fine example of for crying out loud don’t believe everything you read on the freaking Internet.

That 1% Tip from a banker story you read about? Surprise – it’s an hoax is a post from: The Inquisitr

You might not be all that familiar with the acronym BYOD but it is one that is increasingly giving corporate IT and security specialists nightmares as they attempt to do their jobs managing, and securing, corporate network infrastructures.

The acronym stands for: Bring Your Own Device; which for the layman means being able to use your own laptop, smartphone, or tablet within the corporate world instead of being issued one. On one hand this is a good thing for companies as it general will reflect on lower costs in IT spending but on the other hand it creates nothing but headaches for the people charged with maintaining and securing the corporate infrastructure that those devices are expected to connect to.

Prior to the whole BYOD wave the IT departments could dictate what type of device you got and what you could run on them. Now that is all gone but at the same time the potential danger to the corporate infrastructure has also increased, both due to the natural progression of the technology of attacks and because of the variety of ‘uncontrollable’ devices that BYOD brings to the game.

In order to get some sort of handle on this ESET Security teamed up with Harris Interactive to conduct a survey and see what was happening out there when it comes to the whole BYOD movement.

One of there first findings which might surprise some folks is that more than 80 percent of employed adults use some sort of personally-owned device for work related functions. So it would seem that rather than BYOD being something that is coming to the workplace it is something that in fact has already arrived, and in a big way.

When it comes to what type of devices are being used to connect to the corporate network EST found:

• About a quarter (24%) of employed adults use their own smartphone to access and/or store company information.
• The percentage rises to 41% for personal laptops and 47% for personal desktops.
• Only 10% currently use personally owned tablets to access and/or store company information.

When it comes to the whole security aspect of the situation they had this to say in their blog post:

If you stand at the back of a commercial flight these days you can see rows of passengers staring at a wide variety of devices, sometimes running cute little apps and games, and sometimes running business critical processes. Aside from the danger of spreading critical information to snoopy shoulder-surfers, this perspective makes it easy to see the variety of roles that the devices play. And I’m sure you’ve seen this scenario: halfway through the flight a user switches from super-critical pieces of corporate work to checking out the app they downloaded while waiting in the airport terminal. Obviously that’s a potential problem: bored users looking for cool things to install on their hip new piece of hardware. Maybe there’s a compelling reason to get that app, but is there a security context in place whereby this activity is vetted, especially when they are connecting that device to the company network? Beyond that, are basic measures in place to protect the data on the device if it falls into the wrong hands?

Now granted EST is a security software company but, taking into account that this is a corporate first-world problem we are talking about, are they really that far off being concerned about the implications of companies and BYOD for employees?

Especially considering that, as they found out, less than half of all devices in the BYOD category have any kind of security protection of any kind installed on them.

The newest company phenomena giving IT pros nightmares – BYOD is a post from: The Inquisitr

I am betting that the majority of Twitter users couldn’t careless that that searching Twitter for anything past the last few minutes and really the only one’s who even care about Twitter’s search ability, which sucks lemons really, are power users, tech writers, and of course the marketers.

The problem is that when it comes to searching Twitter you are lucky if the service will return any results older than a week, and that is if you are lucky. For marketers this is a problem as there is a lot of data within Twitter that they could use for whatever reason but it’s locked away.

Well lucky for them that is about to change, and while there is no word on how expensive the access will be it seems that UK-based DataShift has cut a deal with Twitter that will grant it access to the complete Twitter fire hose of data. This access will let DataShift pull data from Twitter from the last 24 month period – a veritable treasure trove of information and data that they can then turn around and sell for very big money.

Oh, did we say – that is you information that you have been innocently sending around the world via Twitter for the past year. Yup every single word, every single thought, and every single link that you and all the other millions of Twitter users have been spewing forth without a second thought is now fodder for marketers. Included with this fire hose is the profile information of every single Twitter user as well.

Wait …. I think I just heard a huge cry of joy in the distance.

Yup, it was the marketers.

via Sophos Naked Security Blog / BBC

DataSift cuts deal with Twitter for its data fire hose – a marketer’s wet dream come true is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter may seem like it is just some sort of silly little text messaging system that let’s you blow off some steam or share some silly links but one of the more interesting features about the service is how within seconds of an event Twitter becomes the go to source for immediate news.

We have seen it happen in the past when it comes to natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis as well as events like the Grammy and Academy Awards.

The same thing happened during yesterday’s shooting spree at the Chardon High School in Ohio, which we covered extensively here for you, where as soon as the bullets began flying Twitter began to light up with tweets from the students.

While Twitter wasn’t considered as an ‘official’ source of information of the events as they unfolded the students themselves used the service; both during and after it was over to know what was happening, why it happened, and just to try and make sense of the chaos that they had found themselves in.

Twitter at that point not only became a source of news that let the world know what was happening but also became a two-way communication channel for the students when they needed it the most.

via All Twitter

Twitter became an unofficial emergency broadcast system during the Chardon school shooting is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter is a strange beast. I have my periods where I get involved pass just using to announce my posts from various blogs or neat stuff I’ve found but there are time (like recently) where I won’t even open up my Twitter client to see what is going on; and this is someone who used it a lot.

Then there are those who joined because it was the cool thing to do or they heard that their favorite celebrity was hanging out on Twitter. Primarily though it seems to be more marketing these days than anything else (in my opinion anyway) but it also seems that some types of businesses are discovering that the luster of Twitter is fading.

The Financial Brand has a new study that highlights one of these groups of businesses: the credit unions where one in five has apparently given up on their Twitter accounts and let them fall by the wayside.

The study looked at 350 activated Twitter accounts; which they determined to be those that had uploaded a photo, sent at least one tweet, and had at least one follower, of credit unions across the United States. This represents 5% of all credit unions and 10% of those on Twitter.

The credit unions studied were active for an average of 2.2 years – plenty of time to create a stellar Twitter presence. And yet 74 of the 350 had abandoned their accounts.

Most credit unions aren’t exactly chatty when it comes to Twitter: the average number of tweets sent per credit union was 440, which equals out to about 0.6 per day. However, the most active account had sent a total of 3,889 tweets as of the time of the study, which equals about 5.3 per day.

Credit unions follow an average of 292 accounts, but 12 of them follow none – and one follows a whopping 10,858 Twitter users.

via All Twitter

As with all things this breaks down into some simple rules. Twitter will work for some and it won’t work for other but more importantly you only really get out of it what you are willingly to actively put into it.

Twitter not working for one in five credit unions is a post from: The Inquisitr

While it would be nice to even have any money to think about saving there is no doubt that we all make silly spending choices, whether it being an app buying crazed person or having to have the latest fashions that really don’t suit you anyway.

When it comes to saving money it isn’t always about the big things in our lives but about the small things that we don’t even think twice about as we zip our credit cards through the cash register instead if paying cash and dealing with as well as a hundred other little things at the end of the month when the credit card bill comes in – you know, the one charging a ridiculous percentage and fees.

To help point out some of the smaller things to keep in mind when it comes to saving money the folks at CouponCabin put together this infographic for you to help figure out some of the areas were you can save some money and not have you collapse onto the ground whimpering.

via visual.ly

Some tips on saving nearly $5,000 without even trying [Infographic] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Next to Reddit the only other site that geeks and nerds love as much is Hacker News.

Similar to Reddit it is a regular haunt of geeks and nerds who enjoy sharing the interesting bits of news; and thought, that they find on the web. Just as the members of Reddit are passionate and loyal to their favorite site so are the folks that hang out over Hacker News.

Lim Cheng Soon is one of those people but with a true entrepreneur’s spirit he found a really great way to take his passion for Hacker News, add some value to it and make a business out of it.

You see Lim, like most of the fans of Hacker News, a the type of people who constantly have to deal with information overload but don’t want to miss anything that is happening by going offline. With this thought in mind Lim started gathering up some of the most popular posts from the sites and put them into a magazine called Hacker Monthly.

In this day and age of people being constantly connected and never being out of touch of what is happening in the world you would think that the last thing that would go over well would be a ‘magazine’, let alone a monthly one. Well in this case it has worked and worked well because Lim has been able to make the magazine his fulltime job with a desirable product that attracts advertisers, subscribers, and make money.

Twenty-one issues later, the magazine has about 4,700 subscribers worldwide, Lim said. Annual subscriptions cost $88 for the print edition or $29 for the digital .mobi/.epub/.pdf bundle. Only five percent of subscribers get the print version, he said, but that’s still a tidy sum of about $20,000 on top of an estimated $130,000 in subscriptions per year. He also sells full-page ads.

via Nieman Journalism Lab

Not only is able to pay himself but the project is doing so well that he is able to pay for a graphic artist and hire two copy editors. Every article in Hacker Monthly is hand-selected, any needed editing is done, and set for the page. To be an article that is included in the magazine the post must have gotten more than 100 votes on Hacker News as well as satisfying the ethos that Lim has set for Hacker Monthly: “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiousity”.

Hacker News fan turns his fandom into a business selling you Hacker News is a post from: The Inquisitr

Oh this is interesting.

It seems that Mike Masnick, owner of the Techdirt blog, discovered; while doing a search on Google, that one of Techdirt’s key posts about the whole SOPA/PIPA affair got hit with a DMCA Takedown notice.

For those of you not familiar with the site Techdirt is one of the premier sites in the tech blogosphere that centers around privacy and security as well as copyright and trademark issues. While not everyone might not agree with what gets posted on Techdirt both Mike and the site have earned the respect of many of us in the tech world for his work in these areas.

So it was both interesting and humorous to find out that one of the site’s key posts about the important subject, and the resultant discussion had been removed from Google’s search index.

Mike only found out by accident as he was doing a search on Google for something else to do with the site when he notice at the bottom of the search results page that two results had been removed due to a DMCA takedown.

It turns out that the takedown came from a company called Armovore, a company that specializes in sending out DMCA notices on behalf of other companies. In this case they were acting on behalf of a company called Paper Street Cash which is, as Mike discovered, a porn company; and the claim they made was that the takedown was about content from a site called TeamSkeet.

As Mike said in his post:

If you’re scratching your head, you’re not the only one. There’s clearly nothing infringing in our post. I just wasted too much time going through all 300+ comments on that post and I don’t see anything that includes any porn or even links to any porn as far as I can tell. Instead, it seems that Armovore and Paper Street Cash sent a clearly bogus DMCA takedown notice, which served the purpose of censoring our key blog post in the SOPA fight. And they did it on January 20th… the day that SOPA was officially shelved.

Between this and the bird chirping story that I posted earlier we are being give a perfect example of just how flawed, and a joke that this whole DMCA idea is.

At the end of his post Mike said that they will be looking into their options and I for one hope that Mike and Techdirt go after these idiots one way or another because this was just wrong.

Techdirt discovers it was hit by a bogus DMCA Takedown Notice on a key SOPA post is a post from: The Inquisitr