Friday, November 20, 2009
Google Removes Offensive Obama Image; Was It Justified?
Saying the host site was serving malware to users, Google has removed a controversial photo of First Lady Michelle Obama from Google Image Search.
Saying the host site was serving malware to users, Google has removed a controversial photo of First Lady Michelle Obama from Google Image Search.
China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.
In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of its August launch. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s site, Ji Guilin.
The use of peer-to-peer networks for sharing files has come under fire during recent months, including the dismantling of Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, but it turns out even members of Congress need to be kept in check over their file-sharing practices.
California created the nation’s first energy-efficiency standard for television sets, arguing that it needed to act because federal energy officials have been slow to confront the issue.
Under the standard adopted Wednesday by the California Energy Commission, no TV with a screen size less than 58 inches may be sold in the state after 2011 unless it meets limits on energy consumption.
Federal regulators are considering whether the government should take greater control of the Internet and ask consumers to pay higher phone charges in order to provide all Americans with cheaper access to broadband Internet service.
China’s factories have long churned out high tech products. A big question facing Silicon Valley–underscored in a survey released Monday by Intel and Newsweek–is how big a role the country will play in dreaming up those gadgets.
On the first day that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened registration for non-Latin script domains, Egypt says it has seized the opportunity to register the first all-Arabic domain name.
China’s bloggers are a focus of organizers of the President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit, echoing similar efforts by the administration to use social-media tools to communicate with Americans.
Efforts to reform the U.S. health-care and bank lending systems are likely to lead to an increase in information-technology spending, said one potential beneficiary, Sudhakar Ram, chairman of IT firm Mastek.
Overhauling the country’s IT systems could cost as much as $250 billion to $300 billion over five to seven years, he said in an interview.
In 1993, a tech consultant named Peter de Jager wrote an article for Computerworld with the headline “Doomsday 2000.”
Painting the Golden Gate Bridge yellow might cause less fuss than trying to install a wind farm off Cape Cod’s historic coast.
In 1990, Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr was brutally murdered.
Can the U.S. government secretly subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a political website? No, but that didn’t stop it from trying.
The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center has released the latest list of “vulgar content” offenders (in Chinese). This time, Google escaped mention–but Yahoo China and a popular real-estate portal, Soufun, did not.
Nearly lost amidst the breathless anticipation of all things wireless–whether it’s the latest smart phone, free Internet hot spot or GPS navigation system–is the potential impact these gadgets may have on scientific instruments that likewise need access to the electromagnetic spectrum.
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