The site looks a lot like craigslist, except instead of selling used cars and like-new Ikea furniture, Only the Breast deals in human breast milk. Many kick off with a chirpy headline (“Chubby baby milk machine!”), then follow with a snapshot of their own robust infant and lush descriptions (“rich, creamy breast milk!” “fresh and fatty!”), making a primal source of nutrition sound like a New York cheesecake. There’s also a sort of “anything goes” section for women willing to sell to men.
Interpol has been accused of abusing its powers after Saudi Arabia used the organisation's red notice system to get a journalist arrested in Malaysia for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Police in Kuala Lumpur said Hamza Kashgari, 23, was detained at the airport "following a request made to us by Interpol" the international police cooperation agency, on behalf of the Saudi authorities. Kashgari, a newspaper columnist, fled Saudi Arabia after posting a tweet on the prophet's birthday that sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats. The posting, which was later deleted, read: "I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you … I will not pray for you." Clerics in Saudi Arabia called for him to be charged with apostasy, a religious offence punishable by death. Reports suggest that the Malaysian authorities intend to return him to his native country.
David Karp, the founder of the blogging platform Tumblr, was 17 when he decided to cut the apron strings and move to Tokyo. With a smattering of Japanese and a sharp eye for computer code, the impatient Manhattan teenager embarked on a period of self-discovery. "I was holed up in the middle of this world where it was just me on the internet," Karp recalls. Within weeks, he had fine-tuned his computer skills and cooled on the idea of building robots. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. But there was one small problem: his voice. "I was so silly – I tried to be very formal and put on a deep voice to clients over the phone so I didn't have to meet them and give away how young I was," he says. "I lied about my age. I lied about the size of my team. I lied about my experience. I was so terribly embarassed about it for so long. I should have just owned up."
Twitter announced on its blog Thursday that it has built for itself the ability to change what messages appear in your Twitter feed depending on what country you're in. The result is a selectively censored Twitter experience, based on the laws of the user's country. It comes nearly one year ago to the day since Twitter announced, "Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed." Twitter frames the move as an effort to comply with local laws, retain the ability to stay up in a given country and be as open and transparent as possible about the process.
Diese bescheidene Sammlung von Newsgroup-Postings beinhaltet Threads aus de.org.ccc, in denen Kim Schmitz - auch bekannt unter seinem nom de guerre Kimble - sich geäußert hat. Diese Dokumente zeichnen ein faszinierendes Bild von Geist, Charakter und Entwicklung jener gewichtigen Figur des öffentlichen Lebens. Nicht minder lesenswert sind die Reaktionen auf Kimbles wortgewaltige Prosa.
Er war Hacker, Rennfahrer, Investor, Playboy und schließlich Gesetzloser, der zum Multi-Millionär wurde, als das Internet megalomanische Investmentbeträge auf sich zog: In der Dotcom-Goldgräberzeit hatte Schmitz schließlich Anteil daran, dass aus ihr die Dotcom-Blase wurde.
The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November. The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic.
The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
Movie industry lobbyists like to say that online piracy costs their clients billions of dollars every year, and it’s getting worse — but that’s doesn’t quite seem to be the case, according to data released this week by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS). The CRS report (embedded below) shows that the movie industry is doing very well, earning record profits and paying executives more than ever, even as it hires fewer workers than it did just a decade ago. Although a recent National Crime Prevention Council ad campaign tries to make the point that piracy kills jobs, the CRS found that total gross revenues and box office receipts have doubled in the last 15 years. Grosses went from $52.8 billion in 1995 to $104.4 billion in 2009, while box office receipts went from $5.3 billion in 1995 to $10.6 billion in 2010 — yet hiring still went down.
A week ago today, Megaupload’s now-famous Mega Song was on its way to becoming a viral hit, only to be cut down from YouTube by a Universal Music takedown demand. Following the filing of a Megaupload lawsuit the song is back online, but Universal are standing firm. You can’t touch us on DMCA grounds, the label says in a new filing, adding it can take down any material, even if it doesn’t infringe their rights.
Why is the Pentagon spending tens of millions of US tax dollars to whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships? Over the past three years, a subdivision of Virginia-based General Dynamics has set up and run a network of eight "influence websites" funded by the Defense Department with more than $120 million in taxpayer money. The sites, collectively known as the Trans Regional Web Initiative (TRWI) and operated by General Dynamics Information Technology, focus on geographic areas under the purview of various U.S. combatant commands, including U.S. Central Command. In its coverage of Uzbekistan, a repressive dictatorship increasingly important to U.S. military goals in Afghanistan, a TRWI website called Central Asia Online has shown a disturbing tendency to downplay the autocracy's rights abuses and uncritically promote its claims of terrorist threats.
Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents, spanning 36 companies, include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people's computers and cellphones, and "massive intercept" gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country. The papers were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.
In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.
All told, according to the government’s complaint, Full Tilt Poker owed $390 million to players worldwide, but had about $60 million in cash. Since 2007, the government claims Full Tilt Poker enriched its board members and owners with $443 million in payouts, while telling players they could withdraw from their accounts at will.
In the high-speed world of automated financial trading, milliseconds matter. So much so, in fact, that a saving of just six milliseconds in transmission time is all that is required to justify the laying of the first transatlantic communications cable for 10 years at a cost of more than $300m.
When a 5.9 earthquake hit near Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday, New York residents read about the quake on Twitter when, 30 seconds later, they felt the quake themselves. The earthquake was one of the largest recorded in the Washington, D.C. area.
"The first day [of this paid service] we made $5,000, the second $6,000, the third more -- I wasn't expecting this. But people love advertising themselves. Lots of people use this function several times a day. They become addicted."
Nutzer der kürzlich staatsanwaltschaftlich vom Netz genommenen Video-on-demand-website kino.to und anderer, vergleichbarer sogenannter "illegaler Downloadseiten" gehen weit häufiger ins Kino als der Durchschnittsbürger. Dies belegt eine Studie, die bereits vor einiger Zeit von der Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK) unternommen wurde. Das Brisante an dieser Studie: Sie führte zu Ergebnissen, die der GfK, die als Lobbyist großer Medienkonzerne unter anderem für die Ermittlung von Einschaltquoten zuständig ist, derart unangenehm sind, dass sie nicht publiziert wurde.
Grindr, the popular “geosocial networking” iPhone app for gay men, has more than a million users in 180 countries, including Iraq, Iran, and Haiti. It’s been called a “revolutionary dating tool”—and also “the scariest gay bar on earth that is all over the earth.”
But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit. Mark’s acid worked as advertised. “It was quite enjoyable, to be honest,” he said. We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some “silver haze” pot purchased off Silk Road. “It was legit,” he said. “It was better than anything I’ve seen.”
Netflix video streaming is now the single largest source of peak downstream Internet traffic in the U.S., according to a new report by Sandvine. The streaming video service now accounts for 29.7 percent of peak downstream traffic, up from 21 percent last fall.
According to a new infoDev study, the Virtual Economy is worth some $3 billion and provides new types of jobs in developing countries.
Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.
The TLD is meant to give pornographic websites a clearly marked home on the Internet, but it has gone through so many ups and downs over the last 11 years that it's almost a shock that it has finally gone through. Still, the measure didn't pass without opposition—nine ICANN board members voted in favor of .XXX, while three opposed and four abstained—and the vote went against the recommendation of ICANN's Government Advisory Committee.