Archive for October, 2009

Gary McKinnon, the UK based hacker who allegedly hacked into a number of computer systems on US military sites has had his extradition to the US delayed. McKinnon suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and a growing number of supporters, including MP, David Burrowes are arguing that imprisonment in a US maximum security prison would be highly dangerous to his mental health.

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To the sound of a giant sigh of frustration from the SEO community, content site, Digg has introduced a rel=nofollow tag on all its content. The site had been a great opportunity to promote sites and gain high quality links for clients through well written copy. It was essentially the definition of white hat SEO.

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The Guardian newspaper emailed around half a million of its users this weekend to alert them to the fact that the Guardian Jobs website site was subjected to what they have called ‘a sophisticated and deliberate attack’. The Jobs arm of the guardian boasts about 10 million new unique users per year, many of whom upload personal information and CVs, so any hack is a very serious breach indeed. However, the Guardian claim to have stopped ‘the hack was stopped before it was completed’.

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Struggling search engine Yahoo is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons after a suspect staff entertainment decision. The number two search engine has been accused of sexism by many commentators after arranging for a ‘performance’ from girls dressed in miniskirts and bras to take place at an internet engineers’ brainstorming meeting called Yahoo Hack Day.

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According to retailers, Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest operating system, is set to break computer software sales records after its release today. According to Amazon, the system is already the highest grossing pre-order product ever, easily eclipsing the latest Harry Potter film and the Nintendo Wii. Also, rather damningly for Microsoft’s previous system Vista, Jeremy Fennel, one of the directors of DSGi, the group that owns Dixons, PC World and Currys claims that the group has “Sold more copies of Windows 7 in three weeks on pre-order than Vista sold in its first year.”

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Struggling search engine Yahoo is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons after a suspect staff entertainment decision. The number two search engine has been accused of sexism by many commentators after arranging for a ‘performance’ from girls dressed in miniskirts and bras to take place at an internet engineers’ brainstorming meeting called Yahoo Hack Day.

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Mobile phone giant, Nokia is to sue apple in an attempt to extract royalty payments they claim they are owed by the computer manufacturer. Nokia’s story is that a number of their patents were infringed by Apple in the manufacture of the iPhone. Analysts have estimated that they think Nokia might be looking for as much as one or two percent of the price of an iPhone in royalties, backdated to the launch of the device, obviously. That shakes out to a maximum of $12 dollars per iPhone. Apple have so far sold more than 30 million units, meaning they could stand to pay as much as $400 million dollars.

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As you may have heard, if you’ve been paying attention, MySpace/News Corp are currently in the process of trying to sell Photobucket, the video and image sharing service it acquired for $250 million dollars with an additional $50 million earnout in 2007. The buyer is a company called Ontela, who come with 40 million backing from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures arm. The deal with Ontela is thought to be at an advanced stage though sources close to both companies are putting the valuation at around $60 million, an 83% reduction from what MySpace paid.

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An interactive map of the UK that shows local crime statistics and information on local police forces crashed due to demand yesterday. On Tuesday morning, many of the visitors who went onto maps.police.uk to check the crime statistics in their locality were disappointed to find the site would not load.

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Another day, another display of pettiness from a member of the digital elite. Hot on the heels of Google bigwigs refusing to refer to Twitter by name, referring to it instead as ‘micro-blogging’ (as if we don’t know who they mean), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has gone out of his way to avoid mentioning Google in a recent interview. When TechCrunch interviewed the Microsoft head this week, he refused to call their main search competitor by name, referring to the company repeatedly as, ‘the incumbent’.

It does seem a little small of him though some might say that Google started it. Many people saw the inclusion of the phrase ‘do no evil’ in the Google charter as a subtle dig at Microsoft, implying of course that the previous ‘most powerful company in computing’ had done some evil.

It’s hard to see what, if anything, Ballmer’s playing at by doing this. It might be that he’s trying to avoid giving Google free publicity or implying that he believes they are the market leaders at all… Or, on the other hand, he might just have been feeling a bit tetchy at being very much not the incumbent currently.

Google has launched a new advertising campaign entitled, ‘Gone Google’ which aims to highlight the various ways in which the company’s products and services can benefit businesses and the growing number of companies choosing to, as they put it, ‘Go Google’. More than two million businesses around the world use Google applications in some way, which is an impressive stat, one that Google apparently feels is not widely known enough.

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Channel 4 have signed a deal with YouTube that will allow the world’s biggest streaming content provider to show its programmes. Both parties are remaining tight lipped on the subject of how much – if any – money changed hands but Channel 4 representatives have indicated that any advertising revenue will be split between the two companies.

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UK regulator, Ofcom has released a report today that reveals the true proliferation of video on demand (VOD). The report reveals that that just under one in three (29% to be exact) of all UK adults regularly watch or download video content. However, the really interesting part is that, in contrast to reports in some media, most of those adults are viewing the content on the entirely legal catch up services offered on services such as iPlayer and, to a lesser extent 4od.

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British Telecom is extending its super-fast broadband services, making the 100 megabits per second service available to double the number of people. The extension of the ‘fibre to premise’ service will make super-fast internet available to in the region of 2.5 million households. This is all coming as part of BT’s £1.5 billion pound investment in broadband networks through which they hope to connect 10 million homes to their fast broadband service by 2012.

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