News

The Swedish Appeals Court upheld the conviction and jail sentences of three co-founders behind the infamous The Pirate Bay service. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom all received one-year jail sentences and $4.2 million in fines from a Swedish lower court earlier in the year. After the court ruling, Neij has been given a 10-month sentence, Sunde received an eight-month sentence, and Lundstrom was given a four-month sentence. A different defendant will be sentenced at a later date because he was unavailable due to illness. ...

Miley Cyrus is eighteen years old since yesterday. I don’t know if her father, legendary “Achy Breaky Heart” singer Billy Ray Cyrus, will be joining in her birthday celebrations, but I imagine he’ll be quietly wiping away a tear as his daughter finally becomes officially an adult (at least as far as the age of consent in her home state of Tennessee is concerned). The pop singer and Hannah Montana star has had her fair share of encounters with the world of cybercrime during her short life. ...

 The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined two organizations for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act – the first to be issued under new tougher guidelines in the UK. The security breach at Sheffield-based firm A4e happened in June 2010, after the company issued an unencrypted laptop to an employee in order to do work from home. The laptop was subsequently stolen from the employee’s house. That wouldn’t have mattered too much, of course, if the laptop hadn’t contained sensitive information. Unfortunately it carried personal data relating to 24,000 people who had used community legal advice centers in Hull and Leicester. ...

Reuters: Google Inc plans to hire more than 2,000 people around the globe, bumping up its workforce as it expands into new markets and battles for talent with faster-growing rivals. The world’s largest Internet search engine, whose finance chief told investors in September that the Internet industry was waging a “war for talent,” has job openings listed for 2,076 positions on its website, according to a Reuters tally on Thursday. ...

BBC: The once dominant MySpace has turned to the company that stole its crown, Facebook, for help to drive users to its ailing site. The two launched Mashup with Facebook, to let MySpace users log in to their Facebook accounts through their MySpace page. This means users can port over their likes and interests listed on Facebook. In turn users will get a stream of entertainment content based on these preferences. ...

Native Google Docs support has finally arrived for Android and iOS (the mobile version of Google Docs has been available for over three years). Edits show up in near real-time (so they aren’t completely seamless) and Android even lets you insert text using voice recognition. The biggest improvement is the new layout, which makes mobile document editing much easier and allows for collaboration from other Docs users. Currently, Google Docs supports devices with Android 2.2 (codename Froyo) and up, as well as Apple devices with iOS version 3.0 or newer. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t specify if third-party browsers will work with the new Google Docs or whether it plans on adding new platforms such as Windows Phone and webOS. ...

Controversial “naked” body scanners currently being tested at Hamburg’s airport are constantly malfunctioning due to folds in passengers’ clothing, broadcaster NDR reported on Tuesday. The public radio station said the trial of the body imaging security scanners has been plagued by serious problems. The units, which have been in use since September, are apparently unable to tell the difference between foreign objects and such things like pleated clothing. ...

Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it’s hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company’s search engine, Bing. “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World. Mehdi is referring to users’ tendency to use Google for online searches without a second thought. It’s almost second nature to them. Many people even head to Google as their first webpage when they’re testing to see if they have an Internet connection. ...

Facebook has announced a new product that will compete directly with the e-mail services provided by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and AOL. Facebook believes traditional e-mail is too slow and cumbersome; it needs be brought into the modern world of messaging. The site has thus launched Facebook Messages, which merges texts, online chats, and e-mails into one central hub. Users see all of them in their Social Inbox and can reply in any way they want. The social networking giant says this product is the biggest it has worked on to date. ...

THE INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT without a search engine, Yahoo has announced a package of products that it hopes will make it more relevant again. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Yahoo showed off a host of products that it claimed would deliver to consumers a more “personally relevant Web experience with new social and local features”. You guessed it, more social networking and more experiences than you can poke a stick at. ...