News

In one of the dumbest moves I have seen a court make in some time it is now possible for a copyright holder to go after the company that registered a domain name if that name is used for piracy. The logic behind this decision escapes me and will most people that put any thought to it. However the copyright industry is boasting about how this gives them new tools to combat piracy.

It would seem that even the next generation of “secure” payment systems are showing up with flaws before they really hit the streets. According to security researchers there is a flaw in the next generation of electronic payments dubbed chip-n-PIN. This new technology has been hailed as the more secure means of using your cash without all the worry of swipe fraud or other hassles of using the more traditional magnetic cards. However, as with far too man y technologies these days, someone missed a rather big loophole for the bad guys to exploit

Today is was announced that Futuremark would be “joining” Underwriters Laboratories. The standards group that most people in the US are familiar with his buying up the same benchmarking company that most of us have come to love and hate. According to both Futuremark and UL the acquisition is more like a partnership, it is just that one will fully own the other: “Today, we’re announcing a new partnership. One that will significantly strengthen Futuremark through increased investment in our people and products while protecting our independence and neutrality.”

When you hear people talking about anonymity on the internet it most people will think privacy. When companies hear anonymity on the internet they think piracy, crime, hacking and lost revenue. This is probably the biggest disconnect in the internet age, companies want to monetize your personal information. This is big money and (as we have said more than once) is a commodity that they have been trying to legalize for more than a decade.