Category: Websites

Google launches ad-funded music search service in China, to battle local piracy

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Google is trying to succeed where all have failed, by stemming the impact of piracy in China.

Its latest venture, an ad-funded music search service, hopes to go some way toward making a bit of money out of flogging music in China, a country where it’s believed 99% of all music distributed has been obtained illegally somewhere along the line.

Google’s music search service will lets users browse “tens of thousands” of songs…

Gary Cutlack Digital Music, Intellectual Property, Internet, MP3 players, Web 2.0, Websites

Twitter ramblers targeted by all-new data-mining trojan

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Users of Twitter, the minutiae-documenting waffling programme with no discernible purpose whatsoever, have been coming under attack recently thanks to a fake profile offering, predictably enough, free porn.

Some poor people have, while in the process of telling precisely zero readers what they had for breakfast, been sent messages from this fake account and then – here’s the stupid bit – clicked on the links supplied. Then they also clicked on “YES” to install…

Gary Cutlack Computers, Internet, Software, Web 2.0, Websites

New viruses pretend to be your Facebook / MySpace friend

Your social networking account is being targetted by destructive new viruses, which sneakily invade your computer by sending messages supposedly from your friends. Or the people you added as ‘friends’ to look more popular.

Win32.Koobecaf.a attacks MySpace users, if there are any left, by sending malicious content to their accounts. Similarly, Win32.Koobecaf.b (they’ll have to come up with more catchy names if they want to make it big) does the same on Facebook, in message format, meaning it’s even more irritating than getting 23 ‘Which Spice Girl are you?’ application requests each week.

Michael Cox Internet, Websites

IOC allowing Olympics highlights on YouTube

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced that it will be showing news and sports highlights from the Beijing Olympics in countries where no broadcaster has exclusive rights. The Video on Demand service will be available on a YouTube channel.

That means some 75 countries, including India and Nigeria, will be able to watch the best bits of the Games, as determined by the IOC. The channel will be “geo-blocked” so that those of us in countries where a TV broadcaster is already showing coverage of the Games won’t be able to access the YouTube footage.

Since the BBC will be near-exhaustively covering the Games, official YouTube clips won’t be available in the UK.

Andy Merrett Internet, Sport, Websites

Yahoo's computers link to pictures of "underage girls", humans intervene

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In a gaffe which Yahoo’s computers couldn’t care less about, but which has caused some embarrassment for humans in the company, an automated system linked a news article to Flickr pictures tagged with the keywords “underage girls”.

It’s understandable how an amoral computer could make the association — the article concerned Ashley Dupré — however it turned up some rather dubious images that most people would not have expected to see linked to from a serious news article…

Andy Merrett Internet, Websites

China still censoring the internet for journalists covering the Olympics. What a bunch of [BLANK]ing [BLANKS].

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With the 2008 Beijing Olympics a mere week away it’s almost reassuring to see that despite the massive costs, huge corporate sponsorship deals and globalisation eroding countries individuality, China are trying their best to keep their own culture and traditions alive.

Despite earlier reports to the contrary, during the Games this year, the Chinese tradition of censorship of the internet and blocking websites that in any way contradict the brutal and repressive government’s official line looks set to continue…

James O'Malley Internet, Websites, Wi-Fi