Headlines
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Online service provider and web registrar GoDaddy has belatedly changed position on SOPA, after an online campaign convinced tens of thousands of people to drop their services in protest of the company's support for the controversial anti-piracy legislation ... including one of the site's larger clients, Wikipedia. - "German phone company Deutsche Telekom AG and a Hungarian unit will pay more than $95 million to settle U.S. criminal and civil probes into the bribery of government officials in Macedonia and Montenegro."
- Josh Lowensohn informs us that "Chinese Internet company Alibaba is investing in new lobbying power in the U.S., a move that syncs up with its reported plans to make a serious bid for Yahoo."
- "Among all online purchases made on Christmas Day, 7 percent were done through an iPad and 6.4 percent through an iPhone, giving iOS devices 13.4 percent of all online purchases that day," writes Lance Whitney.
Cellphones
- Verizon is in damage-control mode, after a string of outages on its 4G network.
- Steven Musil writes, "Samsung is still the biggest maker of mobile phones, but Apple is gaining ground, according to data released today by market researcher ComScore." Of course, Apple's growing strength doesn't mean that Samsung is growing weaker, by any means. Witness for example, the strong sales for the latter's Galaxy Note.
Technology and the Law
- "Three appeals court judges unanimously upheld a controversial federal law on Thursday—one that grants immunity to phone companies that give government officials access to users' online communications." Kate Freeman has the details.
- A Florida appeals court has ruled that RipoffReport.com is immune from legal reprisals after a user of the site wrote "an admittedly defamatory posting [...] about a person who operated a Florida corporation providing addiction treatment services."
Security
- Following a recent attack on the security think tank Stratfor, hacker group Anonymous have now breached the defenses of SpecialForces.com, which sells military gear.
- Stefan Krempl brings word: "At the 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) in Berlin, security researchers have demonstrated a new technique for attacking GSM mobile phones."
- "Researchers at Kaspersky Lab are claiming to have found proof that the writers of the Stuxnet and Duqu malware are one and the same, and are warning of at least three new families of advanced malware potentially in circulation," reports Iain Thomson.
Hardware
- According to a report by Timon Singh, Russia and China are teaming up to build the world's largest lithium-ion battery plant.
Cool Technology
- "Amoeboid yellow slime mold might seem an unlikely network architect, but scientists say the monocellular mass could be a key to designing highly sophisticated biocomputers."
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