The Chinese state media has announced that its country has now surpassed the United States as the world’s number one Internet-using population.
The last numbers available to Reuters, at the end of February, showed that China had 221 million Internet-users, a measly 5 million behind the US.
“Despite a rapidly increasing Internet population, the proportion of Internet users among the total population was still lower than the global average level,” the Xinhua news agency said, quoting the Information Ministry.
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Spammers will use the upcoming US elections as a means to increase spam volumes, security firm BitDefender has warned.
Election motivated content and the names of popular candidates including Barak Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain are set to be exploited.
“As we move forward towards the election we’re going to see an increase volume of spam with this sort of content,” Mihai Rusescu, business unit manager EMEA & APAC Business Unit at BitDefender told SC.
Mihai added that image spam volumes will continue to grow while text based spam, often fought off by spam filters, will reduce.
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Alcatel-Lucent has begun court proceedings for its lawsuit against Microsoft, complaining that Microsoft’s Xbox game systems violates one of the company’s 1993 patents “relating to the code for generating video frames.”
The partnership says it plans to demand $1.50 USD for “every alleged misuse of the patent” but it is not clear what is considered a misuse. At worst, the suit could apply to all Xboxs and Xbox 360s ever sold.
Microsoft has so far disputed the claims and also says “that four fifths of the claim applies to video frames in Windows Media Player, which is available as a separate, free download and so wouldn’t generate royalties for Alcatel-Lucent.”
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After having exited the travel business once before by spinning off Expedia, the Redmond company appears to stepping back in by scooping up a Washington-based startup.
Farecast is not exactly like Expedia, or other travel sites for that matter. Instead it essentially provides forecasts of whether fares would rise or fall on a specific route. From there, it provides a recommendation of whether to buy the ticket now or wait.
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The Ubuntu team announced today the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) on desktop and server. Codenamed “Hardy Heron”, 8.04 LTS integrates the latest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
The release candidate is complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user.
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition features incremental improvements to familiar applications, with an emphasis on stability for this second Ubuntu long-term support release, and is easier to try out with the new Wubi installer.
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YouTube says it is changing the way it deals with users who violate its community guidelines.
The video sharing site says it will no longer treat users “who uploads three videos that violate the Community Guidelines over the span of a year the same as someone who uploads those same videos over the course of a week.”
YouTube says its new policy will lift penalties against users who violated its terms of use after six months and that “Accounts that had one or two warnings (as of April 16, 2008) for Community Guidelines (or Terms of Use) violations have been given a clean slate.” The new rules do not apply to copyright violations, which do not expire.
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Skype’s not doing too badly these days. As it stands, though, Skype has little to do with eBay’s core business, and so it may get sold in the relatively near future.
“What we’re testing this year are the synergies,” said John Donahoe, eBay’s new CEO, to the Financial Times. “If the synergies are strong, we’ll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it.”
This decision is interesting, to say the least; after many, many problems, Skype’s revenue has shot up, and its user base is huge. John Oates observed that eBay appears to be “[i]mplementing [a] buy high, sell low strategy.”
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BEA’s new AquaLogic User Interaction (UI) 6.5 will give enterprise staff the type of collaboration tools which they now take for granted as consumers, such as status updates, said Martin Percival, senior technical evangelist for BEA.
The new release of AquaLogic Interaction allows users to produce individual profile pages.
“In the outside world, people are always updating their status on networking sites but they don’t think to do such things with their colleagues, and try and work out where they are in the enterprise,” said Percival.
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Mixing technical concerns with a truckload of business issues, Red Hat has stealthily acknowledged slipping its deadline for Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD), which might have given it an edge against Novell’s competing SuSE Linux.
Unlike the existing Red Hat Enterprise Desktop (RHED), the planned RHGD is aimed exclusively at small, reseller supplied implementations in emerging geographic areas such as Brazil, China, and India. Red Hat also sponsors a community project called Fedora, which develops and maintains a free desktop product.
But RHED and the forthcoming RHGD are both commercial products geared to businesses.First announced at the 2007 Summit users conference, RHGD was then expected to ship a few months later.
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Ethical hacking group GNUCitizen.org has warned that the default settings on one of the UK’s most widely used wireless routers is leaving customers open to attack.
The group showed in a blog posting that the BT Home Hub, the wireless router supplied to BT Broadband customers, uses algorithms that make the device easy to crack when in default mode.
Using reverse-engineering techniques the group said that the hub’s Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) keys can be predicted in just 80 guesses, but had decided against making its automated guessing program publicly available.
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