Social networking online is no longer the province of the young - more and more 'silver surfers'are joining in, Chris Stevens finds

MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google's OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We've confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.

After years working on identity and its protection, I've concluded that our identity infrastructure is fundamentally broken--and the Web is what ultimately broke it.

When Google announced that its new social-networking initiative would extend to any site that wanted to participate, the land grab for the social Web's attention just got a whole lot more intense.

Africa needs to embrace wireless broadband as a potential solution to the digital divide, the chairman of Intel Craig Barrett has said.

"It's cheaper, easier and more efficient to communicate wirelessly," he told the BBC News website.

An alliance between hundreds of newspaper sites and Yahoo Inc has helped publishers increase advertising, but it will saddle them with unproven technology and costs them some independence and flexibility.

Billed as crucial to U.S. newspapers whose print editions are steadily losing ads and readers, results of the program are hard to come by nearly a year after it began.

Google continues its breakneck string of acquisitions, today adding micro-blogging service Jaiku to its roster.

Jaiku, which the search giant snapped up for an undisclosed sum, calls itself an "activity stream and presence sharing service." In layman's terms, it's blogging writ small: Jaiku users can post just a line or two of text to the Web -- usually a description of their current activity for others to see -- using Web browsers or mobile devices. The service also enables them to keep tabs on others' updates as well.

Islamic militants are suspected of using Second Life, the internet virtual world, to hunt for recruits and mimic real-life terrorism.

Police and the intelligence services are concerned that it may have been infiltrated by extremists to proselytise, communicate and transfer money to one another. Radicals may also be responsible for "virtual" terrorist attacks in which buildings depicted on the website are blown up.

Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian government's High Tech Crime Centre, said jihadists may also be using the virtual reality world to master skills such as reconnaissance and surveillance. "We need to start thinking about living, working and protecting two worlds and two realities," he told a security industry conference in Sydney.

In the young but growing world of user-generated news, sites like digg and slashdot dominate in the tech sphere. In the political arena, it is mostly editorial-driven sites that do well - such as DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost and RawStory. Those sites get a lot of attention, but there are also a lot of so-called "Citizen Journalism" sites out there trying very hard to break through to the mainstream. We're going to run a series here on Read/WriteWeb exploring some of those sites. In this first post we'll provide a brief intro to Citizen Journalism (but with a product focus, not theory), and profile a leading practitioner: Newsvine.

ANYONE who follows technology or military affairs has heard the predictions for more than a decade. Cyberwar is coming. Although the long-announced, long-awaited computer-based conflict has yet to occur, the forecast grows more ominous with every telling: an onslaught is brought by a warring nation, backed by its brains and computing resources; banks and other businesses in the enemy states are destroyed; governments grind to a halt; telephones disconnect; the microchip-controlled Tickle Me Elmos will be transformed into unstoppable killing machines.

Think Apple's iPhone is cool? You haven't seen anything yet, tech entrepreneurs promise--that is, if the phone companies would just get out of their way. And they're asking the Feds to help them out.

More and more cities are cutting their wires and going wireless.

But as councils offer public wi-fi, questions are being asked about how much citizens will use them and how sustainable they are.

Ray interviewed more than 80 women, a wide selection of bloggers, chatters, daters, models, geeks and non-geeks. What she found is perhaps not all that surprising but you won't hear it on the evening news: Women have wide-ranging sexual interests and are savvy enough to figure out how to harness technology to pursue our erotic desires -- and occasionally make some money doing it.

(Nasdaq:EBAY) today announced it has acquired StumbleUpon, an early-stage company that helps people discover and share content online, for an aggregate transaction value of approximately $75 million. This acquisition will provide eBay with in-depth exposure to a fast-growing community-based service with approximately 2.3 million users. StumbleUpon gives people a new way to discover relevant and entertaining content based on personal preferences and community recommendations.

CBS on Wednesday said it has paid $280 million in cash for music social network Last.fm.

CBS said in a statement that the online service has more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries and would fit well with its plans to attract younger viewers and transform it from a content company to an audience company.

Newsvine

One part news feed aggregator, another part publishing platform, Newsvine pulls in the latest news stories from mainstream media sources in addition to giving users the chance to publish their own work.
http://www.newsvine.com

Vote now!

Google's ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

The irony of the Amish leading the so-called modern world down an alternative energy path delights Spratley of Green Energy Ohio.

About one in ten websites is infected with malicious software that could result in a user's personal information being stolen, according to Google.

Internet companies including Yahoo! are hindering police investigations into child abuse by closing down the undercover identities used by officers to trap paedophiles.

British child protection police habitually pose as children online, using false profiles to ensnare abusers trying to groom girls and boys for sex.

But the companies say they will shut down all bogus identities on their sites even if they know they are being run to catch paedophiles.

Microsoft Corp. will work with the Clinton Foundation to develop free Web-based software and services that cities around the world can use to monitor their carbon emissions and share ideas about environmental protection.

In conclusion, a woman's right to know the contents of her own body, and to make a choice about whether to continue her pregnancy or not, should be defended against laws trying to stop prenatal sex selection, either in the developing world or in the developed world. Restrictions on women's reproductive freedom harm the interests of women and girls, and ignore myriad social policy solutions, such as education and income incentives to have girls and universal old age pensions, that provide better answers to the strains of unbalanced sex ratios. The opponents of sex selection trumpet all accounts of increased discrimination against women resulting from unequal sex ratios while ignoring growing evidence of positive cultural change and women's empowerment from women's enhanced marriage prospects. Opponents of sex selection reify a conservative heteronormative model of sexuality, gender roles and family structure, while arguing that unmarried men are social time bombs who can only be controlled by a wife. Eventually the social policy dilemma around sex selection will presumably be made moot since would-be parents will be able to use pre-conceptive technology to determine a conceptus's gender without abortion or in-vitro fertilization. But until the sex selection argument unravels before technological innovation, women's rights to control their bodies must be defended against laws banning - or requiring - prenatal ultrasound and abortion.

Yet another way to browse Newsvine.

Microsoft claims free and open source software violates more than 230 of its patents, according to a magazine report.

When "Sweetgal," a 29-year-old British Muslim from central England, began looking for a new husband last year, at first she didn't know where to turn.

The answer, it turned out, was on the Internet.

She'd been married once--a union arranged by her parents--to a man from Pakistan. It lasted seven years and produced children but broke down due to cultural differences and she didn't want to go through a similar trauma again.

At the same time, being a respectful Muslim who wears hijab, she wasn't going to start "dating," and knew her parents would have to be involved in her new search in one way or another.

Over the past two years there has been a boom in the use of Web sites that introduce Muslim men and women, not for casual dating, but for those actively seeking traditional Muslim marriage.

Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that's based around a "thing" are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them. You'd choose to wear that mask and then hop on stage and do the dance that so many have done before you. I don't have direct evidence for this but I suspect it goes many many years back, those conversations lost to history.

There's similar templates for offline communities but that's someone else's job to describe them, and I suspect academic libraries are jammed full of those descriptions. Come to think of it, they're probably jammed with descriptions of online communities too, but here's mine, subject to refinement. Consider it a rough first shot at these definitions, with you getting what you paid for.

We are easy to spot. We have the shakes, drum our fingers and twitch. From our sullen, sunken faces pop wild, darting eyes.

Oh, how we yearn for our next line or two - of computer text. Yes, we are email addicts: "I could quit tomorrow - if I wanted to."

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the A.M. Turing Award to Frances Allen, a computer scientist at IBM and the first woman to receive the prestigious prize.

Carbon capture, in the form of "artificial trees", is one idea explored in the BBC Two documentary Five Ways To Save The World. But could these extraordinary machines help to mitigate our excessive burning of fossil fuels and its consequence, global warming?

After nearly two years, a cryptic treasure hunt played out between the real and virtual worlds has been won.

Andy Darley from the UK was one of 50,000 players who took part in the alternate reality game, Perplex City.

Gamers from 92 countries have solved clues on the web and around the world in a quest for the Receda Cube, an "artefact" buried in a hidden location.

Mr Darley eventually tracked the object to a wood in Northamptonshire. Finding it nets him £100,000 ($200,000).

The rise of what's known as contextual advertising has created a 21st-century version of royalties that's reaching deep into the ranks of amateurs and hobbyists. It points to a future where many people will moonlight online as small-time creators for a little extra income, with a few finding fame and fortune along the way.

By proactively delisting auctions for property from virtual worlds and online games, eBay may be effectively forcing players who participate in such trades into the hands of giant third-party operations that buy and sell virtual goods.

Britons fear being ripped-off online more than gun crime, climate change or even contracting MRSA in hospital, a survey has suggested.

A public relations effort by Microsoft and Acer to provide a number of bloggers with Acer laptops loaded with Windows Vista became something of a PR nightmare for Microsoft; Acer has its own little issue to handle now too.

Public relations firm Edelman has enlisted RSS toolmaker NewsGator to build ad widgets that pull in feeds, ratings, and comments. The joint product, called "Hosted Conversations," launches Monday.

...

For those of us more interested in the consumer side, Holston said to look for a new version of NewsGator's web-based feed aggregator next month, which will incorporate aspects of social tools like Netvibes and Newsvine.

The New York Times unveiled a new service today that allows readers to quickly post stories that they find on the newspaper's Web site to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine.

Western donations of old computers, mobile phones and televisions could be toxic 'hand-me-downs' posing a hazard to the environment of poor countries, a major UN conference will hear this week.

... the first batch of OLPC's XO-1 computers rolled off a Shanghai production line last week. Over the next few months, they will be tested in different countries. "We have to test, test, test this machine under conditions of extreme cold, extreme heat, mud, dust, jungle and daily abuse by kids," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC and chairman emeritus of the MIT Media Lab. Throughout the tests, the XO-1's design will be refined with the aim of shipping the first production models to schools next summer.

Everyone seems to have a personal blog these days. That includes the UN's envoy to Darfur, Jan Pronk, whose blogging has gotten him expelled from Sudan and put the UN in a tight spot as to how to get back in after writing about the "open secrets" of the Sudanese government's digressions.

Like a roll of the dice or a sip of bourbon, the glow of the computer screen has an irresistible and dangerous allure to many people, according to a new nationwide study by Stanford University.

A random survey of 2,500 adults -- the first-ever attempt to quantify ``Internet addiction'' in the general population -- found that between 6 percent and 14 percent of computer users said they spent too many bleary-eyed hours checking e-mail, making blog entries or visiting Web sites or chat rooms, sometimes neglecting work, school, families, food and sleep.

The Mozilla Foundation will release the Firefox 2.0 browser on Tuesday, Mozilla Foundation officials confirmed Monday.

The new release promises several new features, as well as a solution to a annoying memory leak that has troubled earlier versions, according to Mozilla.

The big news on iPod's fifth birthday is, well, the iPod. Buzz continues to surround Apples slick line of hand-held media players as talk of the long awaited iPhone — an iPod that also doubles as a cell phone — and a video iPod with a bigger screen and touch screen controls persist.

After a nearly yearlong ban, China has eased restrictions on the access to the English-language site of Wikipedia, the reader-edited online encyclopedia. However, the access to the Chinese version of the site remains "spotty," a Chinese-American researcher said in his blog this week.

A place to collect interesting links from or about Newsvine

Calvin Tang, Co-founder & Chief Operating Officer in NewsVine., has taken the time to answer a few questions from Web2List.com.

Much has been said about the potential for the blogosphere and cyberjournalism to reshape the flow of information and opinions. But for a case study of how these new media can impact the business world, consider the biggest event to hit the computer industry in recent weeks. Yes, we're talking about those burning laptop batteries and the decision by Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) to recall more than 5 million of them

Mike Davidson of Newsvine.com opens by saying this is a time to talk about how to improve the editorial process. How to decide which stories are important and interesting without human intervention? E.g., Techmeme.com looks at what A-Listers and B-Listers are linking to, while Digg lets everyone vote. Newsvine measures how long you spend looking at a story.

Google launched its citywide Wi-Fi service here this week, and Wired News decided to put it to the test.

On the internet, a little mystery can go a long way.Six weeks ago, a man living in Germany and calling himself KenGrok, announced a fascinating discovery on a Google Earth Community forum.Poring over satellite images of China on the free Google Earth service, he came across a strange plot of land - approximately 900 metres by 700 metres, about the size of six Sydney Cricket Grounds.

I've been asked how I handle URLs on sites like Digg and Netscape. The URLs you choose to submit actually make quite a difference. Their uniqueness plays a big factor in getting promoted to the front page.

The more unique a URL is to a story, the less likely duplicates of that story will be submitted. Duplicates (aka dupes) are the bane of many people's existance in social bookmarking. They split votes for a story between multiple submissions, thereby degrading the community's efficiency of bringing that story to the masses. In other words, they slow a story down from reaching the front page or sometimes cause it to miss its window of promotion opportunity altogether.

Zoomclouds is a service that lets you generate a tagcloud from an RSS feed:

Tag clouds are cool, informative, appealing representations about what's happening in your blog, or anywhere else.

With ZoomClouds you can put in a matter of minutes a tag cloud in your site, based on whichever RSS feed you like.

You can define height, width, colours ... the entire look and feel of the tagcloud.

When you're done, you get the code which you then can post on your blog, or website.

As an example I've created three clouds, spanning a 7 day period. One for my column, one for the main page of Newsvine, but just the Wire part, and one for the main page of Newsvine, the Vine part. You can see the result at your right.

When you click a tag, you get taken to a page with the most recent articles / seeds mentioning that specific word.

If you want to have a look for yourself, without immediately signing up, you can do so at the sample page for Newsvine - Irma.

One of the questions that comes up quite a lot for us is the scale of the archive. There have now been over a million articles published since we began in 1997. We do sometimes get requests from members of the public who were quoted in stories a long time ago to have these references removed. The reasons can be as trivial such as they now find what they said embarrassing, or perhaps they have changed their view on the topic.

There have also been people convicted of a variety of offences who have asked us to take stories down, claiming that it is preventing them from getting on with their lives. Our response to these requests has generally been robust. We like to think of the large backlog of stories at the news website as equivalent to a newspaper archive. Every effort was made to ensure that the stories were accurate and reliable at the time of publication, and they remain in the archive for the record. If we start to alter this version of history, where on earth do we begin to draw the line?

A large number of children in Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand may be getting a $100 laptop soon.One Laptop per Child (OLPC), the nonprofit group founded by Nicholas Negroponte to make a durable low-cost PC for children in developing nations, has confirmed that it is in communications with those governments.

Contrary to reports, no orders for Linux-run laptops from any of those four countries have yet been placed, a representative said.

The initial roll-out will target Brazil, Argentina, Thailand and Nigeria - countries Negroponte says were chosen to represent each continent and give a good geo-cultural mix. He says the focus is very much on rural communities.

Our insatiable appetite for the big picture is threatening the planet. A scientist has warned that if half of British homes buy a plasma-screen TV, two nuclear power stations would have to be built to meet the extra energy demand.

Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of Technorati, lends an inside look at his expertise to the world blogging and how it has come to be. He shares how blogging has helped shape the internet in the global market today. He also speaks about the advances of the medium and how it has helped to shape not only the internet, but society today in everyday life.

Don't miss a second of it, click to view the webcast of Peter's remarks.

Social networking sites are behind a surge in viruses, spyware and other "nasty stuff", according to web security firm ScanSafe's monthly report.

According to an analysis of more than 5bn web requests in July, ScanSafe found that, on average, up to one in 600 profile pages on social networking sites hosted some form of malware.

From the page:

-- Google is issuing this warning to people who try to click on links to sites with spyware and other malicious code: "The site you are about to visit may harm your computer!" --

From the page:

-- I recently went to 11 of 30 Top users of Digg and asked them what advice they have for the up and coming Top Digg Users. This is what they had to say. --

From the page:

-- It's not the Audi-Oh. It's not the iBuzz. And I'm afraid it's probably not the spanking new Ohmibod (that's it on the left), either, though this new version of a vibrator that plugs into your iPod and buzzes along with the beats and swoops and clicks of whatever music is playing on your 'Pod is, to be sure, a keen and relatively pretty addition to the array. --

From the page:

-- The ringleader of a Dutch-based internet scam that raked in up to $US2 million ($2.6 million) has been arrested in Nigeria, police in Amsterdam say. --

From the page:

-- So why is alternative energy a bad word? Simply stated, it is the fact that it costs so much money to pursue and it is the constant reminder that instead of being at the forefront of this search we are just in the beginning. --

From the page:

-- Vicars in the UK are up in arms after parts of a program they use to organise church services were branded spyware. --

From the page:

-- What's the best way to assuage censorship concerns? Throw a temp under the bus. SixApart's apologies to Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus came swiftly after Pincus made a proper stink about attempted censorship. --

From the page:

-- For many publishers and news providers, being included in the Google News index is a good thing. It's a traffic driver. For the Associated Press, it's another matter because AP content is syndicated in publications worldwide. Google has agreed to a licensing agreement with the not-for-profit organization to avoid further legal entanglements. --

From the page:

-- The new network badge from Delicious arrived as the social bookmarking company continues to integrate its services with new owner Yahoo. --

From the page:

-- Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warned.

Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics said in a presentation at the Black Hat security event here Thursday. --

From the page:

-- A Chinese university professor has successfully sued one of the country's largest blog website, Blogcn.com, after it carried defamatory remarks on a blog written by one of his students. --

From the page:

-- Entering its second decade as a potent information technology, the internet is the subject of endless fascination, speculation and, at times, even consternation. In some scenarios, it is seen as the inexorable force that will render the printed page, the high-paid anchorperson, and the concept of an elite gatekeeper media obsolete. Yet at the same time, there are serious questions about whether online news can ever develop a business model that will enable it to support the kind of quality journalism that for now remains the near exclusive domain of the beleaguered old media. --

From the page:

-- A decade ago, just one-in-fifty Americans got the news with some regularity from what was then a brand new source: the internet. Today, nearly one-in-three regularly get news online.

But the growth of the online news audience has slowed considerably since 2000, particularly among the very young, who are now somewhat less likely to go online for news than are people in their 40s. For the most part, online news has evolved as a supplemental source that is used along with traditional news media outlets. It is valued most for headlines and convenience, not detailed, in-depth reporting. --

From the page:

-- Amnesty International has harsh words for the US companies that participate in China's Internet censorship scheme. A new report (PDF) just out from the human rights group takes Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft task for their work in China, and it also attacks the most common defenses these companies use. Amnesty has also launched a campaign at irrepressible.info that sheds light on Internet censorship and repression around the world. --

From the page:

-- Britain is looking for a new real-life "Q", the eccentric boffin behind the gadgets designed for fictional superspy James Bond, according to an advert in The Sunday Times. --

From the page:

-- What is it about electronic communication that makes highly intelligent adults behave like arseholes as soon as they sit down to a keyboard? It is a puzzle that has defeated better minds than mine, most recently Timothy Garton Ash's. He suggests that some kind of responsibility may be the answer; while this is itself a characteristically responsible suggestion, I don't think it is going to work at all. All this spring we have seen astonishing examples of the rudeness, stupidity and aggression which seems to characterise all online discussion. --

From the page:

-- Thousands of Britons who have bought iPod radio links should be able to use them legally for the first time from November, communications regulator Ofcom announced today. --

From the page:

-- Technology companies have reacted angrily to the idea of a new tariff aimed at recouping money lost to illegal downloading. --

From the page:

-- For Mark Cuban, "The Internet is Boring. Its old news." For America's Fortune 500 mega-corporations, however, today's Social Web is the "coolest" thing around. --

From the page:

-- A loft in New York City. The singer Regina Spektor is performing songs from her new album. People wander in, sit down and discuss the music. Everything seems normal. But then so did life for people in The Matrix. --

From the page:

-- Record labels are planning to sue the Chinese arm of Yahoo in the latest high-profile move in their global battle against digital piracy. --

From the page:

-- Efforts to remove the US government's historical stranglehold on the internet will kick off again today. --

From the page:

-- A new study has revealed that women's online skills are far better than they think.

The study, the first to look at self-perceived online competence and its relationship to actual online ability-finds that although women and men have essentially equivalent online abilities, females rate their own online skills significantly lower than do their male counterparts. --

From the page:

-- It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as "contributors" and "editors", not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled "encyclopedia"

Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators. --

From the page:

-- Britain 'could be next' as US businesses seek pay-for-speed scheme --

From the page:

-- Afrinic is the regional registry for Africa whose aim is to "provide professional and efficient distribution of number resources to the African community, to support internet technology usage across the continent and strengthen self internet governance in Africa by encouraging a participative policy development." --

From the page:

-- Data breaches are yesterday's news. It's time to think about your next privacy problem, cryptographer Phil Zimmermann says, before some pimply kid in Bulgaria stumbles across your company's computers. Next thing you know the boss will get an email demanding a payoff attached to a digital recording of him having phone sex with his Brazilian Pilates instructor. Or the kid could just use insider information to quietly play with your stock. Call it "point and click wiretapping," Mr. Zimmermann says. Even while holding forth at a sunny Menlo Park, California, coffee shop his tale carries a chill. --

From the page:

-- China launched a campaign in February to "purify the environment" of the Internet and mobile communications, as the government continues to research monitoring technology and issue "admittance standards" for blogs, reports Chinese news agency Xinhua. --

From the page:

-- Google has won a crucial victory in a German court as it tries to persuade publishers that its drive to digitise library books to get at the information inside is not an attempt to smash copyright laws. --

From the page:

-- It's an old joke that a new computer is obsolete before you get it out of the box, but the seemingly endless rush to purchase new computers—PC sales continue to rise each year, passing the 200 million mark in 2005—have created an increasingly urgent environmental problem. --

From the page:

-- If you're in Israel, you might as well check out the latest in bulletproof vests and unmanned aerial vehicles. This week, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor is holding Security Israel, which covers the latest in security equipment. It's a little different than tech trade shows. The exhibitors start serving beer at 11:00 and a lot of the attendees are in uniform. --

From the page:

-- A media watchdog group protested the conviction of an Italian blogger for defamation, warning Friday that such a verdict could lead to censorship of blogs in Italy. --

From the page:

-- "You don't have to be up on the latest Ajax techniques to build a widget on our system. If you are, great, you can build better widgets, but it's not a requirement anymore," Mr. Anuff said. --

-- Counterfeiters aren't Microsoft's only opponents in its effort to combat piracy: Some of its customers are against it, too.

The company is forging ahead with a program, Windows Genuine Advantage, tied to its free software downloads and updates, that checks whether the Windows installation on a PC is pirated. But some people, including some who say they own a legitimately acquired copy of Windows, have challenged the need for such validation.Most of their criticism is directed at the way Microsoft's antipiracy technology, Windows Genuine Advantage, interacts with a PC. Recently, the software maker was lambasted over its WGA Notifications tool, which it pushes out as a "high priority" update alongside security fixes. There have also been complaints about the tool collecting information from PCs and causing system troubles.

"The issue is not that they are trying to reduce the number of pirated copies. It's the unethical way in which they go about it," a CNET News.com reader using the name "jabbotts" wrote in response to a recent story on Microsoft's antipiracy efforts.

But there is more going on than just talk. Some Windows users have started to search for ways around the antipiracy technology, setting up a struggle between Microsoft and WGA opponents. Since the 2004 introduction of the WGA program, multiple hacks and tricks to circumvent the piracy check or to remove the software have been published on the Internet. And the hunt for effective workarounds appears to be continuing.

Windows Genuine Advantage is a stepped-up effort by Microsoft to boost the number of Windows users who actually pay for the operating system. The company has said that roughly a third of Windows copies worldwide have not been acquired legitimately--as a boxed product or bundled onto a machine, for example.

Microsoft has gradually expanded its pirate-busting efforts. Today, Windows users must have their PC electronically approved before they can download add-on Microsoft software such as Windows Media Player and Windows Defender. WGA excludes security updates from this requirement. When the antipiracy program started, validation was optional for downloads.

As the program has grown, so have efforts to circumvent it. One Web site, for example, lists 15 methods--including step-by-step directions and links to file downloads--to disable Microsoft's copyright-check tools and WGA Notifications warning messages. --

-- Starting next week, MySpace, the popular online hangout, will make it harder for strangers to send messages to younger teenagers.

The site, which has more than 70 million members, has been under pressure because members are frequently subjected to lewd or inappropriate messages and occasionally lured into dangerous real-world encounters.

The site will also stop showing advertisements for certain products--like online dating sites--to those under 18.

News Corp.--the owner of MySpace--has been working to address concerns about the safety of the many teenage users of the site, while not clamping down on the freewheeling and flirtatious interchanges that are the source of its appeal.

Next week, the site will restrict how users older than 18 can contact those aged 14 and 15. Older users sending a message asking to become friends with younger users will have to enter the recipients' actual first and last names or their e-mail addresses, rather than simply their user names.

The new policy still allows people under 18 to send messages to those under 16 without knowing their full names or e-mail addresses.

"A lot of 14- and 15-year-olds are friends in school with 16- and 17-year-olds," said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of News Corp.'s Internet unit. "We want to balance the openness of our community with the interest of protecting the member." --

-- Microsoft and the Creative Commons on Wednesday plan to release a free tool that will let people attach a Creative Commons copyright license to Microsoft Office documents.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has written licenses that allow content creators to share information while retaining some rights.

Currently, some Web-based tools let people associate a Creative Commons license with information. But Microsoft is the first vendor to embed a license-selection option inside its applications, said Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons and a Stanford Law School professor.
Creative Commons in Office

"This is important to us because a huge amount of creative work is created inside the Office platform. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons licenses obviously helps us spread those licenses much more broadly," Lessig said.

Once installed, the license-selection software will appear as a menu option in the Microsoft Office application.

It will generate a Creative Commons logo, a short summary of the license chosen, and a hyperlink to the Creative Commons Web site. People can download the software from the Creative Commons Web site or from Microsoft Office Online. --

-- Censorship or maintenance? That's the question after China's two biggest web portals shut down, media in the region reported Tuesday.

Agence France-Presse and South China Morning Post both reported the search engines of Sina.com and Sohu.com have been shut since noon Monday, launching speculation that the sites may toughen their censorship methods.

The AFP wire service said some spokespeople at the companies claimed they were only going through upgrades. But the Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, said the portals have been given time "to rectify their mistakes" after censorship tests showed they failed to filter certain keywords. --

-- The Dutch court of appeal has overturned a 2004 ruling legitimizing zoekmp3.nl, a web site offering unauthorized links to copyrighted music run by Techno Design.

The website was taken down on Monday after the ruling on Friday which said that failure to comply with the injunction would lead to fines of 10,000 euros (about US$13,000) a day or 1, 000 euros (about US$1,300) per infringing file.
Techno Design will also have to pay damages, with the amount to be determined at a later stage.

A warning to users on zoekmp3.nl not to infringe copyright did not excuse Techno Design from liability. "Such a warning ignores the reality that the lion's share of visitors are looking for unauthorized MP3 files," the court said. --

-- The latest version of the Opera web browser promises to be a boon for anyone wanting to download large files from the internet. This is because of its support for a technology called BitTorrent that is used to share files.

Rather than downloading a file from one computer, BitTorrent splits the download between several computers across the internet saving time and resources.

BitTorrent has been around for some time but recently hit the headlines when the test version of Windows Vista was made available on a BitTorrent website.

Microsoft demanded that the website stop this, claiming that it was "offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorised activities relating to, copyrighted works published by Microsoft". --

-- Hackers on Sunday broke into a part of Microsoft's French Web site, replacing the front page with online graffiti.

The intruders were able to access the server that was running "http://experts.microsoft.fr/," Microsoft confirmed Monday in the US. The attack was claimed by Turkish hackers using the handle "TiTHacK," according to Zone-H, a security Web site that keeps an archive with screenshots of defaced Web sites.

The attackers were likely able to penetrate the server running the Web site due to faulty configuration, Microsoft said in a statement Monday. "Microsoft took the appropriate action to resolve the issue and stop any additional criminal activity," the company said.

After breaking in, the attackers defaced the Microsoft Web site, leaving the following note: "Hi Master (: Your System 0wned By Turkish Hackers! redLine ownz y0u! Special Thanx And Gretz RudeBoy |SacRedSeer| The_Bekir And All Turkish HacKers next target: microsoft.com date: 18/06/2006 @ 19:06 WE WERE HERE...." --

-- As new disclosures mount about government surveillance programs, computer science researchers hope to wade into the fray by enabling data mining that also protects individual privacy.

Largely by employing the head-spinning principles of cryptography, the researchers say they can ensure that law enforcement, intelligence agencies and private companies can sift through huge databases without seeing names and identifying details in the records.

For example, manifests of airplane passengers could be compared with terrorist watch lists - without airline staff or government agents seeing the actual names on the other side's list. Only if a match were made would a computer alert each side to uncloak the record and probe further.

"If it's possible to anonymize data and produce ... the same results as clear text, why not?" John Bliss, a privacy lawyer in IBM Corp.'s "entity analytics" unit, told a recent workshop on the subject at Harvard University.

The concept of encrypting or hiding identifying details in sensitive databases is not new. Exploration has gone on for years, and researchers say some government agencies already deploy such technologies - though protecting classified information rather than individual privacy is a main goal.

Even the data-mining project that perhaps drew more scorn than any other in recent years, the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness research program, funded at least two efforts to anonymize database scans. --

-- The text message was short and to the point: "My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilogrammes of food. You must help."

The arrival of that text made two worlds collide. The sender was a refugee in a drought-plagued camp in Kenya. The recipient was sitting in the London office of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), in the comfort of the industrialised world where hunger and poverty are a distant problem.

In terms of sheer initiative, Mohammed's direct appeal has to be a first. Using nothing more extravagant than a mobile phone he showed that the gulf between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is much smaller than many of us would imagine. He shattered the stereotypical image of the faceless anonymous victim of yet another African disaster and gave a voice and a name to the tragedy unfolding in the Horn of Africa. --

-- We've all heard about the "laws of attraction" -- but what about the laws of Internet dating? Online dating services and some of their users have been accused of committing fraud. Madeleine Brand speaks with Slate legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick about the regulations, if any, that govern Internet dating. --