A large insurance company is hauling Google into French court over selling adwords - the feature selling ad space based on search words. AXA claims the Google adwords service lets AXA competitors introduce words coming up when Googlers search the company's name. Google has already appealed an earlier French court ruling in a similar complaint, that one an Internet travel agent who said some Google adwords infringed their name.
MusicNet and Cflix may find appeal in a pilot music download service they're giving a two-month trial at Yale. The two companies say MusicNet, an online music company, will power a new service, Cflix's Ctrax, offering low-priced music downloads at up to twenty American universities come fall. MusicNet is providing Ctrax with over 700,000 songs from its library, and the plan is to customize it for each school, with the files stored locally on campus.
We wouldn't exactly call this music to your ears or eyes, but the latest variant of Bagle has more than code: the author has included a poem in the document attachment on which Bagle.Z hitches its ride. In the interest of satisfying any craving you have for lame poetry - we'll put it this way: William Carlos Williams he ain't - while saving you the consequences of opening the attachment and giving Bagle.Z its free and mischief-making ride, here is the poem:
Unique people make unique things
That things stay beyond the normal life and common understanding
The problem is that people don't understand such wild things,
Like a man did never understand the wild life."
Well, we understand the wild life enough to understand that early warnings about more signs of a potential "superworm" in the making might have slowed a possible new attack on the Net - but it doesn't quite mean that there isn't a major new denial-of-service attack in the offing, launching by way of thousands of already-infected Windows computers. "I thought it already would have happened," said VeriSign security officer Charles Kaplan to TechNewsWorld.com. "It's a waiting game to see if someone will inject the code that is now available." F-Secure also thinks a Blaster-like worm attack is in the offing.
Speaking of offing, that's about what happened to one particular anti-Semitic Website: Jew Watch, once the first item returned on Google searches on the word "Jew," has disappeared from Google, though Google said it had nothing to do with the disappearance. Spokesman David Krane told ZDNet the change had everything to do with timing and Web-hosting policies, as in the account for Stormfront - the white nationalist site supporting Jew Watch - canceled by Web host EV1, leaving the site inaccessible for several days. By April 26, all you could get out of Jew Watch (other than shuddering, of course) was an old image buried five pages within the search results. Stormfront has since found new hosting, apparently: the site remains online and active, though its links portal listed as temporarily unavailable when checked by yours truly.
Speaking of things you'd like to make permanently unavailable, you might think it was kind of dumb to require a password to get into an online discussion debating the merits of cloth diapers - and you'd be right, except that that kind of thing might well be a cover for a child porn site. At least, that's the advisory passed on from Saginaw County (Michigan) Sheriff's detective Paul Dietzel, who is part of the Mid-Michigan Computer Crimes Task Force tracking what authorities think might be the largest child porn ring ever broken in the region: 14 busts in 11 states since December. And Dietzel's favorite part is knowing his child porn probing will protect kids from predators. "(The pedophiles) say the kids want this," he told a newspaper. "Are you kidding? My kid can't decide what kind of gum he wants to chew. Right now I see myself doing this for a while."
Speaking of big child porn rings, how does a ring whose customer list totals at least 23,000? That's what Dallas police and the FBI have unwrapped by way of Operation Site-Key, which already has 51 convictions - including 17 North Texans - in the United States alone for child porn possession. And it all began with an April 2001 tip about a child porn site traced to a Dallas Web host. The bad news: With 23,000 customers at minimum, this operation has only just begun, even three years on.
Three and a half years on, a Marion, Illinois man will have his child porn trial by bench rather than by jury. Thomas R. Miller waived his right to a jury trial April 26, and Williamson County Circuit Judge Phillip Palmer will try to grant him a May trial date. Miller was charged with child porn possession over an alleged 22 porn photos of females who looked under 18, following a complaint by his then live-in girlfriend.
OK, this is getting too sickening. It's Heatter time: there's good news today. Namely, South Carolina joining 29 other states in making it illegal to use the Internet to stalk, lure, or entice a minor for abduction or sexual assault. Gov. Mark Sanford signed the law April 26. "It's a progressive statute," said assistant state attorney general Debra Tedeschi, "because it builds in... elimination of a defense that the person you're talking to is not actually a minor but might be a law enforcement officer." It's ten years in the pokey for each offense under this law, too, and that can multiply per offense if there were multiple contacts before the arrest was made.
And, let's end this with the following statement: Today, the best communication means of the world has been manifested in the Internet, which like a sea boat familiarizes us with exquisite shores of the world, but these shores are always frequented by dangerous sharks... Immoral images on the Internet lead to depression, ideological weakness (and) psychological damage. So said the Police Head Office for Public Education in Iran, demanding parents get more strict about what their children see in cyberspace. The Christian Right is a bunch of hedonists compared to that crowd...
