Intermittent system glitches have been a pain in PayPal's rump roast since late last week, with the pay-processing eBay subsidiary saying they were working to fix the troubles. The glitches affected processing, logins, and new account creation, PayPal said October 11. "We are working furiously. ... We have all resources dedicated to getting it fixed as soon as possible," spokeswoman Amanda Pires told news wires, adding the problem may have begun with a coding update late October 7. "We haven't found the ultimate cause," she said, adding just how widespread the trouble was wasn't yet known. More details were expected after the glitches were fixed.
Google has taken up the challenge of delivering search and other Net data to cell phones of several major vendors by way of short message service, or text messaging. Google says they'll test a beta version of the free service in the United States, where text messaging has caught on more slowly than in Europe and Asia. One report said analysts think the service might be Google's bid to remain the kings of the search while also getting a position in the cell phone world. "I think what Google is doing with the service is beating others to the punch," Radicati Group analyst Teney Takahashi told TechNewsWorld, adding the service is fast and useful.
Bishop Klaus Kueng, whom the Vatican sent to Austria to probe a seminary sex and child porn scandal, has been named the permanent head of St. Poelten Diocese in Austria. Kueng will succeed Bishop Kurt Krenn, who resisted calls to resign from the moment the scandal broke, a scandal he dismissed as merely a childish prank. Kueng went to St. Poelten to investigate the scandal after pressure on the Vatican to assign an investigator, and his appointment as permanent diocesan bishop moved the Austrian Bishops Conference to say it hoped the appointment would help start putting the scandal behind the church. The St. Poelten scandal involved a reported 40,000 images including pure child porn on seminary computers, many of which showed seminary students and instructors in sexual play.
It might be more useful to send a former Melbourne, Australia brothel owner to treatment than to jail for downloading and storing over 10,000 child porn images, according to magistrate Ref Marron. He said in court that while possessing that many child porn images is "certainly a jailable offense," he also believed Pick would be served better by treatment than a prison term, indicating the prosecution in the case seemed to believe likewise. Pick has admitted possessing the images but denied having made them, saying he downloaded them from computer to disc for personal use. "There is no suggested dissemination of the material," his attorney, Paul Galbally, said. The plea for treatment for Pick comes at a time when Australia is being rocked by a major scandal involving over 200 child porn-related arrests, with more to come across the island country.
If you think email spam is a pain in the rump, beware that Internet telephony spam – known as Spam-over-Internet telephony (SPIT) is just as painful and likely to get worse. Which is not exactly what Technology Review columnist Eric Hellweg wants to believe, either. "[S]pam didn’t necessarily hamper email’s adoption, today it is a very annoying –and expensive – problem," he wrote. "Leaders in the VoIP market need to take advantage of this early-market time to address this issue and figure out ways to stop Internet telephony from drowning in a sea of SPIT. Unfortunately, however, not much is now being done on an industry-wide scale.
