Technology achievements

The victory for the entertainment business was Pyrrhic, although this initial success is dampened by a possible mistrial. Nevertheless, four Swedes have been martyred. Yet content creators and consumers are no closer to new business models that solve the problem.

Piracy is not usually honorable. But it is often a symptom of some kind of failure or injustice. The 17th Century pirates of the high seas were rebelling against tyrannical maritime labor practices. The pirates in Somalia are a direct result of government failure, and the pirates put on trial in Sweden were the result of a market failure, which is sadly now a decade old.

That the market has not come up with alternatives to file-sharing good enough to make piracy moot is the real problem, and the companies and individuals that have stood in the way of this are the ones who owe content creators an explanation. Extremists on both sides are hailing this as a win, but it’s the majority of us in the middle who continue to lose out.

This was a show trial about money and politics, but most of all it was a sideshow. This argument is over and the entertainment industries should be focusing on the licensing schemes, royalty agreements and the new business models content creators desperately need. Thankfully many more of them are. But this verdict will encourage the ones who are not to continue pretending there is some other way around this problem that involves suing people.
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Shortly before 2 p.m. PDT (1:52 p.m.), the iTunes App Store hit 1,000,000,000 apps sold since it originally just nine months ago. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s still a significant milestone for the store, the iPhone (and iPod touch) and Apple. It didn’t come without its glitches. The iTunes Store was showing up as unavailable for several people off and on throughout the afternoon. Even Apple itself jumped the gun a little bit by having its after 1 billion page already available early Thursday, in addition to the counter in iTunes showing the 1 billion mark before the official counter on Apple’s website.

CSO — The perpetual proliferation of botnets is hardly surprising when one considers just how easy it is for the bad guys to hijack computers without tipping off the users.

Botnets have long used a variety of configurations, in part to disguise their control mechanisms — see What a Botnet Looks Like. But as user-friendly but insecure applications continue to become available — especially social networking programs used by the non-tech-savvy — hackers have an ever growing number of security holes to choose from. They’re also getting smarter about building resilient architectures, according to botnet hunters who have monitored recent activity.

Here are four reasons the botnet fight is getting harder, and what to do about it:
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oogle is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.
Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.

But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”
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Officials have agreed to correct spelling errors in road signs pointing to a central Massachusetts lake with a 45-letter name. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Webster has one of the world’s longest place names. It’s been spelled many different ways over the years. Some locals have given up and simply call it Lake Webster.

But after researching historical spelling combinations, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester said local Chamber of Commerce officials agreed that some signs were wrong. There was an “o” at letter 20 where a “u” should have been, and an “h” at letter 38 where an “n” should go.
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