Startup Earth

Is Microsoft Sabotaging Firefox With Sneaky .NET Updates?

DavidReece — Sun, 31 May 2009 00:23:23 +0000

Sabotage may be a strong choice of word, but it immediately came to mind with the news of Microsoft’s latest .NET update. The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, unleashed in February, forces an undisclosed Firefox extension on Windows users, called “Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0″, and it does so without asking the users permission. To [...]

Wikipedia Bans Scientology IP Adresses

DavidReece — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:54:13 +0000

After months of arbitration, Wikipedia have finally decided to clear the site of thetan influence, banning edits from I.P addresses linked to the Church of Scientology. The decision was made to circumvent continual attempts by cult members to silence critics, and push a self-serving agenda in Scientology-related entries. Remedies outlined by the committee include.. “All IP addresses [...]

A Deeper Look Inside Google’s O3D API

DavidReece — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:17:44 +0000

With the advent of HTML5 adoption just around the corner, and the announcement of Google Labs’ open source 3D graphics API, “O3D”, we will soon be seeing a wave of visually rich, media-centric web applications that will change the way you interact with the web. O3D is a Javascript API which allows developers to create 3D [...]

BNP `Crippled` By Anti-Fascist DDoS Attack

DavidReece — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:17:17 +0000

The British National Party (BNP) is begging supporters for £5,000 after their website was hit with a large scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on sunday, which hammered the server with waves of up to 28 million hits, bringing the site down. Deputy Leader, Simon Darby, blames ‘cyber-terrorists’ from Eastern-Europe and Russia, who, according to [...]

Gumblar Virus Mutation Makes Google-Search Toxic

DavidReece — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:49:27 +0000

A massive number of popular websites are being infected with a virus which uses vulnerabilities in Adobe’s PDF Reader and Flash Player to inject malware into otherwise trusted links, which infect visitors silently, and re-direct Google searches to malware sites. The virus, known as ‘Gumblar’ has been around for some time, but a recent mutation now [...]

Mozilla Takes Cloud Coding For a Spin

DavidReece — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:09:35 +0000

Mozilla Labs have been busy tinkering away with various new products like Jetpack and Weave, but it was Bespin that really piqued my interest, so I decided to delve a little deeper. Mozilla Labs describes Bespin as “[an] experiment that proposes an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable [...]

Oxford Barcamp Transparency To Discuss Surveillance State

DavidReece — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:28:04 +0000

If you’re interested in tackling issues such as the UK’s looming surveillance state and government transparency (or lack thereof), you may want to attend this event and chew the fat with like-minded privacy advocates and social media enthusiasts in the comfortable setting of Oxford. The Oxford 2009 Barcamp Transparency will take place on the 26th July [...]

Last.FM Accuses Techcrunch of Slander Over RIAA Leak Allegations

DavidReece — Sun, 24 May 2009 17:05:50 +0000

Last.fm system architect, Russ Garrett has responded to accusations raised by Techcrunch over allegations that the sites parent company, CBS has been actively sending user-data/listening habits of Last.fm users to the RIAA. In a statement, Garrett denies that Last.fm would risk a lawsuit to comply with an RIAA request for user data to be sent [...]

A Look Inside The Wolfram|Alpha Control Room

DavidReece — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:39:46 +0000

The team at Wolfram|Alpha have unveiled some shots of their control room, used during the testing phase to monitor various aspects of the site as it went live. It looks more like a scene from NASA mission control than your typical website launch, but perhaps that’s the image they were trying to convey. I wonder if [...]

How Cyberbullying Prevention Act Could Land You In Prison

DavidReece — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:15:17 +0000

The ‘Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act’ (H.R. 1966), which was introduced to Congress on April 2nd 2009 to amend title 18, United States Code with respect to cyberbullying, is likely to have a serious impact on social networking sites, forums, and all kinds of electronic communication in regards to freedom of expression. The bill introduces legislation [...]