Norton Says Renew now or “Beg for Mercy”

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Norton Says Renew now or “Beg for Mercy”

Instead of Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus removing all adware and keeping your PC safe, the pop-up for when the subscription expires says “Maybe things will be ok for a while longer, Then again, maybe cybercriminals are about to clean out your bank account. The choice is yours: Protect yourself now or beg for mercy.” Sounds more like malware extortion to me.


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Facebook trying to trademark the word “face” and “book”

When businesses become big, some decide to act big too. They walk into the legal saloon, swagger up to the bar and expect plaudits and favors to come streaming their way.

Sometimes it is for good reason, for they fear that others might trade off the back of their bigness. Sometimes, though, it is just an attempt to live large.

What, then, might one think of the news that Facebook is reportedly not merely attempting to trademark the word “book,” but also the word “face”?

The patent application, seems to seek a rather broad coverage.

TechCrunch reports that Aaron Greenspan, a classmate of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and someone who may or may not have been a participant in the company’s founding, has already laid an objection to the trademark application.

Greenspan has a company called ThinkComputer and a mobile payment app called FaceCash. He has therefore reportedly asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an extension to fully form his discomfort.

I will admit not to have been entirely au fait with FaceCash’s possibilities.

However, who could not have enjoyed some kind of relationship with a thing called FaceTime, Apple’s very nice video chatting telecommunication feature of the iPhone 4? Apple already owns the trademark to FaceTime, yet it is very fond of creating subbrands that have a very close verbal identification with each other.

What if Apple wants to create new versions of FaceTime, called, say, FaceIT, through which you could be grilled face-to-face by your most trusted IT professional anywhere in the world? Would that be suddenly verboten?

Yes, I know that not everyone wants to talk to an IT professional face-to-face. Of course I don’t expect such a feature to suddenly appear on iPhone 5. (It’s just a little too niche.)

But surely the question is whether Facebook can prevent any new product, especially one that might already carry some fame with it (like FaceTime), appearing in the vaguely technologically communicative sphere with the word “face” at the beginning of its name.

I have contacted Apple for comment and will update with the company’s reply.


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Movie Studios sue Shops with Pirated Materials

Movie studios are extending their efforts to take down sites that offer pirated material, with a new lawsuit targeting an advertising company that provides services to such sites. As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. and Disney have teamed up to sue Triton Media, accusing the company of both contributory and induced copyright infringement because Triton helps to keep the sites alive by providing them with advertising and referral income.

Warner and Disney say that Triton has relationships with at least nine sites that they consider to be “one-stop-shops” for illegal copies of the studios’ work. The list is made up of mostly no-name sites, such as free-tv-video-online.info, watch-movies-links.net, and thepiratecity.org. According to the complaint, Triton and the nine sites basically had a symbiotic relationship—both sides allegedly profited from the distribution of pirated works, and Triton made it possible by offering “material assistance” to the websites.


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Naked Pics of Dell Tech Support customer posted online

Strange things can happen when you call tech support.

But perhaps not quite as strange as what allegedly happened to Tara Fitzgerald. According to News10 in Sacramento, Calif., Fitzgerald wanted to send some pictures of herself to her boyfriend, but she couldn’t find them on her Dell computer.

Her urgent need to find these pictures drove her, quite naturally, to call Dell tech support. Her call was answered, she said, by a gentleman in Mumbai, India, named Riyaz Shaikh.

Shaikh, who, by the time you finish this tale, might not turn out to be a gentleman, after all, offered to remotely access her computer so that he could find the pictures for her. Fitzgerald said she watched him as he located her snapshots.

It was another fine day in the helpful history of tech support. However, this success was ruined somewhat, when Fitzgerald allegedly received an e-mail from an unidentified source telling her that her pictures were now freely available for anyone to see on the Web. They were on a site called “bitchtara.”

Perhaps I omitted to mention that many of these pictures depicted Fitzgerald in the nude. And the Web site, as well as clearly violating her privacy, unfortunately offered lewd descriptions of her proclivities that were not in line with reality.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/52409490001?isVid=1

When Fitzgerald contacted Shaikh again, he suggested that it was, indeed, her boyfriend who had created the site, and he allegedly offered to help take it down. He needed, though, a laptop on which he could work on this vexing problem from home, she said. So–and this is a very painful part of the story–she shipped him one.

“My conscience is talking to me, saying, ‘Tara, don’t send this. Are you crazy?’ I sent it anyway,” she told News10. This part of the tale occurred in January 2009. This is particularly notable, given that the site featuring her pictures was still active, News10 reported, as of last Wednesday.

Indeed, Fitzgerald claimed that her repeated attempts to solve this problem through official channels, both through Dell and the police, were entirely unsuccessful. It was only by turning to the media, she said, that she managed to finally get Dell’s attention.

In the intervening period between sending the computer to India and this week, Fitzgerald discovered that Shaikh had allegedly used her credit card details to spend $802 on a computer and router for a woman in Tennessee.

Finding no way to reverse the alleged evildoings, Fitzgerald said she maintained contact with Shaikh through his personal e-mail account and his official Dell account. As late as this week, she said, he was still offering to pay for the charges and, she believed, still working for Dell.

However, once News10 contacted Dell, it received the following reply: “We investigated the issue, which involved a technical representative at one of Dell’s vendors. We contacted the vendor about the allegation and can confirm that the representative no longer handles Dell calls. We’ve been in contact with Ms. Fitzgerald regarding this issue and continue to investigate her claims to best assist in a resolution.”

One can, of course, accuse Fitzgerald of some considerable naivete in this matter. She had to break the whole story this week to her 14-year-old daughter. However, it seems that if her allegations are, indeed, substantiated by the facts that News10 says it has at its disposal, she might deserve some considerable restitution from Dell itself.

Tech support is a powerful position. It does give those occasionally supercilious anonymous voices at the end of a telephone, whether in India or elsewhere, peculiar access to people’s inner workings.

Fitzgerald’s accusations suggest that the inner workings of one or two people in tech support might deserve closer examination too.


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Amazon.com says it’s selling 80% more downloaded books than hardcovers

There’s more evidence that digital books are upending the publishing industry.

Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. says it is now selling 80% more downloaded books than hardbacks. Amazon’s download format is for its Kindle electronic reader as well as other devices.

“The Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, in a statement.”Astonishing when considering that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years and Kindle books for 33 months.”

Paperback books, which far outsell hardbacks, were not included in the announcement. Also, Amazon did not disclose sales numbers for the categories.

But it was clear that digital books were on the rise. A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Wilkofsky Gruen Associates Inc. has shown that although revenue from retail sales of printed books has been stagnant for several years, electronic books were forecast to surge to $1.6 billion in sales in 2010 from $1 billion last year.

Amazon said that for its full second quarter, 143 electronic books were purchased on the site for every 100 hardcover books sold.


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Stephen Hawking: “Time travel possible”

In his new documentary, Stephen Hawking offers the view that humans will be able to travel millions of years ahead of their own time.


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