Europe warms to globalisation

Europe 'should not look at globalisation in the way the rabbit looks to the snake' and should embrace the changes to media and information wrought by technologies like the Internet. The remarks were made by Viviane Reding, the European Commission commissioner responsible for Information Society and Media at yesterday's European Forum. In her speech, Reding admitted that the freedom afforded by the Internet can be abused to distribute child pornography around the world and that satellite TV can be abused to circulate hate speech and terrorist propaganda. ...more

Amazon on the game

Leading Internet retailer Amazon has recently launched a new games store as part of its website. The company, which is more famous for selling books than anything else, have decided to tap into the multi-billion pound video game industry. Amazon is also hoping to provide an online gaming community and news on new and future games releases. ...more

Google launches blog search

Google has released a beta version of its long-awaited and much anticipated blog search, two years after it acquired the popular Blogger technology and blog service. However, it appears that the new service is over-zealous in its search for content, and is indexing some blogs, even if the blog instructs it to ignore with meta tags in a file called robots.txt. ...more

Spammers latch on to bird flu scare

Online drug peddlers are putting users lives at risks by flooding mailboxes with spam urging people to buy the anti bird flu drug Tamiflu, SophosLabs warned today. The security firm has reported that an increasing number of junk messages claiming to sell the much sought-after Tamiflu have been picked up by its spamtraps. The drug is believed to be the most effective at protecting humans from the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus. ...more

Microsoft warns: your new PC is already out of date

Microsoft has warned consumers that the first thing they need to do when they open their new computers this Christmas is to protect and update them. There will be plenty of folk waking up Christmas morning to the thrill of a new PC packed with the latest components. But the Windows XP platform, with which it will most likely be preloaded, may not be include the latest security patches and fixes. ...more