IN THE PAPERS
In the papers 30 May
30-05-2007
by Sylvia Leatham
Apple products attract increasing complaints | CDWow to pay record damages in copyright case
The Irish Times reports that Vodafone shares reached a five-year high on Tuesday after a bullish trading forecast from the mobile operator, as reported by ENN.
The paper also says an Irish consumer body has reported a rise in complaints about products made by Apple. Many of the complaints received by the Dublin office of the European Consumer Centre (ECC) relate to an alleged design fault in some Apple laptops that causes the computer to break down after a year's usage, just outside the company's warranty period. ECC Dublin claims there is a problem with "built-in obsolescence" in some well-known Apple products such as laptops and iPods. Last month a Danish consumer agency said it had discovered evidence of a hidden design flaw in Apple's iBook G4.
The same paper notes that a computer malfunction caused the closure of both lanes of the Dublin Port Tunnel on Tuesday afternoon. The closure was caused by a fault to the operational sensory system which monitors the height of vehicles entering the tunnel, CO2 levels and fire hazards. It was the first time the tunnel was shut at peak time since it opened in December.
The Irish Independent says that friends of Sean Nolan, the teenager who died after being stabbed on Waterloo Road in Dublin in the early hours of Saturday morning, have been pouring out their grief on Bebo. Tributes for the 18-year-old are flooding onto a dedicated webpage set up on the social networking website.
The Irish Examiner reports that the Ombudsman for Children is concerned about the use of the Mosquito -- a device that emits a high-pitched sound that can only heard by people under the age of 25. The devices are being bought by business owners who want to deter teenagers from congregating outside their premises. Ombudsman spokeswoman Emily Logan said she had received a report on the devices from Youth Work Ireland and was studying its findings to see what action, if any, she might seek. That report claims the device assaults children and is a crime under the Non-fatal Offences against the Person Act 1997.
The Financial Times says that record companies have won STG41 million in damages against online retailer CD Wow, a Hong Kong-based CD and DVD seller. The judgment -- issued last week and announced by the record companies on Tuesday -- is the latest twist in six years of one of the biggest pieces of copyright litigation led by the British Phonographic Industry. John Enser, head of the music team at law firm Olswang, said the award would be a "significant deterrent" to retailers trying illegally to exploit the so-called grey market in goods that are bought in low-price countries and sold for higher prices elsewhere.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Toshiba has said it will start selling laptops with microprocessors from AMD in the US and Europe. Toshiba, whose computers currently run on Intel processors, has turned to AMD as it faces brutal margins in its computer business. The company saw PC revenue increase 14 percent in the year ended 31 March, but operating profit margins in the business stayed below 1 percent. A Toshiba spokeswoman said the company aims to have AMD processors in about 20 percent of the PCs it sells each month in the US and Europe.
The paper also notes that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a way to get people to help digitise books every time they solve the simple distorted word puzzles commonly used to ensure that a website visitor is a real person and not an automated program. Computers can't decipher the twisted letters, although it takes people just 10 seconds on average to type them in. Carnegie Mellon researchers have come up with a way for the puzzles to present snippets of books, instead of random words, to type in -- a move that could help get searchable texts online faster.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 