NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 18 December
18-12-2009
by Emmet Cole
Irish scientists honoured in the UK | Google slapped with copyright fine
American-owned transatlantic high bandwidth connectivity provider Hibernia Atlantic announced on Friday that it has selected 3Com's H3C S7500E modular switches to provide Ethernet services across its transatlantic submarine cable network. By adding the H3C S7500E switches across its network, Hibernia Atlantic hopes to offer more cost-efficient, Ethernet-based services from 1Mbps to 10Gbps. Hibernia Atlantic owns and operates a direct connection between Ireland and North America, the UK and mainland Europe.
A group of Irish computer scientists based in UCD have received a distinguished paper award at the British Computer Society's annual Artificial Intelligence Conference, in recognition of a reputation-based computer system designed to improve the helpfulness of online customer reviews. The technique automatically analyses online user-generated reviews based on four main factors -- reputation, social, sentiment and content -- and determines how helpful the reviews are likely to be to customers.
Smartphone manufacturer Palm posted a greater-than-expected loss for its fiscal second quarter on Thursday. Palm reported losses of USD85.4 million (USD0.54 cents per share), compared to a year-earlier loss of USD508.6 million, (USD4.64 per share). Revenue fell a whopping 59 percent to USD78.1 million from USD191.6 million a year ago. The results sent the value of Palm shares down more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.
Ten privacy organisations have filed a complaint against Facebook to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The complaint, which is led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, alleges that recent changes to the social-networking company's privacy policies and settings violate federal laws. In December, Facebook made changes to its site, including recommending that people set more of their information to be public rather than visible only to friends. The complaint asks the FTC to require Facebook to restore previous privacy settings which allowed people to choose whether to disclose personal information.
A Paris court has convicted Google of copyright infringement over online publication of French books, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Paris judge ruled that Google must pay EUR300,000 in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere. The company was apparently also ordered to pay EUR10,000 per day until it removes extracts of the French books from its online database. The French case follows the news earlier this week that a Chinese court prepares to hear a case brought against Google by a Chinese novelist for scanning her works.
Twitter was temporarily hijacked by what appears to be Iranian opposition activists on Thursday night. Many users reported seeing a green flag (a symbol of the Iranian opposition movement) when they logged into the micro-blogging site. Others were redirected to another web page with Islamic text. Twitter was a popular tool during anti-government protests in Iran earlier this year, with the US State Department even requesting that Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance in order to maintain the useful flow of anti-government sentiment emanating from the country. The Iranian government has clamped down on access to Twitter, but that didn't prevent Thursday night's attack from a group calling themselves the "Iranian Cyber Army". Reports suggest that it is difficult to pinpoint the true identity of the attackers. On Thursday, ENN reported that the Iranian protests were the most tweeted item in Twitter’s News and Events category in 2009.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 