Meet Flo and Lucky, two dogs hounding out piracy from Malaysia’s borders. These two black Labradors are part of Operation Double Trouble (now, there’s a name destined for film fame). This operation is funded by the Motion Picture Association, which invested $17,000 USD to have the dogs trained in Northern Read more
(via net.wars) The official Second Life blog has announced that it will ban gambling from the popular virtual world. The new policy bans all games of chance through random-number generators that provide a payout in Linden dollars or any real life currency. This includes all sorts of casino games (such Read more
It seems to be social network week here at TechnoLlama. There have been some interesting developments in the ongoing case ConnectU v Facebook (not to be confused with Facebook v ConnectU). ConnectU is yet another social networking site from three Harvard graduates, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra. Read more
The idea that the Internet is filled with sexual predators has received a boost as MySpace has admitted to having found and removed 29,000 registered sex offenders on its site. The admission comes amongst attempts by North Carolina’s Attorney General to change the law so that social networking sites require Read more
The mainstream press has discovered Web 2.0. Here is an interesting piece in the BBC about what they claim is a growing phenomenon amongst busy people, hiring someone to attend your online presence via blogs and social networking. To be honest, I found the premise for the article rather thin, Read more
(via BoingBoing) This is an amazing image charting the Web As We Know It (circa 2007), using the Tokyo underground as a reference. There are some interesting relations implied in the chart, for example, PirateBay is listed as one of the main sites, just as LastFM, YouTube, CraigList and OpenID, Read more
Last week I was reading New Scientist (as you do), and I came across an extremely interesting article on the race to produce synthetic life. The article claims that scientists are on the verge of producing an entirely new type of life from scratch, a prospect that scares the bejeebus Read more
The Times Online reports on the use of Facebook to enforce some of Oxford University’s strict regulations on post-exam celebrations. I have it on good authority that students post pictures of drunken shenanigans on Facebook, some of which fall foul of existing rules. Staff have used those pictures to warn Read more
There are many of us interested in the software patent debate, but the EPO seems not to be one of those. The EPO held a one-day conference attended by parliamentarians, industry, NGO and experts to discuss what has happened since the dismissal of the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive two years Read more
(via Rebecca Kahn) The Icommons mailing list has been discussing another potential Creative Commons enforcement case, this time in Australia. Virgin Mobile Australia has started an advertising campaign called “Are you with us or what?“, which has been collecting images from Flickr released under a CC-BY licence, which allows commercial Read more