San Francisco - US President George W. Bush is no longer Google’s top response to Internet searches for “miserable failure.”

Queries for French military victories no longer take one to “defeats.”

Links to web pages about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva no longer pop up in searches in Portuguese for “drunken despot.”

And Russian Internet users that type “enemy of the people” into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation’s leader, Vladimir Putin.

The search colossus says it has finally defused such “Googlebombs,” search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.

Read more »

Major record companies sued two Minnesotans on Thursday for alleged copyright infringement, accusing the men of illegally distributing copyrighted music on the Internet.In its latest attempt to stop the global online theft of music, the Recording Industry of America (RIAA), on behalf of major record companies, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis and Duluth against Jerry Bowman, of Deerwood, and Matt Smith, of Minneapolis.

According to the suits, the men used, without permission, an online media distribution system to download copyrighted recordings and distribute them to others, via unauthorized peer-to-peer services such as LimeWire. Last fall, major record companies sued the operators of the file-sharing service LimeWire for alleged copyright infringement.

Investors of eBay headed into the end of last year with some trepidation. The concern: an 800-pound-gorilla named Google  would give eBay a drubbing during the 2006 holiday season. The search giant aggressively moved into eBay’s e-commerce territory in 2005 with a product-listing service called Google Base. Last year, it stepped up the challenge, launching Google Checkout, a competitor to PayPal, eBay’s online payment processing service. The new offering was dubbed by press as a PayPal “killer” before it even debuted.

The big surprise of the season, however, was the strength of the services supposed to be suffering at the hands of Google. PayPal posted revenues of $417 million, a 37% growth rate compared with 2005’s fourth quarter. The payment-service company handled a record $11 billion in transactions, up 57%.

SAN FRANCISCO - Executives at eBay Inc. are touting security as their top priority in 2007 after an internal survey showed that online scammers may be denting the company’s reputation.

The San Jose-based online auction company began a program last year to safeguard members’ identities by concealing their user names on expensive listings.

That measure could make it harder for con artists to contact losing bidders and goad them into “second chance offers,” where customers wire cash to the scammers’ accounts.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16686937/

Boston - Microsoft landed in the Wikipedia doghouse on Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Spokesperson Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM, which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tokyo - Microsoft Corp will extend the free support period for its Windows XP Home Edition until after 2010 in response to consumer appeals, a report said on Wednesday.

Microsoft has originally planned to end its support service in late January 2009 as it prepares the global launch of the Windows Vista next-generation operating system for personal computers next Tuesday.

But Darren Huston, president of Microsoft’s Japan unit, said there had been requests from consumers, especially in Japan, for a longer support period.

“It is going to be significantly extended” he said in an interview with Kyodo News. “When I say significantly, it’s more than 1 year.”

An official announcement will be made on Thursday, the report said.

San Francisco - Google Inc has set aside more than $200m in its just-completed takeover of YouTube Inc to cover possible losses on the deal.This creates a financial cushion that might protect the internet search leader if it is hit with legal bills for the frequent copyright violations on YouTube’s video-sharing site.

Without elaborating in a late on Monday statement, Google said it is withholding 12.5% of the stock owed to YouTube for one year “to secure certain indemnification obligations”.

The Mountain View-based company disclosed the escrow account in an announcement commemorating the completion of its much-anticipated YouTube acquisition. As of Tuesday afternoon, Google representatives had not responded to requests for more details about the escrow account.

Buying San Bruno-based YouTube cost Google 3.66 million shares of its prized stock, including a convertible warrant. As of Tuesday, those shares were worth $1.79bn - above the targeted purchase price of $1.65bn announced last month.

California - Google has confirmed that it unwittingly disclosed login and password information of more than a dozen users.

Earlier this month, more than a dozen Google users thought they were doing the right thing by submitting suspicious internet addresses to a Google website designed to help fight online identity theft.

But tacked onto the end of the addresses they sent to Google was information they didn’t intend to share - including bank account numbers, user names and pass codes.

And that’s only half the story - a cautionary tale for unwitting internet users who trust in all things Google.

Perhaps because the company’s tech-savvy engineers figured that consumers would know better than to transmit such private data, they failed to delete it or otherwise protect it before posting it to Google’s list.

It wasn’t until an online security firm discovered the data that Google was alerted to the problem, according to the firm, Finjan Inc, which runs the Malicious Code Research Centre in San Jose.

Hamburg - Google, the world’s biggest web-search engine, had its German website cut off from the internet early on Tuesday, apparently after somebody hijacked the rights to its google.de address.

German surfers who tried to enter the Google site instead saw a webpage hosted on the servers of a tiny German online provider, Goneo.

“The problem was fixed in a short space of time,” said Stefan Keuchel, a spokesperson for the German branch of the US company, which earns most of its revenues from online advertising. Read more »

A Brazilian judge has lifted an order which caused the country’s ISPs to block access to YouTube following a ruling last week over a sex-romp video of footballer Ronaldo’s former missus Daniela Cicarelli.

The film in question shows Cicarelli and Tato Malzoni giving it some stick on a Spanish beach. It proved quite a hit with Brazilian YouTubers, prompting the couple to seek an injunction.

Sao Paulo state Supreme Court Justice Enio Santarelli Zuliani clearly thinks things have got a bit out of hand, and has accordingly “asked the companies to unblock the site and let him know why they can’t simply prevent the video from being seen”, according to AP.

It appears Google has replaced recent satellite imagery of British military bases in Basra with pre-war snaps following Army claims that terrorists were using Google Earth to plan attacks on its facilities.

According to a recent report in the Telegraph, “documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google”. The images showed in detail “the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks, and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked”.

On the back of one set of images showing the Shatt al Arab hotel - home to 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group - insurgents had written the “precise longitude and latitude”.

An intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group said: “This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks. Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?

“We are concerned that they use them to plan attacks. We have never had proof that they have deliberately targeted any area of the camp using these images but presumably they are of great use to them.

“We believe they use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas, such as tents.”

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy the 550 square metre principality of Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a ‘micronation’.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy the self-declared sovereign nation. Outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country, The Pirate Bays believes it could safely run the world’s largest ‘bit torrent tracker’.

Last year the Pirate Bay was closed down after raids by the Swedish police, and although it returned to a new Swedish server after a short stay in the Netherlands, the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the US government have all lobbied for The Pirate Bay’s closure.

Sealand’s royal family, Prince Roy and Princess Joan Bates and their son Prince Michael, Prince Regent, who set up the principality 40 years ago, are willing to sell the platform for £65m.

“If we do not get enough money required to buy the micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somwhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from $50,000),” the Swedish organisation says.

The claims of Sealand, a former military platform off the coast of Sussex, to nationhood are complete nonsense, a leading international and maritime law expert says. Piratebay, the Swedish file-sharing links site, says it is in negotiations to buy the platform.

The Spanish estate agent acting for the self-proclaimed nation has also declared that Piratebay may not be allowed to buy it because it has pledged not to allow a sale that would damage the interests of or act against the UK.

Piratebay is the focus of a burgeoning political movement in Sweden. The server farm hosting the site was raided last year ,causing popular outcry in a country where file sharing is significantly more socially acceptable than in other European nations. The site provides links to material that is often downloadable without a license or permission.

Piratebay now wants to find a location where it can set itself up as a nation and avoid copyright laws, and says it has started negotiations with the family that has long claimed Sealand as a sovereign nation.

But Professor Robin Churchill, a lecturer in constitutional and international law at Dundee University, says that Sealand’s 1967 claim to sovereignty is absurd. “It is within 12 miles of the coast of Britain and in 1987 the UK extended its territorial waters to 12 miles. That means that UK law applies, including the law of copyright, which could be extended to Sealand without any legal problems whatsoever,” he said.

A 16-year-old from Stavanger in Norway who shared thousands of movies and songs through the P2P program Direct Connect, has been charged with illegal file-sharing, Norwegian Aftenposten reports.

The boy allegedly ran the Stavanger Dragon Hub, from where at least 7,000 movies, 150,000 songs and 20,000 video clips were shared illegaly.

The server was tracked down last year by Norwegian law firm Simonsen, which is acting as regional representatives for the Motion Picture Association (MPA). The hub was closed immediately.

The 16-year-old now faces 60 days in jail and a fine of NOK4,000 ($644) if convicted. His parents could also be hit with “a six figure fine to compensate for lost revenues by the music and film industry”. Lawyer Espen Tøndel still has to determine the exact amount.

As Reported Everywhere, MPAA issued a press release that thay are now suing isoHunt.com, TorrentBox.com, and a number of other BitTorrent, eDonkey and Newsgroup indexing sites. I still have yet to receive a formal cease and desist letter directly from MPAA Legal, but all seems to indicate this is for real and it’s only a matter of time.

This is somewhat a followup to the series of MPAA letters we’ve received a year ago.

At this point, it is still uncertain what they are actually suing us for, considering we have a thorough copyright policy outlining our stance and takedown procedures. It is sad that despite our best efforts in cooperating with copyright owners, in both disabling copyright infringing links to their works everyday while for others, helping them distribute their works globally and cheaply using P2P technologies, it is still not enough for the MPAA. Have they ever learned from the VCR or Napster? When will corporations stop fighting technology and learn to embrace it to benefit all of us?

Read more »