From the BBC: France nabs gun-toting pensioner An 81-year-old Frenchman has been given a one-year suspended jail sentence for firing a hunting rifle at helicopters dropping water on a forest blaze. David Thiel opened fire on 21 July when the low-flying helicopters disturbed his afternoon nap near Grasse in the south of France, court sources … Read more
I must confess I’m not sure how it works, but it seems like an interesting, but potentially flawed, approach in the battle against phishing. German bank PostBank, IDG reports, has launched a new system to combat phishing, extending the existing German practice of using transaction numbers, or TANs: Until now, Postbank customers transferring money from … Read more
Was the story that News Corp nearly bought Skype for $3 billion really true? British paper the Independent on Sunday seems to think so: According to well-placed sources, Skype entered into talks with News Corp over a potential $3bn sale. This would have made a massive profit for the two founders and their backers – … Read more
I’m more and more convinced that storage and software to order it are the crucial bottlenecks and opportunities in this next stage of the Net. Not earthshattering, I know, but people are acquiring photos and music files at a faster rate than the drop in storage prices, which means somehow, some way, they’re going to … Read more
[This story has since been denied by the purported source. Please see below for details] For Wikipedia there have long been two problems: How to stop vandalism and how to create a product that could be considered ‘stable’ and ‘complete’ enough to burn to CD — in short a releasable version of the encyclopedia. Maybe … Read more