A Spanish intellectual property law has finally banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain, making it a civil offense even to download content for personal use.
The legislation, approved by Congress on Thursday, toughens previous provisions. An early May circular from Spain’s fiscal general del estado, or chief prosecutor, allowed downloads for purely personal use.
Now Spaniards caught […]

Google launches its own payment service called Google Checkout, today.
The long-anticipated service will compete directly with eBay’s PayPal service, effectively ending a longstanding partnership between the two Internet giants. It will also put Google at the center of the money-transfer business, making Google a tempting target for everyone from fraudsters to government regulators.
If Google Checkout […]

Yahoo Inc. will consider refunding money to thousands of advertisers dating back to January 2004 and pay $4.95 million in attorney fees to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging the Internet powerhouse has been profiting from bogus sales referrals generated through a sham known as “click fraud.”
The agreement, given preliminary approval Wednesday by U.S. District […]

An “emotionally aware” computer being developed by British and American scientists will be able to read an individual’s thoughts by analyzing a combination of facial movements that represent underlying feelings.
“The system we have developed allows a wide range of mental states to be identified just by pointing a video camera at someone,” said Professor Peter […]

I just spent the last hour or so creating an interesting experiment using PHP and the GD extension. I decided to use some 3D math that was festering in my brain, and I wrote matrix and vector PHP classes. Then I used my newly formed classes to draw some lines and rotate them. I added a few lines of JavaScript, and my beautiful lines were rotating right inside my web browser.

The lines themselves are not all that interesting, what is fascinating to me is that I actually created them, and didn’t let them bounce around in my head for ages. I have many ideas about assembling the lines into more structured elements. Something along the lines of 3D web interfaces that are generated from user preferences, online games, or anything with interesting pictures.

Google has written to some of its AdSense publishers offering them the chance to trial ‘cost-per-action’ (CPA) adverts on their sites.
The search engine giant is apparently planning to introduce a full CPA advertising network (also known as affiliate marketing), where publishers are paid a share of revenue based on a specific online action such as […]

Auction Info
ocial network site MySpace last week announced it is to put its search engine up for grabs amongst some of the industry’s biggest players.
During a Deutsch Bank Media and Telecom conference, Peter Chermin, the chief operating officer of parent company News Corp, said the firm will “auction off our search business to one of […]

A cross-site scripting flaw in the PayPal Web site allows a new phishing attack to masquerade as a genuine PayPal login page with a valid security certificate, according to security researchers.
Fraudsters are exploiting the flaw to harvest personal details, including PayPal logins, Social Security numbers and credit card details, according to staff at Netcraft Ltd., […]

Internet search leader Google Inc. is testing a system that aims to speed purchases online but bears no resemblance to the popular PayPal payments service of Web auctioneer eBay, Google’s chief executive said on Thursday.
Analysts had recently speculated whether Google would directly compete with PayPal, dubbing its potential new service “GBuy.” Google has not yet […]

Orange Business Services has launched a business broadband service designed to ease the issues of teleworking management.
The broadband service, which adds to Orange’s converged data access package, will offer download speeds of up to 8Mbps and unlimited download usage.
Orange will also provide end-user support for the service to remove the burden from corporate IT […]