WORLD REVIEW
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Sony of Japan announced it will invest 40 billion baht to build its production and marketing of lithium ion batteries in Japan, Singapore and China; that is a 12.37 billion baht bet in real money that batteries are not going to get any better any time soon.
Alert officials from the International Olympic Committee and US Olympic Committee caught and named rip-off web sites claiming to be selling genuine tickets for the Beijing Games, including BeijingTicketing.com and beijing-tickets2008.com; apparently unaware of how the Net works, they went to court to try to close down all sites selling Olympics tickets. The media woke up for an afternoon and asked IOC chief Jacques Rogge about the censorship; he said he wouldn't apologise for Chinese lies and broken promises - but the "reporters" did not ask him about his own promise: "There will be no censorship on the Internet."
Creepy fact of the week: The new Apple 3G iPhone "phones home" so that Apple can deactivate any extra apps you have put on the phone even (or especially) if it's from an official App Store.
Firefox makers Mozilla invited you, you and ... you to help to develop and test Aurora, which the company says will be a next-generation browser, essentially moving the PC desktop on to the web; Aurora will instant-message, transfer files and do lots of stuff you currently need other programs for; a lot of details and your invitation to work for Mozilla for free at at the blog at tinyurl.com/5qpd3z.
Market researchers NPD reported that the average new Windows notebook in the US now runs on Vista, has 3GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive and sells for around $700; the average Mac notebook is priced at $1,515. If it looks like a notebook and is sold like a notebook, it might be the Jointech JL7100 - a cute, $99 machine with Windowesque CE 5.0 and a VGA display that may remind you more of a PDA than a full computer.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! of America got together, the way huge and powerful companies do, to make a strong decision about what to do with repressive countries; and the answer is: 1. Make money with them until 2. they order you to help them with repressing human rights; at this point refuse to help unless it gets in the way of Point 1; Google pledged strongly, for example, not to give to China "any sensitive personal information regarding American athletes, journalists and tourists who use the Internet while they are in China during the Olympics;" of course, Google has not been asked to give such information, so reverting to Point 1 is automatic; there will be a code of conduct on all this, and please stop sniggering.
404 du jour: A Beijing restaurant hoping to attract Olympics-goers ran its Chinese name through a web-based translation machine, then used the result as its name in English; which is, on a big signboard: Translate Server Error.
In a huge, non-conspiracy coincidence, the top two Canadian yuppiephone firms Telus Corp and BCE did not talk together but decided right at the same time to also start charging customers for text messages they receive including spam and nonsense; Industry Minister Jim Prentice was ever so upset but not so upset as to interfere with big companies that contribute to political parties.
French reporters from Global Security Magazine were expelled from the world's top hacking conference for, well, hacking; les rapporteurs showed colleagues how unsecure their Internet connections were by cracking the Black Hat press room net, and handing US writers their passwords; Mauro Israel, Marc Brami and Dominique Jouniot were tossed out by large security officers.
The Borings, of Pittsburgh, Aaron and Christine, sued Google because the search engine took photos of their home and placed them on the Google Street Views - causing at least 750,000 baht of distress; Google said, look, there is no expectation of privacy anywhere anymore; "Today's satellite-image technology means that even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist. In any event, plaintiffs live far from the desert and are far from hermits."
No. 3 (barely) yuppiephone-maker Motorola of America replaced CEO whathisface with two men to oversee a company reorganisation: Sanjay Jha was brought in for the mobile phone unit and Greg Brown was promoted in-house for the broadband division.
The US Federal Communications Commission announced it would not rescind rules against using yuppiephones in-flight because your seatmate is an obnoxious, loud jerk; the US Fderal Airline Administration announced it would not allow in-flight use of mobile phones because there is a non-zero chance of interfering with airline avionics; therefore, the US Congress, just before adjourning for a five-week holiday without considering the energy crises, passed a last-minute, new law called (no, really) the Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace (Hang Up) Act, that makes it illegal to use mobile phones in-flight.
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