Morning Round-Up for November 28, 2011

Headlines

• "A European court has ruled that record labels and film studios can't use the courts to instruct a broadband company to track or try to block a customer" over allegations of online piracy, reports Rich Trenholm.
• Speaking of piracy: "US authorities have initiated the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites."
• According to Asher Moses, judges in Samsung's appeal of a ruling against the Galaxy Tab—part of a lawsuit filed against the Korean hardware manufacturer by Apple—appear to be more than a little sympathetic to Samsung's argument that "the primary judge made a series of fundamental errors in her disposition of the interlocutory application."
• "IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010." Leena Rao has the details.

Security

• Lucian Constantin reports: "A week-long DDoS attack that launched a flood of traffic at an Asian e-commerce company in early November was the biggest such incident so far this year, according to Prolexic, a company that defends websites against such attacks."
• "Apache developers are working on a fix of a flaw in its web server software that creates a possible mechanism to access internal systems," according to John Leyden.
• "On Wednesday, Nov. 23, Attila Nemeth, a 26 year-old Hungarian citizen, pleaded guilty after hacking into Marriott computer systems, and threatening to reveal confidential company information he obtained if Marriott didn’t offer him a job." Mike Lennon has the story.

Hardware

• Courtesy of The Register: "Price comparison site Idealo.co.uk has revealed that disk drive prices were rising by more than 5 per cent a day in the aftermath of the crisis in Thailand that sent supply chains into a tailspin."
• Also via The Register, Tony Smith brings word that Samsung plans to phase out its line of netbooks next year, accelerating the product line's retreat as tablets overtake the market space.

 

Diagram from the MIT report discussed below.

Cool Technology

• "Researchers from the University of Cambridge have reported the ink-jet printing of graphene circuits, thereby demonstrating the suitability of graphene inks for flexible and transparent electronics," reports Peter Clarke.