This is pretty interesting stuff. According to Iraq Museum International, it has detected a pattern of what it calls “eBay sniping”, in which bids are intentionally and artificially inflated to ensure that a legitimate bidder pays top dollar, and has managed to catch the thiefs (for that is surely what…

I’ve received a lot of questions asking what Baidu is, and why all the hoopla over Baidu? Well, Baidu (Nasdaq symbol “BIDU” – more on that in a moment) is the Chinese search engine which is being tauted as the next Google, and which claims to be the sixth-most visited…

Apparently despairing of what is happening to Chinese youth as a result of violent online games (can’t wait for Aunty’s groupie, Kailee, to chime in here), the Chinese government has said that from now on, minors are prohibited from playing games which involve players killing other players (known as “PK”,…

It seems that “Firefly” is a popular name for small, portable devices this month. First we had the Firefly cell phone for children, and now we have the Firefly “145 g unguided projectile” ballistic camera. Yep, you load this little baby into a grenade launcher, point and shoot, and out…

The below which came across Aunty’s desk today is somewhat dense to read, but the bottom line is that they are suggesting what is being called a “reverse 911” – that mobile communications devices are the next new line of defense for citizens during a crisis such as a terror…

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has just passed a tough new law aimed at spam, unsolicited text messages, and junk faxes. The new law requires a recipient’s opt-in, meaning that a commercial message must be solicited – the recipient must have agreed to receive commercial email from the sender first. Israeli…

Argentine authorites have arrested fifteen people in a multinational phishing scam, and, separately, the U.S. FBI has arrested 8 people in a global online piracy investigation, spokespersons for the agencies have said. In the phishing scam, which was truly international, police arrested suspects from Argentina, Spain, Italy and Romania who…

Nigeria really seems to be doing all the right things to bring under some semblence of control the flood of financial scams which originate within its borders, including the infamous “419 spam scam”. Earlier this month the Nigerian courts sentenced a Nigerian 419 scamstress to 2 1/2 year in jail,…

China has been in the news with relation to the Internet a lot of late. They recently joined the anti-spam “London Plan”, have expanded their Internet offerings to their citizens with MSN Spaces’ Chinese portal (which admits to censoring in China), and, most recently, have been in the center of…

Microsoft came out this week with a statement in strong support of DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement). Here is the statement which came to Aunty’s attention: WASHINGTON, July 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Today’s passage of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) in the U.S. House of Representatives…

Hacking and politics have contrived to make strange bedfellows. According to a report by the British news organization, The Sun, hackers have come forward and started to take down web sites which are fomenting terrorism, and inciting terrorist acts – something which the government cannot do with any sort of…

Scam baiting – the act of leading scammers on a wild goose chase – has been raised to a new art form with the advent of the Internet, and Internet scammers. And none more so (or more deservingly) than the so-called 419 scammers. You know the ones: “I am Mariam…

It is not something which could be done in the United States, what with the First Amendment and all; and whether that is for the better or not is a debate to be had elsewhere. But the British government has announced plans to shut down websites which incite terrorism. The…

It’s the ultimate sanction – the death penalty. To a spammer. Oh, it wasn’t handed out by a court of law, in fact in the country in which it occurred, Russia, there is no law against spamming at all. However, Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found dead in his apartment,…

Governments around the world are using various methods to crack down on Internet porn in general, and that involving children in particular, and the United States is considering the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 (more about that in a minute). The Danish government has just announced a…