China handed over a new licence to Google for the US company to continue running its website and search-software peddling in the Middle Kingdom; the two conspirators had created months of tension over the question of whether China would put principle ahead of business, and whether Google would put doing-no-evil ahead of its share price; Google said it was thrilled that China would allow it to "continue to provide web search and local products to our users in China", while China had no comment about a routine business licence deal.
The inner circle of the official logo of the newly formed military US Cyber Command has this secret code: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a. The cryptic characters are supposedly part of the unit’s mission statement.
The government of India announced that Research In Motion (BlackBerry), Skype and Google must make all customer data accessible to intelligence agencies; the order came after the heads of several Indian security agencies got together and found they could neither intercept nor decode data running through the networks they were trying to tap, strictly for academic reasons, of course; they convinced the government to bring in an amendment to the IT laws to make it mandatory for any foreign business doing business in India to provide any such data on demand; a previous demand to the nice Canadians of Research In Motion to provide all its network data was dropped in 2008 when the government agreed it wasn't actually all that interesting.
Microsoft agreed formally to hand over Windows 7 source code to Russian intelligence services (FSB); Microsoft said all it wanted to do was to increase sales to the Russian state, so why not?
The US military set up a new Cyber Command to combat possible attacks on networks. The US National Security Agency launched Operation Perfect Citizen to try to detect cyber assaults on companies and citizens responsible for critical infrastructure; the NSA will deploy sensors in places such as nuclear power plants and the electricity grid to try to detect an impending cyber attack.
Cathay Pacific Airways announced it will have full broadband networks working on all its passenger aircraft by early 2012; the airline signed a venture with Panasonic Avionics of Japan to supply the service for Internet and GSM phone services; so it won't be long before you and the person beside you can be yakking during the whole flight, won't that be great?
Online backing system PayPal said it was studying new ways to get into the mobile commerce business, which has really taken off this year; Laura Chambers, head of the PayPal mobile division, said she was building a strong "ecosystem for developers" for m-commerce to allow more shopping via mobile phones; she said that PayPal handled $141 million worth of m-commerce in 2009, while this year's transactions are already well past that and expected to total about $500 million. Finally, Facebook agreed to open a store so you can buy gifts with its virtual currency; you can buy the currency at various online banking sites, certain retailers and even some cybercafes, then use it to purchase gifts for friends, isn't that great?
The seizure of seven pirate-movie sites by the US Department of Homeland Security failed, as the operators of the sites turned the operation into a whack-a-mole exercise; the day after it was seized and closed with a huge logo of ICE (US Immigration and Customs), TVShack.net was back as TVShack.cc with a new server in a different country and a Cocos (Keeling) Islands domain. A hacker from Argentina calling himself Ch Russo broke into The Pirate Bay - stop snickering, please - and stole user information; he considered selling the information to anti-piracy forces in Hollywood or Big Music, but decided instead to go public with the vulnerabilities he found at The Pirate Bay; that's his story, anyhow.
An apparently confused Joaquin Almunia, the EU competition commissioner, told a placid audience at University College London that his six-month investigation of whether Google was hurting competition on the Internet was difficult because stuff on the Internet changes often, making it tough to come up with an answer; after six months of careful study, Mr Almunia was still coused over whether to open a formal investigation of a possible monopoly; that raised the obvious question: the EU has a competition commissioner? Thomas McDonogh, a member of the European Economic and Social Committee, said that the United States has way too much influence in the Internet, because so many Net services are controlled from the US; Mr McDonogh said that all security and Internet systems should be controlled by Europe.
Facebook bought the travel recommendation startup NextStop so it could shut it down; the social network's headquarters said it would release a free version of NextStop's database of 100,000 recommendations for travel worldwide, in case someone wants to produce an app for Facebook.
Google wants you to shoot yourself - with a video camera, for YouTube; submit a video of your life on July 24, and you may be one of about 20 people chosen from around the world to actually star in a feature-length documentary Life in a Day with big name directors and producers; details are at tinyurl.com/298qb3y.
