Articles by David Vranicar

Intrepid hikers and garden-variety Internet addicts now have 4G access on top of Japan's famous Mt. Fuji Japanese telecom NTT DoCoMo has equipped the 12,388-foot summit with high-speed LTE connectivity. The access will run now through August, the height of the tourist season on the mountain....

In Japan, a flubbed privacy setting made public a Google Groups chat among Japanese bureaucrats, allowing any-and-everyone to see internal memos, including negotiating positions for an international treaty The default settings for Google Groups, which are established by the party that started the chat, allow public access to discussion threads. A d...

France has abandoned a law that called for copyright infringers' Internet connections to be cut off upon a third offense The law stipulated that letters be sent the first and second time people illicitly downloaded copyrighted material; the third time around, an offender's Web access would be disconnected....

Assuming he can get there, it looks as though leaker/hero/traitor Edward Snowden has options as he seeks a place to take up asylum Venezuela and Bolivia have now both offered asylum to Snowden, who is believed to be holed up in a Moscow airport. Snowden reportedly submitted a formal asylum request with Venezuela and Nicaragua, which has not offered...

Don't be surprised if this becomes a thing Twitter's "retained profits" last year in the UK came to just Pounds 92,408 -- about US$137,500. Some in Britain speculate that the piddly amount reflects some clever accounting, namely routing revenue through Ireland, where tax rates are much lower.

In what could be a prelude to censorship, the Turkish government has asked Twitter to establish a "representative office" in Turkey The government has hinted that it might ban Twitter if the company doesn't comply. Turkey did as much to YouTube, blocking the site for two years until last October, when Google opened a Turkish office....

The UK's NSA-ish surveillance program, "Project Tempora," has drawn the ire of the German government Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the Germany justice minister, sent a pair of letters Tuesday to the British justice secretary detailing the angst and anger that Britain's snooping has caused. Germans were already in a tizzy over U.S. surveillanc...

Google cannot be forced to delete sensitive information from its search index, a key advisor to the European Court of Justice said. The opinion, released by Niilo Jaaskinen, was prompted by a case in Spain claiming that Google should remove outdated financial details about an individual. That case was filed in 2009 by a Spanish man who complained ...

Edward Snowden keeps 'em coming Snowden, the whistleblower who recently blew the top off U.S. surveillance programs by leaking information to The Guardian and The Washington Post, told the South China Morning Post that U.S. spies have been hacking into Chinese mobile companies to thieve text messages....

France plans to propose a law that would prevent Amazon from offering discounts and free delivery for books in France Amazon's discounts amount to unfair competition and threaten booksellers' business model, culture minister Aurelie Filipetti said....

France's data protection watchdog, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes, says it will fine Google if the company doesn't rewrite its privacy policy within the next three months The CNIL will fine Google up to 150,000 euros, or about US$200,000, and double that if it fails to act. In particular, the CNIL wants Google to give us...

Honoring a previous agreement, legendary British rock group Pink Floyd has given the green light to music streaming outfit Spotify to host the band's catalog. Pink Floyd announced earlier this month that it would resist releasing its music on Spotify until the 1975 classic "Wish You Were Here" hit 1 million streams Well, the song hit 1 million, and...

Regardless of how this turns out, at least they nailed the name Google is launching about 30 superpressure balloons that will beam Internet access back to the ground....

Well, this was bound to happen U.S. lawmakers said Thursday that the House Intelligence Committee -- the same House Intelligence Committee that trashed Chinese telecommunications companies last year -- will conduct a "thorough scrub" of connections between China and Eric Snowden....

Google announced it has been tracking and disrupting "multiple email-based phishing campaigns" in Iran The campaigns, which have been going on for nearly three weeks, are targeting the accounts of tens of thousands of Iranian users. Google posits that the phishing is related to the Iranian presidential elections, which will be held Friday....

As far as Iceland goes, Edward Snowden may be left out in the cold Snowden, the whistleblower who made international headlines after leaking secrets about the U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM program, is believed to currently be in Hong Kong. Given Hong Kong's history of extraditing people to the United States -- and Snowden, to be sure, will ...

The European Commission is concerned that U.S. data collection practices such as PRISM may pose a threat to Europeans' privacy rights Commission Vice President Viviane Reding, who is in charge of justice, plans to raise the issue at an EU-U.S. meeting later this week in Dublin. That announcement comes after last week's revelation that the National ...

Google appears to have supplanted Facebook -- which had supplanted Apple -- as the likely candidate to acquire Israeli start-up Waze Google is prepared to pony up US$1.3 billion for the company, according to the Israeli business newspaper Globes. Last month, reports surfaced that Facebook was working on a $1 billion deal for Waze. And that was only...

President Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping will meet this weekend to talk cybersecurity, among other things, but there are plenty of people on either side talking already A day after China's claim that it has "mountains of data"proving U.S.-based hackers have been attacking the Middle Kingdom, United States intelligence officials say they hav...

This coming weekend's cybersecurity talks may have already started The state-run People's Daily ran an article claiming that China has "mountains of data" proving that it has been the victim of cyberespionage at the hands of the United States....