Articles by David Vranicar

From Algeria to Bangkok to Atlanta... a three-year manhunt... a laundry list of suspected crimes. This one's interesting Hamza Bendelladj, an Algerian national known by his alias "Bx1," appeared in an Atlanta court last week, where he faced a 23-count indictment stemming from his alleged participation in the cybercrime consortium responsible for ha...

A company in India has developed a smartphone for the blind. The device, three years in the making, will be equipped to read text messages and emails, and it will then convert the text to Braille. It will utilize shape memory alloy technology, which exploits a metal's ability to "remember" its original shape. The phone's screen is not a screen so ...

Police in Australia have arrested a 24-year-old who claims to be a high-level member of the international hacking collective Lulzsec The IT worker was charged with two counts of unauthorized modification of data and one count of unauthorized access to/modification of restricted data. In other words, he attacked and defaced a government website....

Dramatic rhetoric, tiny fine German data regulators fined Google less than US$190,000 for collecting information from unsecured WiFi networks while it compiled data for Google Street View. The data scoop was, according to Germany's data chief, "one of the biggest known data protection violations in history." ...

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt defended the company's tax practices in the United Kingdom, where Google and a handful of other U.S. tech companies have been chastised for not paying enough taxes Google paid just over US$9 million in UK taxes in 2011, despite hundreds of millions in turnover. The company was able to pull this off by operatin...

Before knocking boots, knock phones Three software engineers at the University of Iceland have designed an app to alert people if a casual encounter might in fact be casual incest....

Taiwan authorities have launched a probe into charges that Samsung hired students to post disparaging comments about HTC online If the false advertising accusations are upheld, Samsung and its local advertising agent could be on the hook for Tw$25 million, or about US$835,000....

In an effort to appease European regulators, Google for the first time has agreed to make legally binding changes to its search results The changes stem from a two-year investigation into whether Google abused its online search dominance in Europe, where is owns a 90-plus percent market share....

The official Twitter page for the Japanese city of Yokohama announced that "North Korea has launched a missile." This would be scary if true, but because it didn't actually happen, it's just kind of embarrassing....

Iran -- long irked by Google's mapping systems -- said that it will launch its own 3D mapping service, one liberated from the geographical inaccuracies and "Zionist" bent of Google Earth The system will be an "Islamic Google Earth," according to Mohammad Hassan Nami, Iran's minister for information and communications technology. It will go by the m...

Microsoft and Nokia are part of the coalition of companies that filed a complaint with EU antitrust regulators claiming that Google is using its Android mobile operating system to promote its own products and services Made public Tuesday by lobbying group FairSearch, the action comes as European regulators are reportedly near a settlement with Goo...

It was time to try something new The western Africa nation of Mali, whose .ml domain current has fewer than 50 active websites, will let people around the world register .ml sites for free....

The Netherlands has had the damnedest time blocking The Pirate Bay Taking a cue from the UK, as well as from Belgium and others, the Netherlands ruled last May that Dutch Internet service providers must block The Pirate Bay.

Living up to its billing as the Chinese Google, Baidu, China's top search engine, reportedly is working on Baidu Eye, something that sounds a lot like Google's Glass. It's "a wearable Internet gadget," according to China Daily. Worn like eyeglasses, Baidu Eye will be controlled by voice and will feature an LCD display that can recognize images. W...

Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized Monday to Chinese customers over the company's warranty policy, adding that he would improve customer service in China, which is now Apple's second-biggest market The apology may be linked to a mid-March television special -- it aired on state-run CCTV March 15, which is known in China as "Consumer Rights Day" -- that ...

Members of a film crew working on State of Control, a documentary about Tibet, are convinced that the Chinese government is behind cyberattacks on their computers They've been faced with unknown parties taking external control over a computer's cursor; abrupt log-offs; at least one fried operating system; and DDoS attacks....

Google Street View has had its share of intrepid adventures -- Antarctica, say, or Everest Base Camp However, the Google Maps service has a sober side, too.

North Korea's Internet liberation has hit a snag -- it's still North Korea One month after announcing that it would grant tourists and visitors 3G Internet access, North Korea appears to have revoked its 3G services.

At long last, China and the United States are on the same cyberpage A U.S. district judge in Manhattan dismissed a lawsuit brought by activists who claimed that Baidu, China's largest search engine, should be punished -- along with China itself -- for censoring them on the Web....

A cemetery in Shenyang, the capital of China's Liaoning Province, will become, for lack of a better term, interactive With mobile devices, people will be able to scan a quick response code on graves of people whose relatives have requested the feature. Scanning this code will allow visitors to learn about the person's life; they can also access a W...