Digital-Lifestyles

UK

  • UK File-Sharer Has To Pay £16,000: Historic Background

    UK File-Sharer Has To Pay £16,000An unnamed woman in UK has been ordered to pay £16,000 after having been found guilty of sharing a game, Dream Pinball 3D, on P2P networks.

    The initial default judgement was made against her was at the London County Court on 27 May.

    Subsequently the Patents County Court in London handed down damages of £6,086.56 plus costs and disbursements of £10,000.

    Recent UK actions
    Davenport Lyons, a UK law firm, has been instructed by Topware Interactive, a video game company started in Germany, to pursue UK residents who have been sharing their games on P2P network.

    We all know that law is a slow moving beast, but as far back as March, 2007 there was discussion on P2P sites about letters that had been received from Davenport Lyons, which had targeted 500 people at that point.

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  • 16-24 Year Olds Still Obsessed With TV, Despite PVRs

    16-24 Year Olds Still Obsessed With TV, Despite PVRsJust when you think that there’s hope for humanity, that mankind has escaped the slavery that is television, a survey turns up that tells you the complete opposite.

    Published today, a study of 2,00 UK digital TV viewers reports that some of the supposedly tech savvy generation Y (16-24 year olds) are still choosing watching TV over other more normal activities.

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  • Twitter Cuts UK SMS Service

    Twitter Cuts UK SMS ServiceTwitter has decided to drop the distribution of outgoing SMS in the UK, citing escalating cost.

    While UK users will still be able to update Twitter using their mobiles, those updates will not be distributed via SMS to their ‘followers.’ Updates will still be visible over the Web, as previously, as well as other, third-party services.

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  • Gary McKinnon Gets European Court Date: Newsflash

    Gary McKinnon Gets European Court Date: NewsflashYou’ll remember that UK ‘hacker’ Gary McKinnon had lost his House of Lords Appeal at the tail end of July.

    He’s attempting to stop his deportation to America to be tried on hacking charges.

    He and those in his defence camp, including his lawyers, Kaim Todner LLP, will be breathing a sigh of relief, for the next two weeks at least.

    We’ve just heard that the Presidents of the European Court Human Rights will hear his application, before the full Chamber, on 28th August 2008.

    Background on the case

  • Tesco Offers DAB Radio For £35

    Tesco Offers DAB Radio For £35Supermarket giants Tesco will soon start offering shoppers the smallest and cheapest personal DAB Digital radio in town, the teensy weensy Technika DAB-108P.

    Set to retail for £34.97, the midget-sized Technika measures up at just 6.9cm long by 3.8 cm wide and weighs in at a mere 52g.

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  • Niklas Zennstrom’s Ran Yacht Wins Cowes

    Niklas Zennstrom's Ran Wins CowesWhat do you do if you’ve sold your business for X billion dollars?

    Well if you’re Niklas Zennstrom of Skype and Kazza fame, you share a passion with other Tech billionaires, like Oracle’s Larry Ellison – Sailing.

    If you’ve got large bundles of cash in your pockets, you don’t just get any old boat and hope that you might do quite well, you invest a ton of wonger and gather yourself a world-class crew.

    The boat, a Transpac 52, was commissioned in 2006, designed by Reichel/Pugh, famed Yacht designers and runs under GBR 528R.

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  • Google Bags Three Quarters Of All UK Web Searches

    Google Bags Three Quarters Of All UK Web SearchesFurther proof of Google’s towering dominance of the search market has been revealed in the latest figures released by stats analysts comScore.

    Their latest Internet usage figures from June 2008 show that Google has become the total don of UK search engines, notching up more than three in every four of all web searches conducted in the UK.

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  • A Tough Week For YouTube

    A Tough Week For YouTubeYouTube will be hiring more lawyers and policy wonks, we suspect, following a week of complaints and legal challenges to the content that is stored on their servers and show to people around the world.

    Yesterday the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee published a report (PDF) with included “Risks from the Internet, particularly social networking sites and sites hosting user-generated content.” Most of the media used this to focus on YouTube and how evil it is.

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  • Ofcom Gives BT OK For Ebbsfleet Fibre Trial Line Rental Discounts

    Ofcom Gives BT OK For Ebbsfleet Fibre Trial Line Rental DiscountsOfcom are altering the very grandly named, “Universal Service Condition 1,” to let BT provide discounted connections to people on their Ebbsfleet Fibre optic trial, which plans to provide network connections of up to 100Mbps.

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  • Gary McKinnon, ‘Hacker,’ Loses House Of Lords Appeal

    Gary McKinnon, 'Hacker,' Loses House Of Lords AppealGary McKinnon, who is accused by the US government of being a ‘computer hacker,’ lost his appeal to the House of Lords yesterday.

    He was appealing against being extradited to the US, but in a unanimous decision, the Lords said to find in favour of McKinnon would, “imperil the integrity of the extradition process.”

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