Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a bill on Thursday that would rewrite the ground rules for Internet and mail order sales by eliminating the option for many Americans to shop over the Internet without paying state sales taxes.
via Democrats push for new Internet sales taxes | Politics and Law – CNET News.
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry plans to raise workers’ struggles to stop a spate of worker suicides and quell rising public anger.
An incorrect malware alert, issued today (4/21) at 9am Eastern, resulted in computers with Windows XP Service Pack 3 to shut down and start on a continuous reboot cycle.
Full story at PCMag.com.
Internet users in China’s rural areas reached 106.81 million by the end of 2009, an increase of 26.3 percent year-on-year, chinanews.com.cn reported Friday, citing a report released Thursday by the China Internet Network Information Center CNNIC.
The report said 68 percent of rural residents use desktop computers to get access to the Internet. Cell phones are also becoming important devices for rural netizens to surf the Internet, with 71.89 million people doing it this way, up 79.3 percent from the previous year.
A Delaware man has been arrested because police there say he used a tiny camera to secretly take hundreds of pictures of unsuspecting women as they used the bathroom.
Matthew Hawkins (pictured above) works as an I.T. contractor and police say his work has taken him to several area businesses including several Philadelphia hospitals and may also have placed cameras inside restrooms at those facilities. But the investigation began at a small medical billing office in Claymont, Del.
The camera, found by an employee, is about the size of a flash drive, maybe three inches long, and police believe it may have a motion sensor device that triggers it to take pictures. Computer forensic experts recovered hundreds of pictures they say had been deleted off the camera. Police say the pictures even captured Hawkins placing the camera in the bathroom, so they knew who they were looking for.
from: Computer Technician Arrested For Installing Hidden Cameras In Bathroom -
The deadline for students applying for Google Summer of Code this year is today, at 19:00 UTC. That’s about 3 hours from now. Still working on your application? Double check your time zone here. No late applications will be accepted.
A colour (color) e-reader that supports video and potentially web browsing has been shown off by Dutch researchers.The prototype uses screen technology – based on century-old science – that its makers say is up to four times more energy efficient than LCD screens.Once established in the e-reader market, Dutch firm Liquavista hope to see its displays integrated into other devices in the future.
But analysts question whether consumers will be enticed by the greener gadgets.
Liquavista said it expects the first e-readers using the “electrowetting” technology to be available by the middle of 2011 and the technology to then become more widespread.
Electrowetting has been known about for more than a century but is only now being perfected by several companies, for instance, to create auto-focus lenses for cameras.
It involves small electrical charges moving coloured oil within each pixel.
Most current e-readers use e-ink technology – small black and white beads that are manipulated with electrical charges.
Pages on current e-book readers can take up to two seconds to load each page. The new display can change images at a speed of up to 60 times per second, its manufacturers said.
This is fast enough to run video, which typically needs a refresh rate of 50 or 60 frames per second.
Liquavista uses the electrowetting to also add colour to a screen, but unlike liquid crystal displays (LCD) such as those on laptops, it can work without a backlight.
China’s Tencent, as well as Russian firms, ProfMedia and DST, have submitted their offers for AOL’s instant-messaging service ICQ, which is reportedly valued at up to $300 million.
Since its spin-off from Time Warner, AOL has been trying to remake itself and is currently selling its non-core assets, including ICQ.
A federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.
It marks a serious setback for the FCC, which needs authority to regulate the Internet in order to push ahead with key parts of its massive national broadband plan.
