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Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk
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Andrew Orlowski
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Canadian cops staked out a bar in the hope of finding a journalist drunk, a court heard today. The journalist in question, Edmonton newspaper columnist Kerry Diotte, wasn’t suspected of involvement in any crime. But Diotte had written a column criticizing the police force’s radar and camera technology as being more of a cash cow…
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GoogleNet flickers into life
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Andrew Orlowski
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Five months after announcing its first Google-branded hot spots, covering San Francisco’s Union Square and main public library, Google is enhancing the service. The ad giant briefly made a beta of a proxy server, Google Secure Access, available for limited download today before withdrawing the link. The proxy is intended to protect 802.11 wireless users…
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A Million Nation States of One fears Google Balkanization
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Andrew Orlowski
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Some stories just take forever to come true. 30 months ago, we revealed Google was going to introduce a weblog search engine – and this week, it finally did. The story, so obvious in retrospect, barely merits the term ‘scoop’. But now, as then, it has been eclipsed by a raging debate about the implications for…
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Meg Whitman’s $2.6bn spam goof?
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Andrew Orlowski
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“eBay looks less fearsome when you’re upside down,” says the young CEO behind the online auction house’s great Chinese rival Jack Ma. To encourage new hires at his Alibaba.com, Ma asks them to perform handstands. Maybe that won’t be necessary for much longer, as eBay is a lot less fearsome – and a lot poorer –…
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What sealed Palm’s software fate?
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Andrew Orlowski
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So, PalmOS ends up in the hands of an Japanese mobile browser company that almost no one has ever heard of. It’s a sad sign that expectations for PalmOS software have been so low, for so long, that PalmSource stock leapt 70 per cent on the news. The origins of this decline have been well…
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Google hires ‘Astro’ Cerf
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Andrew Orlowski
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Vint Cerf, co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, has become Google’s latest trophy hire. The ad broker must be hoping that Cerf, hired for the PR position of “chief evangelist”, can add some gravitas to the operation after weeks of bad publicity. A poorly judged flounce saw Google vow to shun CNet’s reporters for a year, and the…