The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the Labour party. Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints - and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
Now he has been unmasked as Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old who had created an entirely false identity, claiming to be a tenured professor at a private university, but who relied on books such as Catholicism for Dummies when correcting articles on dogma.
He specifically rejects licensing FairPlay because he says its secrets will leak out if it's spread around, and it will be hard to patch when many companies use it. But he may be exaggerating. Microsoft's proprietary but openly licensed DRM has been cracked less often than FairPlay, even though it's licensed to dozens of companies. Is Jobs saying Microsoft can do this but Apple can't?
Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, an old comrade-in-arms of President Fidel Castro, raised suspicions about Microsoft's cooperation with U.S. military and intelligence agencies as he opened a technology conference this week. He called the world's information systems a "battlefield" where Cuba is fighting against imperialism. He also noted that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once described copyright reformers _ including people who want to do away with proprietary software _ as "some new modern-day sort of communists" _ which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.
Even if you abolished these old formats in favor of media locked up with technologies like FairPlay or PlaysForSure, you'd still have no bar to music file sharing. Both Apple and Microsoft's systems allow buyers of a song to burn it to an audio CD that can then be copied back to a computer in an unrestricted format. The side effect: It only took a few minutes with a file-sharing program to find MP3 copies of songs sold only on iTunes. And even without the audio-CD workaround, hackers have repeatedly dismantled the defenses of FairPlay and PlaysForSure.
Google Inc. saw its share price slip Friday after the company's second-quarter earnings came in slightly below Wall Street's estimates, thanks to higher expenses. However, Google's massive hiring caused a jump in expenses related to payroll and bonuses beyond what the company had budgeted. That caused earnings per share to come in below analysts predictions, even though revenue exceeded estimates. Bottom line narrowly misses estimates; analysts see buying opportunity.
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