Amazon accused of insider dealing

Amazon is being sued by its shareholders amid allegations of insider dealing. The class-action lawsuit is being brought against Amazon in the Western District of Washington by representatives of the company's shareholders. Two weeks ago, the FBI said they were investigating Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos over alleged insider dealing. ...more

MacBook successfully hacked in $10,000 contest

A MacBook has been successfully hacked, using an vulnerability in Safari, as part of a Hack a Mac contest. The vulnerability was exploited at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada, by software engineer Shane Macaulay, who won a laptop for his hacking efforts, and security researcher Dino Dai Zovi, who has been credited by Apple in the past for discovering vulnerabilities in its software. Dai Zovi, who developed the exploit away from the conference and sent it to Macauly who then applied it, will now be submitting his work in an effort to claim the $10,000 bounty on offer for successfully hacking an element of Apple's operating system. ...more

Different XHTML horses for different courses

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the body that looks after Web standards - has released "Modularization of XHTML as a W3C Recommendation". Basically, it's a means of specifying agreed subsets of XHTML such that content developers can more easily target platforms such as mobile phones or interactive televisions. It's a way, for example, to help manage the display of equivalent content across different devices: a menu on a cell phone will be managed differently from making a selection on a TV-based Web browser. ...more

Nokia primes Python for Series 60 devices

Python programmers can now start developing for Nokia phones - the mobile phone giant has released Python for Series 60. The open source object-oriented language, which is more structured than the likes of Tcl and Perl, has been adapted to create commands, scripts and applications for Series 60-based devices (including the N-Gage QD and the Nokia 6630, 6600 and 7610). 'Python will make mobile application development easy and accessible to programmers seeking a fast and developer-friendly avenue to writing mobile applications,' promised Lee Epting, VP of Forum Nokia. ...more

Robots need rights, claims UK government research

Robots may have to be given similar rights to their human counterparts, as advances in technology enables them to perform in increasingly similar, even better, ways to man. According to a raft of new futurology papers, commissioned by the government, society will have to adapt to offer robots appropriate housing, healthcare and other support, when they develop to the point of being able to reproduce and have artificial intelligence. This might happen within the next 50 years, it predicts. ...more