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/ 27 November 2007
If the experience of the world’s largest software vendor is any guide, the industry’s best hope for reducing piracy rests with anti-copying technologies rather than in policing the legalistic user agreements that restrict how software can be used. Microsoft is locking software down through a programme it calls its Genuine Software Initiative.
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/ 27 November 2007
Officials in a Missouri city have unanimously passed a measure making online harassment a crime, days after learning that a 13-year-old girl killed herself last year after receiving cruel messages on the internet. The six-member board of aldermen made internet harassment a misdemeanour, punishable by a fine of up to and 90 days in jail.
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/ 27 November 2007
Two cousins took their battle for chieftaincy of the Valoyi tribe to the Constitutional Court on Tuesday, in a case that challenges customary law in their tribe that says only men may be chiefs. Tinyiko Shilubana and Sidwell Nwamitwa each insist that they are the rightful head of the Valoyi tribe.
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/ 27 November 2007
Singapore has banned an Xbox video game because it contains a sex scene between a woman and a female alien character, the city-state’s censors said. Mass Effect, a futuristic space adventure published by Microsoft, has been banned from sale because of ”lesbian intimacy” between two characters.
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/ 27 November 2007
The information superhighway could become clogged with data by 2010, forcing broadband users to revert to dial-up modems, according to a new study. The report predicts that unless more than -billion is invested in the global internet infrastructure, a level of gridlock will develop that will make it almost impossible to use rich-media sites.
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/ 27 November 2007
A hunt for Britain’s top university is helping mobile firm O2 tap Facebook’s burgeoning audience and reflects the innovation advertisers need to tap the potential of such sites, analysts say. Social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are hugely popular with younger internet users — vital but hard to reach for advertisers.
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/ 27 November 2007
The mayor of war-wracked Mogadishu has banned Somali media from publishing interviews with government opponents, or reporting on military operations and the city’s refugee exodus, journalists and watchdogs said on Tuesday. The measures announced by mayor and former warlord Mohamed Dheere put further pressure on journalists.
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/ 27 November 2007
Local online retailer Kalahari.net, a popular stop on the web for South Africans looking to buy especially CDs, books and DVDs, has been chosen as best e-commerce store of the year, for the second year in a row. The South African e-Commerce Awards is an initiative hosted by online shopping search engine Jump Shopping.
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/ 27 November 2007
Zimbabwe’s latest inflation figures have been delayed because there are not enough goods in the shops by which to measure price increases, it was reported on Tuesday. There was an ”unavailability of required information, such as prices of goods, due to their shortage”, the Herald quoted Moffat Nyoni, director of the Central Statistical Office, as saying.
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/ 27 November 2007
A taxi driver saw British citizen Anthony Cooper flick a burning cigarette on to dry grass, which started a runaway fire on Table Mountain, the Cape Town Regional Court heard on Tuesday. The driver, Craig Ward, testified before magistrate Wilma van der Merwe in Cooper’s trial on a charge of culpable homicide and one of contravening the National Forestry Act.