Author: Admin

Friday, October 12, 2007

The Internet is very much present at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2007, not just, like in previous years, as a means for the journalists who have 80 workplaces for their own notebooks to report on the fair, but like before as a chance – and as a threat for rights-owners of digital media.

After a marginal existence in the previous year, bloggers have got their own “living room 2.0” at the fair, furnished with everything a blogger needs, including media attention. Every day from Wednesday October 10 to Sunday October 14 they will write and podcast about the big names to meet, the events not to be missed and their very personal experiences and thoughts. Three of the bloggers write in English, two English language podcasts are done, to widen the reach of the Book Fair 2.0. The blog entries and podcasts will be available until after the book fair at http://www.book-fair.com/en/wordpress/ and the bloggers themselves can be visited on the weekend at hall 4.2, Q411, though until now it is more the media and less the visitors of the fair, the bloggers come in contact with.

Digitalization and digital media, especially books and magazines offered digitally, are a hot topic at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, as more and more publishers want to see the digital counterparts of their traditional media not just as a field to be present in, but as a possible profit center. With scientific books, this move already was quite successful: Publishing house Springer for example, offering over 40,000 ebooks and over 1700 electronic magazines, of which over 1200 are still actively continued with Springer, nowadays does an ebook-variant of every traditional scientific book they print – and already has the largest part of their cash-flow from digital media.

This is harder for fiction publishing houses as the Pabel Möwig group (VPM), which has become active early. They do offer the digitized new adventures of – say, the outer-space-hero Perry Rhodan -, but the turnover is still only a small addition to the print and other media versions. Readers become readier to read on a screen, but their readiness is still growing slowly. Since a new generation of readers is growing up using the internet as a reference work – especially Google and Wikipedia – it will become more and more natural in the future.

A growing number of service companies in the publishing sector therefore offers re-digitalization apart from increasingly effective content management systems, with which new forms of media can easily be compiled from the contents of a data base.

Older works, of which the publishing house owns the rights, but for which a reprint might not be profitable, are scanned, divided into content sections and tagged. When the original type face isn’t good enough, books are typewritten in third world countries two or three times which are corrected and merged into a final version. Once in the system, digitalized books can be at disposal as MobiPocket ebooks or Print On Demand (POD) and with aid of the Amazon BookSurge program remain available, possibly even within 24 hours.

Digital content can also be used as a marketing-tool with the “Search Inside” from Amazon.com, where the full text of a book is visible but only small parts of the book are shown at a time.

Right after Amazon, Google also presented their own projects for the digitalization of books, where publishers have the option of just sending a box or container full of their books in printed form and leave the job of digitalization to Google, where afterwards their content will be findable with Google Book Search. The difference between those two internet services was obvious, though: Amazon wants to earn money with books, while Google’s business is advertising, their revenue model is AdSense and AdWords, targeted as perfect as possible with full text search. Both services had to answer questions as to how they will protect the content from unpaid exploitation, as probably fewer and fewer users will be willing to pay for a digital eBook when they can read the content for free, up to twenty pages at a time. The freeloader mentality of many Internet users was seen as a threat by many of the publishers.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Both suspects in the death of Savanna Greywind have entered not guilty pleas in court in Fargo, North Dakota, United States. On Tuesday, William Hoehn, acting through his lawyer, pled not guilty to counts of conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, and giving false information to the police. On Thursday, his girlfriend Brooke Crews did the same, procedurally. Hoehn’s next hearing is scheduled for December and Crews’ for January.

“At this point, Ms. Crews chose on my advice not to specifically enter a plea. The judge entered a not guilty plea, procedurally to move the case forward,” Crews’ lawyer, Steven Mottinger, told the press.

Savanna Greywind, 22, whose body was found wrapped in plastic by kayakers in the Red River on August 27, was eight months pregnant when her relatives called the police to report her missing. According to court documents, the police first responded to a call at 2825 9th St. N. #2 in Fargo on August 19, and spoke to the man and woman who lived at #5, Brooke Crews and William Hoehn, but did not execute a search warrant until August 24, at which time they found Brooke with a baby girl. Hoehn would later tell police he had discovered Crews in their bathroom wiping up blood, and she showed him the infant and told him, “This is our baby. This is our family.” Crews would tell the police Greywind had given her the baby. Both told police the girl is Greywind’s daughter, and a DNA test was performed to confirm the child’s identity.

Greywind worked as a nursing assistant at the Eventide Fargo senior center in West Fargo, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. According to her boyfriend, Ashton Matheny, they had planned to name their daughter Haisley Jo, and had recently leased an apartment where they planned to live with their child. Now, Matheny says, he plans to move to the Spirit Lake Reservation northwest of Fargo to raise his daughter near family. He and Greywind both belong to the Spirit Lake Tribe. Ashton and Greywind’s parents were permitted to visit the child in the hospital pending confirmation of her identity, and Matheny has since been awarded full custody.

Matheny, in remarks to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said “I’ve been waiting to be a father for a while[…] She’s the only good thing that came out of this. She looks like Savanna.”

Earlier in September, tribal leaders sent an open letter to North Dakota’s US congressional delegation with several demands regarding Greywind’s case and the violence faced by Native Americans nationwide. Among other things, they asked that the United States Department of Justice establish a cross-jurisdictional task force to establish a clear system for investigating the deaths and disappearances of Native American women.

The tribal leaders’ letter reads in part: “During the gatherings and prayers for Savanna, we heard story after story from families who also have women in their families missing or with unsolved murders[…] The murder of Savanna illustrates a much larger problem of epic proportions.”

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The Internet has already brought great things to the world, but has also brought spam, phishing, scamming, etc. We all have seen them across the Internet. They promise money, weight loss, or other things a person may strive for, but they usually amount to only a lighter pocket. Online advertising has become something that the increasingly Internet-reliant society has become used to, as well as more aware of. As this is true, online ads have become more intricate and deceptive in recent years.

However, a certain type of advertisement has arisen recently, and has become more deceptive than any other Internet ad, and has tricked many users into credit card charges. These sites claim to be news websites that preach a “miracle product”, and they offer a free trial, and then charge the user’s credit card a large amount of money without informing them after the trial ends. These sites appear to be operating under one venture and have caught ad pages of high-traffic websites by storm. In this report, Wikinews’ Tjc6 investigates news advertisement sites.

These Internet ads work in different ways:

Hypothetically speaking, a reader is browsing the web, and then happens to come across something that they believe is too good to be true. A link on one of these high-traffic pages promises white teeth, weight loss, or huge profits from working at home part-time. Out of curiosity, they click on the link.

This is the way that people are attracted to these fake news sites on the internet. The domain owners draw in customers by purchasing advertising on some of the World Wide Web’s most visited pages. Curious users click and are led to what they believe is a news article. From anti-aging to shedding weight, these “articles” from non-existant newspapers and television stations depict a skeptical news reporter trying a product because they were instructed to by a superior.

As the user reads on, they find that the “reporter” miraculously achieves significant weight loss, teeth whitening, or other general health and beauty improvement. The reporter states that the reader can get the same results as they did by using a “free trial” of the product.

Next, the user looks to the bottom of the page, where there seems to be a set of user comments, all of them praising the product or products that are advertised — this is where we first see something suspicious. Across several of these false articles, the comments appear to show the exact same text, sometimes with even the same usernames as other sites.

There is obviously some kind of correlation. Although this appears to be true, most users who purchase these products do not look at multiple versions of these similar pages of what appears to be a fast-growing network of interconnected fake news sites.

Once customers have convinced themselves into buying the product, they are led to a product (or products) website which promises a free trial for a very low price. What they do not know about this, however, is that they are giving their credit card data to a company that will charge it automatically after the trial ends. In about 14 days, the user receives a charge on their credit card for an excessive amount of money, usually from about $80 to $100 (USD). All attempts to contact these companies and cancel their shipments usually prove to be futile.

What these sites have is a large amount of legal copy located at the bottom of each site, stating their right to charge the user. This site, a fake news article claiming to offer teeth-whitening benefits, has several paragraphs of fine print, including this: “…Upon signing up for the 10 day trial membership you will be charged up to $4.97 depending on various shipping and initial offer promotions at that time but not more than $4.97 upon signing. If not cancelled, you will be charged $89.97 upon completion of the 10 day trial period. Monthly thereafter or 30 days from the original order date, the charge will reoccur monthly at a total of $89.97 until cancelled…,” the site says.

Practices like this have alerted the Better Business Bureau, an American organization that studies and reports on the reliability and practices of US businesses. In a press release, a spokesman from the BBB spoke out against sites like this. “Many businesses across the country are using the same selling model for their products: They lure customers in with claimed celebrity endorsements and free trial offers, and then lock them in by making it extremely difficult to cancel the automatic delivery of more products every month…,” said the report that denounced the websites.

When a user looks at several of these sites, they notice that all of them have the same exact structure. Because of this, Wikinews decided to look into where some of the domains were owned, and if they were all in fact part of one company.

However, the results that Wikinews found were ones that were not expected. Out of the three random websites that were found in Internet ads, all using similar designs and methods to attract the customers, came from three different locations in three countries and two separate continents. The first came from Scottsdale, in the United States, while the next two came from Vancouver and Hamburg. There is no location correlation, but surely, there has to be something that connected these sites together. We had to look even further to try to find a connection.

There is some correlation within the product’s contact information. A large amount of the teeth-whitening products analyzed actually shared the same phone number, which lead to a distribution center located in St. Petersburg, Florida, and several other similar distribution centers located across the Southern United States. But, that explains only one of the categories of products that these websites cover, teeth whitening.

What about the other products? The other products such as weight loss and work-at-home kits all trace back to similar distribution centers in similar places. So, what do we make of all of this?

There is obviously some company that promotes these products through the fake news advertisements, but that company is nowhere to be found on the websites. All contact information is given on the product pages, and websites are copyrighted under the name of the domain, not a company. Whatever company has been the setup for these pages has been very good at hiding themselves from the Internet, as there is no information across the web about that mysterious large advertiser.

As a result of customers buying the products and having unauthorized charges on their credit cards, a large volume of complaints are currently present on awareness sites, complaint sites, and even the Better Business Bureau. Several customers point out that they were not informed of the steep charges and the company made it extremely difficult to cancel their subscription, usually resulting in the loss of several hundred dollars.

• “The trial offer was to pay for $3.95 for the cost of the shipping for one bottle. I noticed shortly after placing the order I had a charge on my credit card for $149.95. Unknown to myself the company charges for a membership if you don’t cancel within 14 days, I cancelled within 18 days…When I called the customer service number they told me the decision has been made and my refund request was denied. When I questioned the person on the other line about what I was getting for my $149.95 she told me I was not getting anything because I cancelled the membership.“

?“Tamara”, in a post to the Ripoff Report

• “This is a “free sample” scam: Pay only postage and handling and get a free sample of a tooth whitening system, they say. I looked for the “catch,” something that would indicate that there’d be hidden or recurring charges, but didn’t see anything, and ordered. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, I see a charge for $88.97 on my bank statement…When I called, the guy answering the phone had obviously answered the same angry question many, many times: “Why has your company charged $88.97 to my card?” “Because you didn’t cancel your subscription in time,” he said tiredly.“

?“Elenor”, in a post to the Ripoff Report

One notable lawsuit has occurred as a result of these articles. Some of the articles about work at home kits specifically advertise things like “work for Google”, or “job openings at Google”. However, Google asserts these claims as false and has taken the case to court, as it is a copyright violation. “Thousands of people have been tricked into sending payment information and being charged hidden fees by questionable operations,” said Google in a statement.

The BBB has received over 3,000 complaints about products such as the ones that Google took offense to. The lawsuit has yet to begin in court, and no date has been set.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Tuesday was a tumultuous day in the Khadr household as they desperately awaited to hear whether Abdullah, the Canadian family’s oldest son, would be released on bail after nearly four years of detention awaiting trial in the United States for helping Afghan militants procure weapons.

“We couldn’t help but be a little hopeful,” his older sister Zaynab remarked, though Khadr himself remained more optimistic and encouraged his family to use their second weekly visit to Toronto West Detention Centre later that day, as a sign of faith that the courts would soon reunite the fractured family. But when the family returned home from their second visit, there was a crushing message from his lawyers, “Abdullah didn’t make bail”.

The family feels frustrated and says that the court’s ruling that Khadr still represents a serious flight risk is unfair. “None of us have every tried to leave the country”, Zaynab sighs, pointing to Abdullah’s co-operation with Canadian authorities since the very beginning.

Although his lawyers proposed a “stringent supervision plan” that would have seen the Ottawa-born Khadr living with his grandparents and fitted with an electronic ankle-bracelet to track his whereabouts, the ruling released late Tuesday confirmed that Mr. Justice Gary Trotter was not convinced that Khadr would remain in Canada if released back into the community.

The ruling echoes a similar finding made in 2005, when Khadr first applied to be released pending the outcome of his extradition hearing to the United States, where he faces federal conspiracy charges.

Khadr’s lawyers appeared successful in allaying earlier concerns about the insufficient ankle bracelet that would have tracked Khadr’s movements in 2005, bringing the owner of Trace Canada, Len Beagley, to testify that “tremendous developments” had been made since the courts last heard Khadr’s plea for bail in 2005. However, Trotter seemed unconvinced that ankle-bracelets were an “accepted way of monitoring individuals”, and agreed with Crown arguments that such devices required “co-operation from the subject”.

Fatmah and Mohammad Elsamnah again offered their $300,000 Toronto home as surety for Khadr’s behaviour if released on bail. However, they were judged unacceptable guardians for their grandson, in part due to Mohammad’s stuttered and confused responses to questions from the Crown, and his advanced memory loss.

Khadr’s lawyers chose to focus on the recent community support shown at Salaheddin Islamic Centre, where his family prays. In addition to adding $50,000 in collected donations as assurance that the community would keep a close eye on Khadr, the Board of Directors agreed to pay the costs associated with the most advanced system of monitoring ankle-bracelet for Khadr. The manager of the Islamic Centre also offered to employ the 27-year old Khadr, driving him to and from work each day. Crown lawyers Matthew Sullivan and Howard Piafsky challenged the mosque’s credibility however, asking RCMP officer Tarek Mokdad to describe the number of worshippers who were later accused of militant action.

Trotter dismissed claims that the mosque was tied to terrorism, but said the donations from worshippers were unacceptable since they gave the money without expecting to see it returned to them, regardless of Khadr’s behaviour.

The last to find out about his fate, Abdullah wasn’t told the outcome of the hearing until he phoned his family Wednesday evening.

Sunday, February 6, 2005

LONDON,United Kingdom —The new London police commissioner Sir Ian Blair has warned middle class dinner party users of cocaine that he is out to get them. In contrast, he is relaxed about cannabis smokers, saying he does not wish to waste police time pursuing them. He has been quoted as saying: “People seem to think the price of a wrap of cocaine is 50 quid [UK pounds], but the cost is misery on estates here and a trail of blood back to Colombia. Someone has died to bring it [cocaine] to a dinner party. People who wouldn’t dream of having a non-organic vegetable don’t seem to notice the blood on their fingers.”

Blair is clearly trying to prick the conscience of the 624,000 estimated cocaine users in the UK, hoping to persuade them to boycott this Class A drug. Others, including Colombian Nobel Prize winner and author Gabriel García Márquez, have stated that the misery both in Colombia and on poor housing estates in the UK is caused not by drugs themselves but by the banning of them. Marquez has specifically said that he cannot see the end of the civil war in Colombia as long as the illegal drug trade exists, and he cannot see the end of the illegal drug trade unless drugs are legalized. The trade in cannabis also generates violence both at home (in the UK) and abroad, in spite of Sir Ian’s softly, softly approach to this recently reclassified Class C drug.

Sunday, October 18, 2020

The spread of coronavirus led to a global pandemic, affecting various daily activities. Originated in Wuhan, China, the virus spread globally, and by March, drastic measures were taken by the Indian government. Some branches of the South Western Railway of India had started taking precautions by distributing masks to ticket collectors and guards from as early as March 8. Some colleges were suspended by March 13, their exams post-poned as the government introduced lockdown and enforced social distancing.

Announced in the evening, Indian Prime Minister asked the countrymen to get the essential products and avoid going out as much as possible. Long queues outside the grocery shops, people in masks, some in N-95 masks, and hand sanitisers at the gates of megamarts were a common sight. There were reduced items in the shops, and some stores had a limit of number of customers allowed in the store at any given time. Food delivery services, and taxi services were on haitus — workers who dependent on the profession for their daily income, while software engineers were working from home. Physical classes in schools and colleges were replaced by online lectures to prevent social gatherings.

While many relied on technology for continuing their work and earn their livelihood, Wikinews reached out to sex workers in Mysore in June who unlike others can’t maintain social distancing for their work. Two sex-workers, Akram Pasha, and Jaya (a pseudonym), who were a part of sex-worker’s group called “Ashodaya Samithi” discussed how their lives had been affected by the coronavirus, the lockdown and the restrictions they had faced.

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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The San Diego, California suburb of Chula Vista has responded to the recent housing crisis with an aggressive blight control ordinance that compels lenders to maintain the appearance of vacant homes. As foreclosures increase both locally and throughout the United States, the one year old ordinance has become a model for other cities overwhelmed by the problem of abandoned homes that decay into neighborhood eyesores.

Chula Vista city code enforcement manager Doug Leeper told the San Diego Union Tribune that over 300 jurisdictions have contacted his office during the past year with inquiries about the city’s tough local ordinance. Coral Springs, Florida, and California towns Stockton, Santee, Riverside County, and Murietta have all modeled recently enacted anti-blight measures after Chula Vista’s. On Wednesday, 8 October, the Escondido City Council also voted to tighten local measures making lenders more accountable for maintenance of empty homes.

Under the Chula Vista ordinance lenders become legally responsible for upkeep as soon as a notice of mortgage default gets filed on a vacant dwelling, before actual ownership of the dwelling returns to the lender. Leeper regards that as “the cutting-edge part of our ordinance”. Chula Vista also requires prompt registration of vacant homes and applies stiff fines as high as US$1000 per day for failure to maintain a property. Since foreclosed properties are subject to frequent resale between mortgage brokers, city officials enforce the fines by sending notices to every name on title documents and placing a lien on the property, which prevents further resale until outstanding fines have been paid. In the year since the ordinance went into effect the city has applied $850,000 in fines and penalties, of which it has collected $200,000 to date. The city has collected an additional $77,000 in registration fees on vacant homes.

Jolie Houston, an attorney in San Jose, believes “Lenders will respond when it costs them less to maintain the property than to ignore local agency requirements.” Traditionally, local governments have resorted to addressing blight problems on abandoned properties with public funds, mowing overgrown lawns and performing other vital functions, then seeking repayment afterward. Chula Vista has moved that responsibility to an upfront obligation upon lenders.

As one of the fastest growing cities in the United States during recent years, Chula Vista saw 22.6% growth between 2000 and 2006, which brought the city’s population from 173,556 in the 2000 census to an estimated 212,756, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Chula Vista placed among the nation’s 20 fastest growing cities in 2004. A large proportion of local homes were purchased during the recent housing boom using creative financing options that purchasers did not understand were beyond their means. Average home prices in San Diego County declined by 25% in the last year, which is the steepest drop on record. Many homeowners in the region currently owe more than their homes are worth and confront rising balloon payment mortgages that they had expected to afford by refinancing new equity that either vanished or never materialized. In August 2008, Chula Vista’s eastern 91913 zip code had the highest home mortgage default rate in the county with 154 filings and 94 foreclosures, an increase of 154% over one year previously. Regionally, the county saw 1,979 foreclosures in August.

Professionals from the real estate and mortgage industries object to Chula Vista’s response to the crisis for the additional burdens it places on their struggling finances. Said San Diego real estate agent Marc Carpenter, “that kind of measure will add additional costs to banks that have been hit really hard already and ultimately the cost will be transferred down to consumers and investors.” Yet city councils in many communities have been under pressure to do something about increasing numbers of vacant properties. Concentrations of abandoned and neglected homes can attract vandals who hasten the decline of struggling neighborhoods. Jolie Houston explained that city officials “can’t fix the lending problem, but they can try to prevent neighborhoods from becoming blighted.”

CEO Robert Klein of Safeguard, a property management firm, told the Union Tribune that his industry is having difficulty adapting to the rapidly changing local ordinances. “Every day we discover a new ordinance coming out of somewhere”, he complained. Dustin Hobbs, a spokesman from the California Association of Mortgage Bankers agreed that uneven local ordinances are likely to increase the costs of lending. Hobbs advised that local legislation is unnecessary due to California State Senate Bill 1137, which was recently approved to address blight. Yet according to Houston, the statewide measure falls short because it fails to address upkeep needs during the months between the time when foreclosure begins and when the lender takes title.