Fed up with being unable to receive funds via Visa and Mastercard, on Monday Wikileaks issued an ultimatum. According to the self described, "not-for-profit media organisation," should the two financial giants not lift their ban on donations to Wikileaks, they will be laying a complaint with The European Commission.The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union entrusted with proposing and enforcing European Union legislation.Svein Andri Sveinsson, the controversial site’s Iceland based lawyer is reported to have ...

The US Secret Service said Monday it was investigating the apparent hacking of an official Twitter account operated by Fox News that posted a series of tweets claiming President Barack Obama had been assassinated.The Twitter feed for the television network's political news -- @FoxNewspolitics -- sent out a series of "malicious and false tweets," starting around 2:00 am, Fox News confirmed in a statement. The posts have since been taken down.According to the BBC, a group calling themselves "The Script ...

Google has just announced the launch of Google Engage, a new partner programme to support South African web professionals who provide services to SMBs.The Google Engage programme offers the training and support that small businesses need to help their clients benefit from Google AdWords and other Google products.Advertising agencies, webmasters, search engine marketers, or anyone who provides web services to South African small and medium businesses can now apply to join the programme and receive support from Google. Engage members ...

Chinese web giant Baidu said on Monday it had reached an agreement with American software giant Microsoft to provide English-language results generated by the US software giant's Bing search engine.Some English search requests from Baidu users will be automatically directed to Bing and its results will be displayed in pages in Baidu's search engine, the Chinese company said in a statement."The cooperation between Baidu and Bing will bring into play technological advantages of both parties and jointly provide best search ...

Internet censorship is rife and seems to be getting worse. This month, Reporters Without Borders ran an article about bloggers and human rights activists in Bahrain who have been given life-sentences for expressing their opinions online. This year alone, the site reports that 121 'netizens' have already been imprisoned around the world for reasons directly relating to their writing activities online.The countries where this is most prevalent are China, Vietnam and Arab countries including Iran, Syria, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. ...

It seems that every article you read about some new web development contains at least four references to cloud technology. Everyone is hopping on the bandwagon -- even Apple is following the herd with their move from MobileMe to iCloud. Clearly, cloud-based computing systems are here to stay.Just as the world moved from mainframe architecture to personal computing, it seems that this is the start of a shift towards offloading certain aspects of personal computing to the cloud. So ...

Listening to music on vinyl – Gearburn is all about the latest and greatest – but to be sure we’re not missing the gorgeous old forest for the shiny new trees, we also look backwards to see if we’re moving forward. LP vinyl records were what your parents listened to, not because they had greater presence and deeper, fuller soundstage with darker blacks between the notes, but because that’s pretty much all they had.Now we have mp3 players and ...

Go Daddy, the world's largest registrar of Internet domain names, said on Friday that it was selling a stake to three major investment firms including private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). "The Go Daddy Group, Inc. ... has signed a definitive agreement to receive a strategic investment and enter into a partnership with KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures," the company said in a statement. Go Daddy CEO and founder, Bob Parsons said the company had always intended to make ...

Police have arrested 36 people in southeast China following an investigation into fraud on e-commerce site Alibaba.com and other websites that duped buyers out of more than US$6 million.Alizila.com, Alibaba's corporate news website, reported earlier this week the suspects were detained in Fujian province's Putian city in April. John Spelich, the firm's spokesman, confirmed the report on Saturday. The people arrested allegedly operated a criminal gang that used fake IDs to open more than 100 "Gold Supplier" accounts on Alibaba.com. ...

A small security company called CertiVox has launched a free text encryption service call PrivateSky for use in browser-based messaging services. Despite the manifold risks, many Internet users still pass private, sensitive or embarrasing information over Facebook posts, Gmail accounts, blogs and other insecure public Web services. PrivateSky encrypts text, allowing only a trusted recipient to read it.It takes the form of a one-click encryption plug-in for Internet Explorer (only, at this point) that turns any text entered into a ...