AP reports that drivers in The Netherlands will, from 2012, be charged by distance driven rather than paying an annual road tax and a tax on newly purchased cars. The base rate will be set yearly, with a higher tariff at peak times increasing until a 2018 review of the scheme. Overall, it’s projected that [...]

“Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine … Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.” The Huffington Post reveals yet another [...]

People who don’t understand technology really shouldn’t be the key decision-makers about it. As The Guardian reported this morning, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch has asserted in his latest ill-informed tirade again the evil Internet that not only is he going to erect pay walls around all his online properties, he’s also going to stop search engines [...]

“It’s not that IE6 is out-dated and substandard (although it is), but that large organisations have needed to lock users in to using an approved Web browser … So why do they do that? There can be many reasons, but the largest, and most difficult to dispute is actually of our own creation. We (the [...]

Facebook has just announced its acquisition of FriendFeed, the two year old lifestreaming site, and tech websites are awash with opinions on what it means for the future. Most sites seem to dryly list all the FriendFeed features they can think of without giving context or showing insight (CNET News was particularly disappointing) but Mashable has [...]

Ryan Singel reports on Yahoo’s continuing slide towards Internet oblivion. The brand, which at the turn of the decade symbolised the information age, is rapidly muddling towards insignificance through indirection. Despite owning some of the Internet’s most promising properties, the company has decided not to focus on its products; and regardless of the fact that [...]

Tim Ferguson, writing on Silicon.com, rightfully defends the BBC against criticism of yet another useful service. After rows over BBC iPlayer and Canvas, jealous media organisations are once again complaining that the BBC has innovated before they did, this time in allowing newspapers to use BBC video on their websites. Yes, the BBC is funded [...]

Wired UK led me to take a look at Wolfram|Alpha, a new ‘computational knowledge engine’ launched this month. In a nutshell, it’s a a little like Google for databases. Instead of searching the entire web and trying to decipher the human-readable content out there, it draws on a vast array of machine-formatted data to compile [...]

Ars Technica reports on a US court case, where the judge ordered a professional code review of breathalyser software in a drink-driving case. The examination found serious bugs, complex and ill-maintained code, a lack of safeguards and other bad programming practices. While the case is a US one, the issues it raises are global. Why do we [...]

Molly Wood writes an insightful piece on her blog criticising reporters who propagate rumours and publish company-generated PR as news. This follows a weekend Wall Street Journal article about Apple, which lacked sources but was nonetheless rapidly reposted as indisputable fact across the web. Wood brings her experience as a technology reporter to bear, noting Apple’s [...]

“The Phorm system learns your interests by snooping on your internet web traffic. Your ISP does the necessary wiretap in exchange for a cut when advertisers pay a premium for learning precisely what to try and sell you. It’s rather like the postman getting money to peek at your letters, so you can receive a [...]

David Baron writes an absorbing post about the future of downloadable font formats for the web. With current or near-release version of all major browsers supporting the W3C standards on Embedded OpenType (EOT) fonts, websites will no longer be limited to text in the Microsoft Core Fonts which the vast majority of users have on [...]

“The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its shrapneliferousness is not something that’s ever occurred [...]

“So, it’s not exactly the most profound observation, and I’m far from the first to make it, but it’s worth noting again: There isn’t that much going on. While the constant flow of information is entertaining and addictive, it is, by overwhelming consensus, primarily filled with bits that are of little to no value.” Anil [...]

Silicon.com reports that Ofcom is working with the UK mobile operators on an emergency mobile roaming service. Currently, phones only connect to 999 or 112 through their home network – so if O2 doesn’t have a signal where you are, for instance, you can’t use Orange’s network to call for help. The new agreement would [...]

As Ars Technica notes, while the free market generally promotes innovation through competition, the patent system is an exception. John Timmer reports on a recent Science paper in which researchers carried out an experiment to compare the results of a free-market model with the current monopolistic one. Despite a multitude of reasons as to why [...]

Ars Technica had an interesting story last month about cyberlaw professor Professor Eric Goldman’s speech to the Silicon Flatirons conference, in which he postulated that Wikipedia is heading towards its own destruction. The site’s administration is torn between openness and a closed-ranks approach. As the current, open approach increasingly becomes the target of vandalism, administrators (including [...]

“Skittles, the Mars candy brand, today replaced its homepage with a Twitter-search for the word ‘Skittles.’ … In doing so, Skittles essentially handed over control of its page to Twitter-users, for better and worse … The Skittles meme went viral on Twitter, and “#Skittles” is today’s most-popular term on the micro-blogging site … This isn’t the [...]

Jude Umeh outlines an interesting idea on his BCS blog on DRM. He notes the recent Memorandum of Understanding between the UK recording industry and six major ISPs, which essentially means that ISPs will monitor their networks for illegal filesharing in return for the music industry relaxing its previously zero-tolerance, anti-consumer position. Umeh notes that, [...]

In a recent article on the BBC website, Bill Thompson rails against Apple’s closed approach to security. He notes, quite rightly, that Microsoft has in recent years made great strides in their approach to security, including open discussion about the purpose of updates and fixes, allowing administrators to choose what to install. Apple, on the [...]