Sponsored
Assange vows WikiLeaks to stay strong despite new blow (AFP) : Technet |
- Assange vows WikiLeaks to stay strong despite new blow (AFP)
- Weight Watchers Can Make Your Holiday Recipes Healthier With an iPad App (Mashable)
- Holiday Tweet Drive Brings Toys and Food to Disadvantaged Kids (Mashable)
- 9 Ways to Connect With Santa on the Web (Mashable)
- Oracle, Bolstered by a Strong Quarter, Aims at HP (PC World)
| Assange vows WikiLeaks to stay strong despite new blow (AFP) Posted: 18 Dec 2010 08:54 PM PST ELLINGHAM, United Kingdom (AFP) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the site will stay strong despite another blow to its funding and the publication Sunday of new details of the sex crime allegations against him. The Australian began his third full day under "mansion arrest" at a friend's house while he fights extradition to Sweden, vowing that the whistleblowing website would continue to publish more secre US diplomatic cables. Assange on Saturday denounced Bank of America, the largest US bank, for becoming the latest institution to halt financial transactions for Wikileaks after MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others. The bank said its decision was "based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments." "It's a new type of business McCarthyism in the US to deprive this organisation of the funds that it needs to survive, to deprive me personally of the funds that my lawyers need to protect me against extradition to the US or to Sweden," Assange told AFP. The term was coined to describe the anti-communist pursuits of former US senator Joseph McCarthy from the late 1940s to the 1950s. Assange is staying at Ellingham Hall, the mansion in eastern England of journalist friend Vaughan Smith, as part of the conditions of bail, which he was granted by London's High Court on Thursday. He must also report daily to a nearby police station and wear an electronic tag. Several British newspapers published lurid new details of the allegations of sexual assault against two women, over which Swedish prosecutors want to question him. The 39-year-old denies the charges. The Guardian newspaper -- which has cooperated with WikiLeaks on the publication of the US documents -- and the Mail on Sunday both reported that the two women with whom he had sex in Sweden had gone to police after he refused to take an HIV test. Assange hit out at Swedish handling of the case, accusing authorities there of leaking fresh details about the case that even he and his defence lawyers have not had access to. The former computer hacker also reiterated that there were threats against his life and those of the website's staff, but he vowed that WikiLeaks would continue publishing the cables. "We are a robust organisation. During my time in solitary confinement we continued to publish every day and its not going to change," he said. Assange claimed earlier in an interview with Forbes magazine that a "megaleak" by the website will target a major US bank "early next year". WikiLeaks has enraged Washington with its release of thousands of leaked US diplomatic cables and confidential military documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Assange said Friday it looked "increasingly likely" the US would try to extradite him on charges related to the leaked cables as he savoured his first day on bail. He said his lawyers believed a secret US grand jury investigation had been started into his role in the release. Media reports suggest that US prosecutors are trying to build a case against Assange on the grounds that he encouraged a US soldier, Bradley Manning, to steal US cables from a government computer and pass them to WikiLeaks. A report by congressional researchers said the Espionage Act and other US laws could be used to prosecute Assange, but there is no known precedent for prosecuting publishers in such a case. The latest US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks indicated that the United Nations offered Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe a retirement package and safe haven overseas if he agreed to stand down. The offer was made by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general at the time in 2000, said the memo, which was drawn up by US officials and cited the then-opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). |
| Weight Watchers Can Make Your Holiday Recipes Healthier With an iPad App (Mashable) Posted: 18 Dec 2010 07:12 AM PST Sorry to bring this up right before the annual holiday eating binge, but Weight Watchers has a new iPad application. Weight Watchers Kitchen Companion is an attractively designed app that helps you cook lower-calorie recipes every step of the way, interactively timing your recipes, helping you follow along with checklists and showing you videos of cooking techniques while you're actually preparing the recipe. The free version of this Weight Watchers Kitchen Companion iPad app is limited, giving you 10 featured recipes and letting you save up to 10 of your favorites. However, if you subscribe to Weight Watchers Online ($17.95 + $29.95 sign-up fee) or use eTools (included with Weight Watchers meetings), this application integrates with thousands of Weight Watchers recipes. In the unique Recipe Building feature, users can add their own recipes and have the app show how to reduce its caloric content with a PointsPlus system. Research has shown that when you specifically record the amount you eat into a journal, you can more successfully lose weight. Keeping that in mind, you might want to consider this iPad app to help you with that inevitable New Year's resolution you'll be making in January.
|
| Holiday Tweet Drive Brings Toys and Food to Disadvantaged Kids (Mashable) Posted: 18 Dec 2010 09:09 AM PST The 2010 Holiday Tweet Drive is underway, harnessing the power of social media to gather toys and clothing for less-fortunate children. The three-week event started December 6, and will continue through Thursday, December 23. If you can't attend a Holiday Tweet Drive, or if there's not an event in your city and you still want to help, find out more @TweetDrive2010 or donate to a local Toys for Tots drop-off point. If none of this appeals to you, there are hundreds of other ways to do good with social media this holiday season. The easiest we've seen is this Google Chrome browser extension that automatically spurs Google to donate to one of five charities of your choice, the amount accumulating with each additional tab you open. Want additional choices? Here are 75 more ways to do good with social media. |
| 9 Ways to Connect With Santa on the Web (Mashable) Posted: 18 Dec 2010 10:16 AM PST |
| Oracle, Bolstered by a Strong Quarter, Aims at HP (PC World) Posted: 18 Dec 2010 06:10 AM PST Oracle's net income for the quarter ended Nov. 30 rose 28 percent from a year earlier to US$1.9 billion, buoyed by strong software license sales and an improving hardware business, the company said last week. Revenue was $8.6 billion, a jump of 47 percent. New software license revenue, a key indicator of a company's performance and the mood of customers, rose 21 percent year-over-year to $2 billion. Hardware system product sales were $1.1 billion, while hardware systems support revenue was $641 million. No comparison could be made to the same quarter last year, as Oracle had not yet completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems at that time. Software license updates and product support remained a crucial part of Oracle's business, producing $3.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 12 percent increase. The steady income from support contracts can keep software companies humming even when new license sales slow, as happened during the recent economic downturn. Oracle's new license sales in the quarter show customers are starting to invest more aggressively in software. Oracle's software business could get an additional boost next year, when the first generation of its Fusion Applications is expected. Drawing from Sun Meanwhile, with the purchase of Sun, Oracle has started selling integrated systems like the Exadata family of database machines and the more recently announced Exalogic, a powerful application server it has dubbed a "cloud in a box." Customers have reacted well to the strategy, according to Oracle President Mark Hurd. "Since joining Oracle I've met with and visited many customers that have expressed a high level of enthusiasm around our strategy of engineering hardware and software that works together," Hurd said in a statement. "That enthusiasm translates into an Exadata pipeline that has now grown to nearly $2 billion. That number is a good leading indicator that customers are planning to increase their investment in Oracle technology." During a conference call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison once again stressed that the company is focused on becoming the industry's number-one name in high-end servers, not commodity systems. He also made the latest in a string of jabs against Hewlett-Packard, calling the company's systems slow compared to Oracle's and IBM's. Hurd was CEO of HP before leaving the company this year after a scandal involving his relationship with a contractor. Oracle's integrated systems will allow it to win "significant share" at the high end and become number two in the hardware business behind IBM "very, very soon," Ellison claimed. HP Strikes Back HP has started firing back at Ellison's criticism, however. In a statement sent via e-mail recently it said Oracle bought "a money-losing business that had steady market share declines for years, and which still ranks at the bottom of the market." As in the past, Oracle said it had a strong pipeline, or backlog of sales leads, for the Exadata system. Asked how many were translating into closed deals, Ellison said the situation is "definitely improving" and will accelerate in the next quarter. "This pipeline grew very, very rapidly, but because it's a new product people were running a lot of benchmarks," he said. "They bought a small machine first. We are seeing a lot of re-buys and customers translating their interest into purchases." Exalogic should benefit from Oracle's experience in selling Exadata, as well as the presence of a large installed base already using its WebLogic application server, according to Hurd. Turning to Oracle's Fusion applications, the executives claimed Oracle will have an advantage over competitors because the software can be deployed either as SaaS (software as a service) or on-premises. "You decide where you want to put this. You can't do that with Salesforce.com, can't do this with Workday," Ellison said, referring to two prominent SaaS vendors. Ellison took repeated jabs at SAP, as is his habit. But perhaps surprisingly he made no mention of the US$1.3 billion verdict Oracle recently won against SAP in its corporate-theft lawsuit . |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Yahoo Tech News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment