beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com

Ebay said that it had banned auctions of virtual gold, armor and other booty amassed in World of Warcraft and other online computer games.

The San Jose, California-based Internet auction house decided to bar sales of what was essentially computer code representing riches, swords and other items in games due to “legal complexities” regarding ownership.

“We decided it was best to just not allow sales of them,” Ebay spokesman Hani Durzy said of virtual game goods.

“We are not saying they are legal and we are not saying they are illegal.”

Ebay continues to allow auctions of items from virtual societies such as Second Life, where people represented by animated figures called “avatars” buy and sell homes and other “property” made of computer codes.

“Right now, Second Life is not considered a game so we are not applying the restriction to it,” Durzy said.

In massive multiplayer online role-playing games such as Warcraft gamers represented by avatars wage battles and undertake quests, gathering gold, weaponry, armor and other virtual goods along the way. continue reading…

Google’s Gmail trademark just suffered a severe blow in Europe as the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market has ruled against the search giant’s use of the Gmail name there, according to the man who opposed the mark.

Daniel Giersch, a German-born 32-year old entrepreneur, has just announced that his company received a positive ruling last week from the Harmonization Office supporting his claim that “Gmail” and his own “G-mail” are confusingly similar. G-mail is a German service that provides a “gmail.de” email address, but also allows for a sort of “hybrid mail” system in which documents can be sent electronically, printed out by the company, and delivered in paper format to local addresses.

Giersch has been successful in German courts so far, which is why German users can’t sign up for “gmail.com” accounts (they get “googlemail.com” instead), and he has now taken his fight to the EU office that handles trademark disputes for the continent. On January 23, according the Giersch, the Harmonization Office supported his own claim against Google, a company he refers to as “Googliath.”

“My trademark ‘G-mail’ suffers through this name abuse,” Giersch said in a statement. “I must repeatedly tell my investors that my undertaking has nothing to do with these reports [i.e. stories in the media about "Gmail"].”

Google also switched from Gmail to Google Mail in the UK back in 2005, after a dispute with a company called Independent II Research.

Google is still free to appeal the ruling, but Giersch’s string of legal victories make success look unlikely. Google is certainly interested in using the Gmail name wherever it can—Giersch claims the company offered him $250,000 for it at one point—but it now looks it will be “Google Mail” throughout Europe.

That’s got to sting, as Google is a company used to getting its way, but it comes as consolation to Giersch, who said in an interview last year that “Google’s behavior is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it’s very evil.”

Source

Earlier I wrote about clean installs not being available any longer with Windows Vista Upgrade DVDs. There was conjecture that it might be related to Home versions, but even the mainstream press was confused. Now, it seems Paul Thurott, through some internal Microsoft documents, has discovered a workaround. However, he did not test it, but the enterprising folks at DailyTech did, and they confirm it works.

We Say: You could say this is even more liberal than a “clean install” for XP was (and therefore, probably a bug). Why? Because done as instructed in the DailyTech article, you don’t even have to have an XP key. I’m not going to print the DailyTech instructions verbatim (please use the link above), but to summarize:

With a clean drive, install Vista by booting from the DVD but do not enter the key when asked. This installs Vista as a 30 day trial. Once complete, run the installation from inside Vista and do an in-place upgrade. Viola. (why do I think this is really a bug? … nowhere did I enter my XP key).

Source

Game developer WildTangent has accused Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, of being a little bit problematic when it comes to playing casual games.

Microsoft’s Windows Vista was introduced to the world this week but the US firm WildTangent alleged that the corporate giant “has gone overboard” by making Vista so secure it blocks or disables play, reports Yahoo News.

WildTangent chief executive Alex St. John says that Vista “breaks” games from Microsoft’s online MSN service as well as from game websites operated by Yahoo, America Online, and RealArcade. We’ve yet to hear any bad news from people trying to play Company of Heroes or World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade.

Microsoft has yet to respond to the WildTangent claims.

Source

An anonymous reader writes “PC Advisor reports that Microsoft is going to start getting tough with certain small business customers. They are going to examine their small customer license database — any discrepancies and it will call you for an audit. If you refuse it will send in the BSA and the legal heavies. “

Source

It used to be a joke around the Internet that if you Googled “miserable failure,” the number-one result provided by the famed search engine was President George W. Bush’s official biography on the White House’s Web site. This was thanks to a “Google bomb,” in which mischievous Web users would manipulate the page ranking of a search result by planting links on their Web sites that used the search terms to point to their result page of choice. But now Google has put out an announcement that states it will be “minimizing the impact” of Google bombs with a new algorithm designed to weed them out.

The reason? Some people misinterpret Google bombs as the work of pranksters at the search company itself rather than unaffiliated Web users. That isn’t too good for publicity purposes; after all, some Google bombs were more malicious than your average political jab, like the anti-Semitic one that surfaced in 2004. So, while Google has said that it will not hand-remove Google bombs, that the newly-coded algorithm should take care of most of them.

Unfortunately, Google may not have had the success it wanted. Googling “miserable failure” now yields a bunch of results about the phenomenon of the Google bomb.

Source

New Zealand is the first country to experience the worldwide consumer launch of Windows Vista on 30 January, due to its position on the timeline. New Zealanders get the opportunity to buy Windows Vista in retail stores a few hours before Australians, 13 hours before the UK and a day ahead of Americans. The 2007 Microsoft Office system is being launched at the same time.

It’s about 1.30am NZ time on 30 January as I write this, so I guess some extra keen kiwi geeks will be ripping off the shrink-wrapping on their Vista OS right about now.

As Geekzone noted, the first purchase in the world of a Microsoft Windows Vista loaded PC took place in Auckland, New Zealand at one minute past midnight in the early morning of 30 January 2007. All Black Dan Carter kicked off the Vista launch by signing a laptop, which was then put up for auction for charity on Trademe (NZ’s version of eBay). There are also 15 copies of Windows Vista (Ultimate) digitally signed by Bill Gates, and other items, being auctioned to raise funds for New Zealand charity Cure Kids.

Tomorrow morning I’m part of a local media contingent checking out a digital home in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s a home outlayed with Microsoft technology, perhaps a bit like Bill Gates’ home! I’ll wait and see what it’s like tomorrow morning (if I can drag myself up in time) and will write up a report later for R/WW.

Source

In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.

Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.

Source

Cyberspace has replaced the schoolyard as the preferred space for bullying among many US kids, who are going online to threaten, insult and harass each other outside the watchful eye of teachers or parents.

According to statistics, more than a third of American teenagers who use instant messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, Xanga and Friendster fall victim to electronic insults, often by schoolmates.

“Many kids are involved or engaged in this behavior because it is sort of out of distance,” Justin Patchin, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, told AFP.

“They don’t see the harm that they are causing, they don’t really think that they are doing anything wrong, they think they’re just having fun,” he added.

The bullying includes nasty remarks posted on personal pages or repeated insults during instant messaging conversations.

Sometimes, however, the aggression goes even further. According to a study by the University of Wisconsin, 12.6 percent of respondents reported that they had been threatened physically and almost five percent said they feared for their safety. continue reading…