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Filed under: Internet, News

AP sues online news aggregator for scraping content

MoreoverThe Associated Press is suing Moreover, an online news aggregator and its parent company VeriSign. The AP says the company is illegally accessing and distributing Associated Press content without permission.

Moreover is sort of like a subscription version of Google News. If you visit the company's main page you get a lot of information about the service, but no free content. Users can sign up for RSS feeds on a variety of topics or you can pay a subscription fee for more in-depth content.

Moreover isn't producing news. It's collecting news from various sources and sending it along to subscribers. Each story you get from Moreover is really just a link and a brief description. If you're using the ad-supported version of Moreover's services you'll have to click through to the original website to find the full content. Paying subscribers can access full length stories from the AP and other news sources.

So here's the question: is Moreover ripping the AP off, or is it actually helping the wire service by directing more readers to AP news content online? While Google claims that the Google News service constitutes "fair use," the company has reached a deal with the AP and several other major news providers to distribute content. But Google also doesn't offer a premium service with full-length content scraped from other news publishers.

[via lost remote and Ars Technica]

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services

Domain name prices are about to get a little higher

domain name price increaseStill holding out on that perfect domain name because you can't choose between a few different ones? Try not to hold back any longer, VeriSign, the company that controls the domain name registry for .com, .net, among others, is set to raise prices.

Verisign will initiate a 7% yearly price hike effective October 15, 2007, raising prices from a wholesale cost of $6/ year to $6.42/ year. This amount isn't a considerable difference, however VeriSign does have the right to renegotiate their contract with ICANN to continue a 7% per year raise indefinitely.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Internet, Security, News

PayPal to offer two-factor key fob authentication

PayPal Key FobIn an effort to crack down on phishing and account theft, PayPal will trial new key fob devices to their customers. Available for free to all PayPal business users, and for $5 for personal PayPal accounts, the devices were developed jointly with VeriSign. Every 30 seconds it displays a new one-time password which is used with your existing PayPal password for authentication. The idea with two-factor authentication (think of it like using two keys to unlock your front door) is that even if an attacker steals your username and password, without the key fob they are unable to compromise your account.

PayPal has been testing the devices internally for the past couple of months and plan to test it with customers in the USA, Germany and Australia as soon as next month. Depending on customer response, and a measure of its effectiveness, I can imagine this type of service likely used by other commonly phished web sites such as banking web sites and popular web mail services (Hotmail, Yahoo!).

[via CNet News.com]

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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