A WOMAN who hired a yacht using a certificate she downloaded from Facebook has been questioned by police and cautioned under the Fraud Act.
The 29-year-old hired a yacht near Dorset last summer using the fake certificate. The conditions of hire stated that she needed to have a Marine and Coastguard Agency (MCA) Yachtmaster certificate in order to hire the vessel. The woman found an imag
e of such a certificate on Facebook. She downloaded the image, doctored it and produced it, claiming it was a photocopy of a genuine certificate she had earned. A police statement said a caution was sufficient because the yacht hire was paid for and the boat returned undamaged.
Warnings watchdogSOME of the UK's biggest media and internet companies have agreed to warn users when they publish material that some might find offensive. A series of guidelines has been brokered which will see online material tagged for suitability. All four UK terrestrial broadcasters – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five – have joined with Bebo, Google, AOL, Yahoo! and mobile phone networks to sign up to the guidelines. They have agreed to abide by the rules brokered by Government advisors the Broadband Strategy Group. The principles have been designed to allow viewers or their guardians to know what kind of content is going to be watched.
Bill fined a billionTHE European Commission has fined Microsoft 899 million in an unprecedented move penalising the company for not complying with a previous Commission order. In 2004 the Commission found that Microsoft had abused its dominant position in the software market, fined it 497m and ordered it to give other software developers the information they needed to make their technology interoperable with Microsoft's on reasonable terms.The Commission has now ruled that only from 22 October 2007 did Microsoft offer the information on fair terms, and has fined it for its behaviour up to that date. The fine is the third in four years imposed by the Commission on Microsoft. As well as 2004's 497m fine there was a penalty payment charged in July 2006 for the company's non-delivery of complete interoperability information to the Commission.
Is it free? Not now!One of the internet's biggest sellers of domain names is being sued for allegedly forcing consumers to buy addresses from it to the exclusion of other providers. The US class action lawsuit also claims that addressing authority ICANN is facilitating the alleged abuse. Network Solutions is being accused in the suit of "front running", the practice of locking an address as soon as someone asks if it is free. The person then has to buy the address from whomever has locked it.
Assault on chipsThe European Commission and US Government have seized 360,000 computer components in a series of co-ordinated raids. The action was the first time the two bodies have worked on a joint enforcement operation to protect intellectual property rights. The Commission's Taxation and Customs Union Directorate (TAXUD) and US Customs and Border Protection seized the components in November and December last year. The co-ordination resulted in the seizure of 360,000 integrated circuits, or computer chips, bearing over 40 different trademarks a Commission statement said.
In 2006 the European Commission and the US agreed a programme of action to combat intellectual property infringements and chose to focus on fake computer chips. The Commission said it believed there were "national security and health and safety implications" of using fake chips, and that their potential use in aircraft, cars and medical devices could put users in danger.
Widening the netEurope's data protection watchdogs have said internet companies that do any personal data processing in Europe must comply with its privacy laws even if they are based outside of Europe. The Article 29 Working Party, a committee of all of the EU country's privacy or data protection commissioners, said that its data protection rules must apply to personal data processed by companies that do not even have offices in the EU.
