News written by James Delahunty (February, 2014)

The Wikimedia Foundation has received correspondence from Finland's Police Ministry seeking information on its 'donation drive' activities in the country.

The donation page on Wikipedia in Finnish is essentially the same as it is for everyone else; visitors can use a variety of payment methods to make a once-off donation, or monthly donations.

In Finland, organizations seeking to carry out donation drives (charities etc.) must seek permission from Finnish police. The measure is intended to make it more difficult to carry out fraudulent donation drives in the country.

Since Wikipedia's fundraising activities on its Finnish site technically qualify as a donation drive - at least according to letter signatory Jouni Laiho - the Wikimedia Foundation should have sought approval from the Finnish Police Ministry in advance.

As a result, Wikipedia has been asked to clarify the situation, and explain why its fundraising efforts shouldn't be considered an organized donation drive. This information must be delivered by February 21, 2014.

Letter from Finnish Police: wikimedia.org (PDF, Finnish)

California lawmakers will propose mandating that all smartphones and tablets sold in the state from next year come equipped with a 'Kill Switch' that can render them useless if stolen.

State Sen. Mark Leno and other lawmakers said they will introduce legislation proposing the requirement on all such mobile devices sold in the state, with the vocal support of Los Angeles City Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Charlie Beck.

The proposed requirement, intended to tackle a growing problem of smartphone robberies, would go into effect from January 1, 2015 onwards.

Apple's iOS 7 operating system introduced some anti-theft with Activation Lock, if enabled by the user. Coupled with Find my iPhone, Apple has taken steps against the problem largely in response to calls from lawmakers and law enforcement officials across the U.S. and elsewhere. Apps are also available for Android devices.

By making a stolen device an inoperable useless brick, you clearly remove its resale value, and the long-term hope is that it will remove the incentive to steal mobile devices altogether.

A growing problem

According to a report from the LA Times, almost a third of all robberies in the United States are now related to mobile devices. In San Francisco, more than half of all robberies involve mobile devices.

Verizon has responded to a claim that it is throttling (limiting bandwidth to) Netflix and other services in the cloud, just weeks after a federal court struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules.

The allegation comes from David Raphael, an engineer with cloud security firm iScan Online. According to Mr Raphael's account, he was first made aware of speed problems when using Amazon's AWS cloud services after the president of the company told him there was a dramatic slowdown. Raphael could not find a problem in the company's product, but all of the company's infrastructure is hosted on Amazon's servers.

One evening, Raphael noticed a considerable slowdown when using the company's services from home, and realized that both the company president, and himself, used Verizon's FIOS Internet service. He tested the speed at which he could retrieve data from Amazon AWS S3 and got a dismal 40kB/s. After remoting into the office - less than a mile away - the speed bumped up dramatically to 5000kB/s. A clear difference between both connections is one is for residential purposes, while the other is for business.

Around the same time, Raphael had noticed considerable degrading in the quality of Netflix video streaming. Netflix also uses Amazon's AWS services to host content.

Apple has removed the last fully-functioning Bitcoin wallet app from its app store, blocking iOS device users from popular apps available on Android.

Blockchain had been available from the iPhone-maker's App Store for over two years prior to its removal on Wednesday, February 5. In that time, it had clocked up over 120,000 downloads and wasn't the subject of any complaint made by users to Apple.

Citing an "unresolved issue," Apple has removed it from the App Store, meaning users of iOS devices (with the exception of jailbroken devices) are unable now to download any fully functioning Bitcoin wallet app for their devices.

Blockchain has responded angrily to Apple's decision to remove the app without providing any prior warning, any reasonable justification for the action or any means of redress.

"These actions by Apple once again demonstrate the anti-competitive and capricious nature of the App Store policies that are clearly focused on preserving Apple's monopoly on payments rather than based on any consideration of the needs and desires of their users," reads Blockchain's scathing reaction.

It notes that Google's Play Store provides a large number of fully functioning Bitcoin apps despite those apps providing competing services to Google's own "Google Wallet" service.

Google has reached a settlement with the European Commission that includes commitments to change its business practices, avoiding a potentially massive fine.

The case traces back to initial complaints made in November 2010 with the European Commission - the main regulatory body of the single European market - that questioned several aspects of Google's search and advertising business practices. The Commission wound up investigating eighteen formal complaints against the web giant, and in March 2013 informed Google that it was violating anti-trust rules in the European Economic Area, based on Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

These infringing practices included the prominent placement of Google's own specialized search services in its general search results. Consumers were not made aware that these services were also owned by Google, while specialized search services (restaurants, hotels etc.) of third parties were typically displayed lower in search results. Google was also found to be using original content from third party services without consent.

The Commission also scrutinized Google's advertising service restrictions and contractual obligations that forced content publishers to obtain all or most of their online search advertisements from Google, while also limiting the transferability of online search advertising campaigns to rival platforms.