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More MS job cuts speculated

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 12 Jul 2010

More MS job cuts speculated

Rumours of employee layoffs dominated Microsoft's week, along with discussion about the short life of the company's Kin phone, says eWeek.

Microsoft officials declined to officially comment on rumours that the company is laying off a small number of employees, following the 1 July beginning of the new fiscal year.

However, online reports and blogs frequented by Microsoft employees both suggested that cuts were indeed under way.

Facebook policies hit language barrier

Facebook and its controversial privacy policies are teeming with new complications, as regulators overseas increasingly start to regard them as a suspicious, Americanising import, reports Cnet News.

However, Facebook's privacy policies, maligned by advocacy groups, have so far held up decently well in the US.

But more than three-quarters of Facebook's users live outside the US, in countries where laws are different, and where lawmakers are much less likely to agree with the Facebook concept, or even the American concept of online privacy.

Blizzard backs down

Following a barrage of criticism, World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard has backed down on the need for gamers to use their real names on its forums, reports BBC News.

The firm's about-face comes three days after saying it would introduce the feature as part of its Real ID product. Within 24 hours of announcing the plan, Blizzard received more than 1 000 comments, mostly critical.

After the furore, Mike Mourhaime, founder and chief executive of Blizzard, wrote in an open letter on the company's forum page: "We've decided at this time that real names will not be needed for posting on official Blizzard forums."

Australia unbans the Internet

Australia's minister for broadband and censorship, Stephen Conroy, has delayed the switch-on of its Chinese-style national firewall until after the election, says The Register.

Conroy's moves have been criticised on technical, practical, economic and moral grounds to no avail. But it seems the danger of losing votes has focused his mind.

Trials of the initial system, which claimed only to block child sex abuse images, hit controversy when the secret blacklist of sites was leaked and found to contain a variety of other content, from vanilla porn to a site for a Tasmanian dentist.

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