THREE men have been arrested in China for allegedly selling virtual weapons to online gaming enthusiasts.
Livescience.com reported that the trio, from Jinhua, in the eastern Zhejiang province, have been charged by state prosecutors for copyright infringement after earning more than £100,000 supplying weapons to players of Legend of Mir 2 by having an insider manipulate the online game’s database.
livescience.com
legendofmir.net
Named and shamed
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“My first-born has a name that no one else has, he is a first: Abeus ( Abe E us ),” begins one posting from a parent’s message board catalogued by notwithoutmyhandbag.com’s Big Book of Bad Baby Names. It continues: “Reader Tom points out that Abeus is an anagram of ‘abuse’.”
Notwithoutmyhandbag.com
Sharing secrets
Type “Confidential do not distribute” into Google, boingboing.net reported, and you’ll be confronted with tens of thousands of documents that someone, somewhere, does not want you to see. The “secret” pages range from deadly dull business presentations to genuinely confidential material.
Metafilter.com
google.com
boingboing.net
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Digital cliffhanger
Publishers are flicking back to the days of Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and old-fashioned cliffhangers in an effort to usher their industry into the digital era. Gordon Dahlquist’s fantastical Gothic mystery Glass Books of the Dream Eaters will be offered in a serialised form over the web by Penguinat £25 each, with free delivery to your home.
penguin.co.uk
Grammar grab
Can Microsoft really patent basic grammar? Perhaps. The world’s biggest software company has applied in the United States for the right to protect a “method and system for selecting and conjugating a verb”.
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uspto.gov
microsoft.com