Mininova.org has won the transfer of the mininova.com domain in a dispute, and successfully put a scammer out of business. The .com scammer has been a thorn in the side of mininova for a long time. Thousands of people who signed up at mininova.com were charged money without ever receiving something in return.

A ceremony today marked Lockheed Martin’s delivery of the first production Remote Minehunting Vehicle (RMV) to the U.S. Navy.

This delivery is a significant milestone in the development of the mine countermeasures capability for both DDG 51 Arleigh Burke Class destroyers and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).

The RMV is a semi-submersible, semi-autonomous, unmanned vehicle that tows a variable-depth sensor to detect, localize, classify and identify bottom and moored sea mines at a safe distance from friendly ships. The RMV transmits real-time mine sonar images to its host ship over a data link system. This mine reconnaissance capability will allow a naval Strike Group Commander to quickly and safely assess the threat of mines in prospective areas of operations.

“The Remote Minehunting System (RMS) introduces a critical mine countermeasure capability to our forward-deployed naval forces,” said Captain Joe Spitz, Deputy Mine Warfare Program Manager, Program Executive Office Littoral and Mine Warfare. “Sailors now have an organic unmanned mine warfare system that will allow them to detect and classify mines from a safe distance. RMS allows the Navy to send a remotely operated vehicle into dangerous waters, keeping Sailors out of the minefield.”

Microsoft’s fix for the animated cursor flaws demonstrated last week is finally out and available for download, but you might want to think twice before installing it. There’ve been various reports of programs ceasing to function after the update’s installation, and Microsoft has already published a supplementary article detailing issues that may occur if your system uses Realtek Audio.

Google has commented on a new software tool it released in China this week, although it did not address allegations that the software bears more than a passing resemblance to a rival’s product.

“Two days ago we launched our Chinese Pinyin Input Method Editor (IME) as a test product in Google Labs. Based on feedback from users and our own testing, we made a number of updates to the product this morning. Like all Labs releases our IME product is a work in progress, and we expect to continue to improve it over time,” Google said via e-mail on Friday.

Google China released its Pinyin Input Method Editor (IME) earlier this week. Pinyin is a romanization system for Chinese characters, and IME software allows users to enter Chinese characters by typing their Pinyin equivalents on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

Soon after its release, some users began to notice similarities between the dictionary used with Google’s IME and a popular offering from Chinese rival Sohu.com’s Sogou search engine. The similarities, which included an error involving the name of a celebrity, were noted on a Google Labs discussion board about its Pinyin IME.

Firefox’s exploration of bringing social networking features into the browser has moved forward a step. There is now a very rough prototype of “Coop�? available as a Firefox Add-on that tries out some of the ideas discussed on the Firefox Labs wiki.

The Add-on can be downloaded here. Only early adopters who want to see what Firefox is up to will be interested in trying this out - for now it simply pulls some basic Facebook functionality into the browser.

Agence France-Presse and Google signed a licensing agreement Friday giving the search engine the right to post AFP news and photos and settling a lawsuit filed by AFP two years ago.

A joint statement by the companies said the accord allows the Internet giant to post AFP content on Google News and other services. Details of the pact were not made public.

The deal “will enable the use of AFP’s newswire content in innovative, new ways that will dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet,” the statement said.

AFP agreed to withdraw a lawsuit filed in March 2005 accusing the world’s number one Internet search engine of copyright infringement for allegedly posting AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs without permission.

Many people have had success buying, selling and swapping goods on the Web site craigslist, but one Tacoma woman says she was robbed.

Laurie Raye said she had everything stripped from her home after someone placed a fake ad on the San Francisco-based Internet site, a collection of online classifieds.

“The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me,” Raye told Seattle television station KING.

Raye had recently evicted a tenant and cleaned out the rental.

The ad posted last weekend welcomed people to take for free anything they wanted from the home. It has since been pulled from the site, but not before the residence was stripped of light fixtures, the hot water heater and the kitchen sink.

Two more clips mocking Thailand’s revered monarch appeared on YouTube, a day after the withdrawal of another that had prompted the army-backed government to block the entire video-sharing Web site.

Despite the removal of the clip, which outraged Thais and created a lively debate on freedom of speech versus respect for cultural sensitivity, two more clips mocking the monarch appeared on YouTube on Friday.

One clip, 42 seconds long and titled “King of the Apes”, was posted by “thaifreespeech”, showing pictures of King Bhumibol, regarded as semi-divine in largely Buddhist Thailand, with a monkey’s face.