Sock-puppets wont be waring shades in Europe this year – the future’s not bright. ‘Sock-puppet’ reviews or websites – in case you didn’t know (I didn’t) – are fake blog entries or whole web sites purporting to be created by customers that are in fact, made and maintained by businesses to tout their wares. A new EU directive, part of a wider consumer law shake down, shall come into effect in the UK by the end of the year, effectively (hopefully) banning the underhand activity.

British Telecom are said to be negotiating with the Spanish Wi-Fi sharing service Fon. A deal could mean that BT customers will start sharing access to their home Wi-Fi networks, and BT Fusion mobile customers could make cheap calls from their phones when they are in the vicinity of one of these Wi-Fi hotspots.

Fon, by the way are still giving away free routers – aka ‘La Foneras’ – to celebrate their one year anniversary.

Perplex City, the treasure hunt internet game, known as an ARG – alternate reality game – has been won after two years of cryptic clue bashing. Andy Darley from the UK, one of 50,000 players from 92 countries, landed the £100,000 ($200,000) prize money by finding the ‘Receda Cube’ in a Northamptonshire forest. “As I pulled the Cube from the sticky, wet clay, and even afterwards as I was waiting to return the Cube, all I could think about was how bizarre the whole thing really was.” Said Andy who played the game “…for the puzzles and the stories, but it was only a few days ago that I thought I was in with a chance.” A new Perplex City game will start later this year.

The group of Belgium newspapers attacking Google for the diffusion of unauthorised material have won their case it seems. A Belgium Court accorded Copiepresse, the association regrouping the newspapers, 3 million euros – which is a long throw from the 130 million they had demanded.(fr)

Om Malik asks “Is the Netherlands the new server hub?” after hearing reports from a Dutch newspaper that “…a massive new server farm is being built in the Eemshaven (Eems harbor) and will be able to store 100,000 servers and will have access to 30 megawatts of power, mostly coming from a huge power plant that is just a stone’s throw from the new proposed server farm.”

This news shouldn’t interest one Dutchman who has just been fined 75.000 euros (US$97,000) for sending out spam. This is the largest such fine levied by the OPTA – a Dutch telecommunications watchdog and is said to take into account the sheer volume of the unwanted e-mail messages, according to OPTA “9 million was a ‘minimum’ estimate.”

Greece is to become the first European country to benefit from a mobile WiMAX MIMO network. Nortel and Craig Wireless will be using there expertise in wireless technology to bring affordable, WiFi broadband to rural Greece which has remained largely unconnected.(fr)

The redemption of P2P file sharing made headway in some parts of Europe recently. In a similar decision to the one made in a Spanish courtroom last year, the Italian Appeal Courts overturned an earlier conviction against two Turin students, stating that – the downloading of copyrighted material for non lucrative purposes, is not illegal.
Dutch politicians however are considering banning DRM outright and legalizing filesharing in exchange for an Internet tax levied to compensate the Music Industry.

Swedish company MYSQL AB, responsible for probably the most popular free data-base software used on todays websites – the open source MySQL – is to be introduced onto the stock market. A possible wake up call to the flagging European software industry say Netco.

Google finally lost their trademark wrangling with the German entrepreneur who owns GMail, a same day delivery service founded six years ago. So there will be no need to contact Erento.com, the German rent-a-protester website that opened for business recently. It seems Erento were busy anyway in Munich, where organizers of a march had hired protesters “…because its own adherents were too old to stand for hours waving banners”

In Britain, where time spent on the Net has overtaken time spent in front of the TV (for those with broadband), the publishing house Penguin are attempting to use a wiki to write a novel. A Million Penguins online since the 1st of February will be open to receive public entries for a further six weeks.